Government blamed for long list of school shortcomings

When a child in Nunavut wanders the streets all day or stays at home playing video games rather than go to school, whose fault is this?

For many groups who made submissions to Nunavut's standing committee on health and education last week, the answer was obvious: it's the fault of a territorial government that runs an education system that is, they say, essentially racist, by only offering Inuktitut instruction up to Grade 4.

It is, in other words, a system flaw, which they say could be fixed with enough fiddling to Bill 21, Nunavut's proposed new Education Act – a 90-page document that divvies up who is responsible for what in Nunavut schools.

Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., a long-time critic of the draft law, hauled out a list of complaints and demands that are, by now, familiar to those following the often-shrill Education Act debate.

Chief among their demands is that the government give more power to District Education Authorities – small groups of elected people who do things like set school discipline policies and the school calendar, help hire the principal, and review student expulsions.

The draft law permits the education minister to overturn most DEA decisions if he sees fit. DEAs want the final say.

DEAs also want to set their own budgets, rather than having them handed down by the education department. And, most controversially, DEAs want to hire and fire teachers.

The government has already rejected this last demand, saying it would amount to creating 26 separate human resources departments around the territory, and that the money used to fund these mini-bureaucracies would be better off spent on hiring more teachers.

But mistrust of government runs high among DEAs when it comes to education. Alice Ladner, who works for a coalition formed by DEAs, said she has difficulty imagining DEAs doing a worse job than the government now does.

She cited one example of a teacher being fired with cause from one community who had been hired elsewhere in Nunavut.

Ladner acknowledged DEAs have their own capacity problems. They're supposed to be the voice of parents, but voter turnout is often low, candidates are often acclaimed, and members frequently lose interest, resign and must be replaced.

But this, DEAs say, is also the fault of government, for not providing enough funding, and ignoring DEAs when they make requests.

DEAs also want to resurrect an old layer of bureaucracy, called divisional boards of education, which existed prior to the formation of Nunavut, to serve as an additional buffer between DEAs and the education department. NTI backs them on this.

But Ed Picco, the education minister, is adamant "that's not going to happen." Whether this ends up being a deal-breaker when MLAs vote on the bill, expected to happen before territorial elections this autumn, remains to be seen.

Another criticism of the new Education Act is that it is peppered with references to Inuit culture, but without clear definitions, this amounts to nothing more than lip service.

But critics offered few solutions as to how schools could be legislated to be more culturally relevant. Pressed on this by committee members, Ladner said teachers should decorate their classrooms using northern themes, and spend more time showing kids how to build igloos and light oil lamps.

No one discussed the shortage of Inuit teachers, which remains the biggest obstacle to offering K-12 bilingual education.

Nunavut plans to train several hundred more Inuit teachers, in order to provide bilingual education – where half the classes would be taught in English, and half in Inuktitut – by 2019.

NTI says the GN's bilingual scheme isn't good enough and that 80 per cent of the education program should be taught in Inuktitut immediately.

To do this, NTI suggests, in its annual report on Inuit culture and society, to lower formal teaching requirements for Inuit, even if this may mean a Nunavut high school diploma won't be recognized outside the territory. But Kaludjak didn't broach this subject during the hearings.

Others expressed skepticism about the government's plans to improve schools by spending an additional $14 million each year. In fact, several people said money should be no issue at all – a position that may be difficult for the education minister to defend when he asks the legislature to approve his departmental budget.

Everyone at the hearing agreed Nunavut doesn't spend nearly enough money on helping kids with special needs – of which there are many in the territory.

And there was some acknowledgment that Nunavut's appalling drop-out rate is a problem bigger than the schools.

As James Arvaluk, MLA for Tunnuniq, said, "the Inuit way of raising children has been abandoned by Inuit themselves."

Jimmy Jacquard, president of the Nunavut Teachers' Association, said a change in attitude needs to happen in communities. Parents need to get kids up in the morning. And, when 10-year-old children are seen wandering the streets, they need to be told to go to school.

In some communities "that's not happening," Jacquard said.

But in communities where DEAs have "rallied the troops" and encouraged parents to send their kids to school, Jacquard said he's seen attendance rates jump from 40 to 70 per cent.

"If all our kids attended school all the time, we wouldn't have a 25 per cent graduation rate," he said.