DEAs will be displeased as revamped legislation doesn’t download hiring

Ed Picco, Nunavut's education minister, admits he will have trouble pleasing everybody when he tables the proposed new Education Act in the legislature later this month.

For the past year he's heard complaints from the small bands of elected people who sit on district education authorities, which help oversee the administration of schools. They want more power, including the ability to hire and fire teachers. They also want more money to cover the cost of these administrative tasks.

Picco says he doesn't see much sense in the request. It would cost the government several million dollars each year to download these responsibilities to individual DEAs, he says, and he'd rather see that money spent in the classroom.

So he says he's included a compromise on the matter in the new Education Act. Picco calls it a "happy medium," but it probably won't give DEAs much satisfaction.

The act includes a provision for Picco, the minister, to give additional powers to individual DEAs as he sees fit. But he adds that, as it stands, he doesn't see any reason why he'd let a DEA hire and fire teachers.

Last Friday, Picco reassured a conference room full of teachers they would remain employees of the Government of Nunavut, and not of their respective DEA, which teachers fear may at times be swayed by petty prejudices.

Besides, Picco says, making teachers the employees of individual DEAs, rather than the Government of Nunavut, is not so simple. "I can't circumvent the collective agreement, or the Public Service Act," Picco says.

The Public Service Act is a federal law, which supercedes laws of the territory, such as the proposed Education Act.

"When you take a second, sober look, maybe you'd change your mind," Picco says to DEAs.

Maybe. But so far, DEAs have described their fight as one of parents wanting "local control" over schools, up against an uncaring, unresponsive government.

The old government of the Northwest Territories listened to parents better than the Government of Nunavut does today, DEAs say. They miss, of all things, another layer of bureaucracy, called divisional education boards, that were dissolved in 1999. NTI, bureaucrats themselves, support them on the matter.

To this, Picco is more blunt. "That's not on at all," he says.

Picco sounds personally offended when Nunavut's dismal graduation rates, which are by far the lowest of any jurisdiction of Canada, is raised. He prefers to emphasize the positive: more kids in Nunavut are graduating from high school than ever before. The graduation rate, once around 10 per cent, he says is now around 30 per cent.

And he points out that the deepest problems of schools are beyond his department's control. It's hard to study when you're a child squeezed into a social housing unit shared with several other families, especially if your parents did not graduate either, and see schools as an imposition of an outside culture.

The new Education Act will have strong provisions for Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, or traditional culture, Picco says, although he won't get into details before the bill is tabled. Critics of a past draft of the bill said it only made superficial reference to IQ, but Picco says that's changed.

Picco says the act will also say that by 2012, Nunavut will offer bilingual education from K-12. "That's a pretty difficult row to hoe," Picco admits, given how he does not have nearly enough Inuit teachers to accomplish this goal, or enough money to train the 200 additional teachers he estimates he would need.

Nunavut's present Education Act is inherited from the NWT. Since 1999, the Nunavut government has spent many years, and millions of dollars on community consultations, to replace it. In March 2003, a draft replacement act was withdrawn on third reading in the legislature.

"These things take time," Picco says. "Apex wasn't built in one day."

The legislature sits October 23.