Retaining staff difficult despite low rents, subsidized cargo and paid trips home

Principals and teachers from the South cleaned off their desks, packed up and headed home from Nunavik earlier this month.

Most will never return to the region.

About 70 teachers have not renewed their contracts with the Kativik School Board for the 2008-09 school year. Eleven school principals have also said they won't be coming back in September.

This means the KSB stands to lose nearly half its non-Inuit teachers and nearly all its principals, despite perks which include low rents, subsidized cargo and paid trips back home.

Professional and teaching staff also receive bonuses from $3,500 to $9,000 a year, depending on employees' length of service and place of employment.

But these benefits are still not enough to keep many Qallunaat teachers – who also pay taxes on some of these benefits – in Nunavik.

As well, most don't have to take a job so far from their homes – they can easily find jobs in the South, where KSB competes against southern school boards for teachers, particularly in the sciences.

"Teachers who know what they're getting into don't want to go so far from home for peanuts. They don't see any compelling reason, with lots of jobs in the South and no financial advantage to working in the North," said Patrick d'Astous, president of the Nunavik Teaching Association, which represents 300 Inuit and non-Inuit teachers in Nunavik.

"Money is important at this level, when there's more demand for teachers in the South, because people know its not easy to teach in the North."

Lack of adequate housing also contributes to the challenge of retaining staff, say the KSB and union.

Generally, about 50 teachers decide not to return, so this year's turnover is higher than that in previous years.

In Kuujjuaraapik, eight of the 11 non-Inuit teachers and the school principal won't be returning next year to Asimauttaq School.

If the KSB was a business, the school board would be alarmed by such a high turnover rate.

But it's not, according to a southern hire who is not coming back – one of the KSB teachers and administrators interviewed for this story who asked not to be identified or directly quoted.

Students are the big losers when the KSB loses staff, they say.

That's because rookie teachers never know where the former teacher left off. As a result, fresh arrivals spend more time reviewing old material at the beginning of the year than moving ahead.

As teacher turnover persists from year to year, the students' progress slows, they lose interest and more than three in four drop out.

New staffers are moreover less likely to start up school activities or carry on with existing ones. And, with unfamiliar faces in school year after year, schools become less inviting and interesting places.

"We're not bad teachers, but turnover is the problem," said one teacher.

Departing staff point to two major reasons why they are abandoning the region's schools.

First, they say the KSB doesn't provide them with adequate in-school support. This is particularly critical in communities where are there are few outside resources, such as community social workers, to help students affected by drug and alcohol use, sexual abuse and family violence.

Second, they also say relations between southern staff and local people are often stressful, partly due to the high turnover.

When there's a problem at school, the KSB and local education committees take the side of the parent or child, many teachers and principals say.

Many teachers tell stories about harassment or violence, everything from a battering by a student wielding a hockey stick to kicks in the knee.

A teacher in a Hudson Strait community told about some of his experiences in an on-line blog entry, written last March.

"I've had my dog's life threatened," he wrote in an entry that was later removed from the blog, when the union called to verify the incident.

"My students have thrown their desks at me, repeatedly threatened to "suicide [them]self", and they've even pissed on the floor in front of me and laughed."

The teacher wrote about these events because a student had thrown dog feces in his face. He called the student's father to tell him about the incident.

"He was so angry he hung up. I thought at first that he was angry at her. I was wrong… ten minutes after that, I was called from my class. I went into the office, where the principal, student counselor, the student, and her mom were waiting. The student claimed that I had pushed her face into the dog poop," he wrote.

The student's parent accused the teacher of blowing the incident out of proportion.

School administrators say they are drawn to Nunavik by the challenge of being a principal, but they decide to leave over frustrations with the lack of support from the community and school board.

At first, the KSB looks like a "Cadillac," they say, but then they find out the KSB runs like a lemon, because there's no support to deal with the chronic lack of support staff and staff absenteeism.