New year, old teachers in Kugluktuk

DENISE RIDEOUT

IQALUIT — Kugluktuk students saw a lot of familiar faces at the front of their classrooms when they headed back to high school Monday.

Eleven of the teachers at Kugluktuk high school are returning from last year. Only two teachers are new to the school.

“Continuity is a critical element in the educational process,” said Keith Parker, the school’s principal.

“We’re glad to have the two news ones, but it’s also really neat to have people continuing.”

The situation at Kugluktuk High, a Grade 7-12 school with 130 students, stands in stark contrast to some other Nunavut schools, where teacher turnover rates are staggering.

In Chesterfield Inlet this year, for example, half the teachers at the Victor Sammurtok School are new.

Kugluktuk High’s principal said the constant arrival of new teachers in the North is a dilemma schools often face.

“You do have people come to the Arctic for one or two years, or three years, and then leave again. So you do have a lot of turnover,” he said.

Parker said it’s more productive for a school to have staff members on board for the long haul. Continuity allows students and teachers to become comfortable with one another, he said. Having new teachers is stressful for students and staff alike.

“The critical thing for me is that students recognize that there’s a commitment being made to them,” he said.

Parker is quick to point out, though, that he’s not criticizing teachers who come to Nunavut for a short stint. He said all teachers have something great to offer students.

Parker, who worked in the Edmonton educational system for 23 years, is in his second year as principal in Kugluktuk.

About 11 years ago Parker took a group of Edmonton students on an exchange trip to Grise Fiord. That trip sparked his interest in returning to the North.

Parker is one of the long-term staff at Kugluktuk High School. He’s signed a contract to stay on as principal for another five years.

Elsewhere in the Kitikmeot, the situation isn’t so different from Kugluktuk. Teacher turnover in the region has been low this year.

“Continuity is a critical element in the educational process. So we’re glad we have many staff continuing this year.”

– Keith Parker, principal

Only 20 of 107 teachers in the region are new this school year. That’s a turnover rate of less than 20 per cent — lower than in past years, said Jean Phelps, executive director of the Kitikmeot School Services.

Phelps said some of those teachers are just filling in for one- or two-year stints, and that about seven new teachers are replacing staff who are on education and adoption leaves.

“It’s not that the teachers have resigned. They’re just doing something else for a year,” Phelps said.

That means students in the Kitikmeot can expect to see some of their former teachers returning to the classrooms again.

Southern staff

While Kugluktuk’s high school has been successful in retaining its teachers, few of those staff members are Inuit.

“All of our teachers, except for our language specialist who is Inuit, are from the South,” Parker said.

He said the case is similar throughout Nunavut. That’s because few Inuit have the training to teach high-school level courses, he said.

But Parker anticipates that that situation will slowly change.

“The government of Nunavut and the people of Nunavut are on a path where eventually the Keith Parkers of the world won’t be coming up from Edmonton to Kugluktuk,” Parker said.

“There will be people from the local communities who will be in jobs like mine.”