Rankin DEA wants more staff

DENISE RIDEOUT

RANKIN INLET — The group that oversees schools in Rankin Inlet wants more students bused to school, increased high school attendance and a way to cope with too few support staff in classrooms.

Members of the group — the Rankin Inlet district education authority — have some unorthodox ideas to solve the problems.

The district education authority, or DEA, monitors activities in Rankin’s three schools, meets with principals to address concerns and solicits community input on education issues.

Two weeks ago, the group hosted a call-in show on Rankin’s local radio station to ask parents if they want their children bused to school. Last week, members went on the air to pitch the “$500 question:” Should parents have to pay a $500 fine if their children regularly skip school?

And on Nov. 27, DEA members aired their grievances about the lack of classroom support staff at their biweekly meeting. They told the director of Kivalliq school services that the needs of Rankin Inlet’s students are not being met.

Students need support

Brian Zawadski, chair of the Rankin Inlet DEA, said the town’s schools are short on support staff to assist students who have fetal alcohol syndrome or learning disabilities.

“We need to be able to address the needs of these children so they can function in the classroom,” Zawadski said. “We don’t have the support staff or the specialists to help the students with the issues they’re facing.”

The situation means the students who are most in need aren’t getting the attention they require, Zawadski said. “We’re in a real bind. These are bright children but they need the support staff to get them through.”

The problem isn’t that no one is interested in working as a classroom assistant. Rather, the DEA said, the Department of Education doesn’t give schools enough money to hire them.

The department uses a funding formula to determine how many support staff are hired in each of the schools. But the DEA says the formula doesn’t take into account the high number of children in the territory who have fetal alcohol syndrome and other learning difficulties.

“We want to review how we fund the schools and staff the schools,” Zawadski said.

This summer, Nunavut’s education department started looking at how it allocates teachers and support staff to the territory’s schools.

At the Nov. 27 meeting, Chris Purse, director of school operations in the Kivalliq region, said the review is almost complete. But he wouldn’t say whether the new formula would give schools more support staff.

“A lot of these decisions are made in the political arena, so that’s where you have to get them addressed,” Purse told the DEA.

Getting kids to class

In addition to lobbying for more classroom workers, the Rankin Inlet DEA is trying to fund a second school bus.

Right now, the town’s one school bus picks up only students who live in areas five and six, and goes just to Leo Ussak, the Kindergarten-to-Grade 4 school. There’s no bus service to the middle or high schools.

The DEA figures more children would make it to class if they had guaranteed rides to and from school every day.

And tackling poor attendance is a priority for the schools’ principals.

Donald Clark, principal of Alaittuq high school, told the DEA that student attendance has been suffering. He said a handful of students go to class sporadically, showing up for two days in a row and then missing a few days.

“They don’t develop any work habits because they’re always playing catch up,” Clark said. “It’s a trend we’d like to see stopped.”

This year, Alaittuq high school began a new attendance policy: Students won’t receive a grade for a course unless they’ve attended 60 per cent of the classes.

And the DEA is exploring a more controversial way to get students to attend class. They want to see what the community thinks of the DEA fining parents $500 if their children don’t go to class regularly.

Zawadski admitted the DEA doesn’t think that approach will be welcomed by anyone in the community. The group is mainly pitching the idea, he said, to get parents and students to take school attendance more seriously.