The crisis in Nunavut schools

PATRICIA D’SOUZA

Diane Dennison teaches kindergarten in the English stream at Nakasuk School in Iqaluit. Though Christmas break has not yet ended and there are still a couple of days to go before classes begin, Dennison’s voice on the phone is weary.

One of her fellow teachers left at the end of the term, and the school hasn’t found a replacement. When school starts, the Inuit kindergarten class won’t have a teacher, so Dennison has agreed to take the students into her classroom.

I imagine her at the front of a roomful of rowdy tots. I ask if I can come in to observe — even help. But Dennison is reluctant. She doesn’t have time, she says. And it’s not just time she lacks: “I don’t think I can seat all the kids.”

There’s a crisis in Nunavut schools, and it’s hurting Inuit children. In addition to growing class sizes, the Inuktitut curriculum is incomplete and programs are not standardized throughout communities — students in the same grade in different hamlets are at different levels, which makes transferring to a new school in a different community almost impossible.

The drop-out rate is soaring, attendance levels are suffering and growing numbers of children affected by fetal-alcohol syndrome are finding little help available.

Many students in the territory are taught Inuktitut from kindergarten to Grade 3, then thrown into the English stream with little or no knowledge of English. In my discussions with teachers in Iqaluit, the word “illiteracy” dropped from their mouths like a lead ball.

“They’re put into a situation where they cannot be automatic winners because they don’t have the language skills,” said one teacher who asked not to be identified. “It’s an impossible task and at the end of the day, I think, ‘Am I really serving any of them?’ ”

A numbers game

Overcrowding isn’t a new issue, says Lou Budgell, president of the Nunavut Federation of Teachers. “Overcrowded classrooms didn’t come with April 1, 1999.”

But the numbers paint a clear picture, he explains. Budgell pulls out a large binder at the federation’s office in Iqaluit and opens it to a page listing ratios of students to teachers throughout the territory.

It’s a sliding ratio, he says, using the example of two Nunavut schools with student populations of 214. The K-9 school has 10 teachers, giving it a ratio of 21.4 students to each teacher. The 10-12 school has 11.5 teachers, which gives it a slightly better figure of 18.6 students to every teacher.

The numbers show a need for more teachers in the lower grades. But the revised Education Act drafted by the department of education and being tabled in the legislative assembly later this month makes no reference to student-teacher ratios.

Ratios determine the number of teachers a school needs. “It’s hard to say what else is needed unless you know how many teachers you’ll have,” Budgell says.

Time to grow

The story is not hopeless. There are small miracles occurring within the system every day. With only 50 years of formal teaching, Inuit education in the region now known as Nunavut has come a long way. But it still has a long way to go, and it’s absurd to think that only three years after division, Nunavut can create an entirely new and functioning system.

The existing curriculum and program structure has been borrowed from the Northwest Territories. But according to Peter Kilabuk, the territory’s minister of education, it has been the government’s goal to create a Nunavut-specific system since the territory was created. Even research papers and meeting agendas from the mid- to late-1990s show the consistency of thought on this issue.

While a basic Inuktitut guideline was created by Inuit educators for Inuit students, it has failed largely because it has not been supported by teaching materials. But producing Inuktitut teaching materials has proven to be a mammoth undertaking.

“With seven or eight dialects and three orthographies, how do you produce materials in sufficient quantities to allow boys and girls to become thoroughly and completely literate?” asks Noel McDermott, an instructor with the Nunavut Teacher Education Program at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit.

McDermott asks his class of future Inuktitut teachers if they know how many copies of the latest installment of the Harry Potter series have been sold internationally.

The students throw out some numbers, but none of the guesses come close. Even McDermott doesn’t know the answer for sure, he later tells me, but he cites the latest figure he’s seen: 100,000. The students are blown away, and understandably so.

He asks me if I know how many Inuktitut books there are in print. He pauses, then shouts the answer: 220. “One would have to be a fool to imagine that 220 books will produce literate children,” he says.

“Where is the Inuktitut Harry Potter?” he asks. “Well, we’re not even at Chicken Licken yet.”

Next week: Surviving the system