First Nations address the dropout problem.
Thirty-nine per cent of children and young adults on reserves stay home every day
They are the ghost children of the reserves.
You can’t find them waiting for the school bus, can’t photograph their grinning faces on the swings at recess. Their names aren’t checked off on the attendance records, and often their names aren’t listed at all.
The federal government records the birth and death of every status Indian, keeping a tally of school-age children, four to 21. Officials also record every child going to school on reserve or in surrounding municipalities. But analyze the best available numbers for Alberta reserves and there are more than 11,000 children and young adults missing.
That’s a growing, uneducated and marginalized population, a problem that could come back to haunt us.
“We have dropouts from Grade 9 and Grade 7,” said Billy Joe Laboucan, education director for the Kee Tas Kee Now Tribal Council north of Slave Lake. “It seems to be an epidemic.”
These young adults soon have children and no work, even in regions where the oil and gas industry is booming, said Laboucan.
“The thing about it is, they are ready and willing to work. It’s just that they are unemployable. The industry won’t hire them because they don’t have the tickets. They don’t have Grade 10; a lot of them don’t have a driver’s licence.
“When they try to go back, they get a really huge discouragement because they are told they have to upgrade for four or five years before they can actually get to a first-year apprenticeship.”
After decades of complaints, the poor state of First Nations schools is finally getting some of the attention needed at federal, provincial and local levels. The three orders of government signed a memorandum of understanding in Alberta two years ago and have been studying the problems together since, expecting to make recommendations public this fall. But until now, this shadow population of children not in school has gone uncounted, even though Aboriginal Affairs (formerly Indian Affairs) collects and files the basic statistics every year.
In Hobbema, Samson Cree Coun. Vern Saddleback pulled the two sets of data for his band and made the calculations last winter, shocking his community when he found 40 per cent of children age five to 18 on his reserve were not in school.
To follow that, the Journal filed federal requests for data on every reserve in Alberta, making these data easily available for the first time on its website.
In total this school year, 17,954 children and young adults age four through 21 living on reserves in Alberta are either in school or have already earned their high school diploma. Another 11,699, or 39 per cent of children and young adults, have dropped out or were never registered.
Three First Nations — Ermineskin, Sunchild and Alexander — have truancy rates at less than 20 per cent, but most bands face much higher rates.
In 19 of the 44 First Nation communities, more than 40 per cent of the school-age population stays home every day. Large bands like the Samson Cree, Kainai and Little Red River Cree have more than 1,100 dropouts each.
The reasons for such high numbers are complicated.
“School is the gateway to get out of this place, but people don’t see that,” said Riel Gladue, a Grade 11 student at Cadotte Lake School.
Nearly all of his friends have dropped out of school, saying the school was no good and they could never catch up to students off reserve anyway. “There are lots of excuses,” he said. “Someone needs to go house to house, tell them the good stuff of where school can take you.”
Here in Cadotte Lake, there are large families that don’t send any of their children to school.
But ties are close in this small community, and family is what you count on to get you through tough times, said Carmen Lamouche, a Grade 6 teacher’s assistant.
No one will report a relative for not sending a child to school.
“It would be like you called them out on it. Everybody knows everything. You’ll know when someone makes the call.”
Principal Vic Dikaitis said the legacy of residential schools still has an impact. Children lost their language and came back hurting. Those memories, spread by word of mouth, lead to suspicion of the schools.
You can’t force suspicious parents to send a child to school or you risk driving them further away, he said. “You strongly encourage, you try to convince.
“Asking why kids don’t go to school is not as important as asking how can you get them back to school. These kids are bright. If the kids would come on a regular basis, our problems would disappear.”
Dikaitis is concentrating on slowly building trust with parents, while Kee Tas Kee Now Tribal Council, which includes the Woodland Cree of Cadotte Lake, is working on a new regional trades or vocational high school as part of a new
“Asking why kids don’t go to school is not as important as asking how can you get them back to school. These kids are bright. If the kids would come on a regular basis, our problems would disappear.”
Principal Victor Dikaitis, left
partnership with the provincial Northland School Division.
Staff plan to interview dropouts this summer to see what courses could tempt them back, hoping politicians will come through as promised with funding once the details are worked out.
They’ll take advantage of the coming provincial dual-credit system to let students earn credits toward their high school diploma and a journeyman certificate at the same time, said Laboucan, the education director. “It’s not rocket science; it’s a matter of just getting right into it and doing it.”
Across the province, other First Nations are also beginning to talk about the elephant in the room, said Morris Manyfingers, director of education for the large Kainai First Nation in southern Alberta.
Kainai officials from its human services and transportation departments are meeting on the issue for the first time June 5.
Bus drivers, social workers and teachers need to communicate, and political leadership needs to take this seriously, he said. “There needs to be pressure put on families and homes so those children are in school.”
On the Samson Cree First Nation in Hobbema last fall, band council passed a rule saying families must have their children registered for school before getting social assistance.
That helped, said education director Kevin Wells, but many of those children were so far behind, they started acting out in class and left school again.
The schools are planning a new, permanent transition class next fall to help those children catch up. They also started a new outreach school for junior high and high school dropouts. The school is now operating at capacity. With new trailers, they’ll double capacity to 140 students next fall, said Wells.
He and a home liaison worker are also hoping to cross-reference nominal rolls and membership lists as best they can to find out who is not attending and follow up with those families. But it’s a big project, not possible during the school year when their single liaison worker is busy just keeping the children now in school from dropping out.
That would be easier if Ottawa would give the band more detailed student lists from all schools, since it collects the information anyway, Wells said.
Going door to door and checking off children missing from the nominal roll will be the most accurate way to verify how many children are skipping school and why, but even without that information, there are some things Wells knows for sure, he said.
“Are there a large number of First Nations kids who are not attending school? Yes. Do the schools want them? Yes. Should the government be demanding that they are in school? Yes,” he said.
“Should the government be providing more money for tutoring, remedial transition, counselling? Yes. It’s not all the A+ kids who are dropping out.” Download the full data set at edmontonjournal.com/insight and connect with the reporter at facebook.com/elise. stolte