First Nations schools welcome federal cash
New deal with the Canadian government will bring equal pay, benefits for teachers
Better help for students with disabilities, more Cree language instruction and equal pay and benefits for teachers are anticipated improvements from a new 10-year education agreement to be inked Thursday between five northern Alberta First Nations and the Canadian government.
Although they’re not releasing exact funding figures yet, the Kee Tas Kee Now Tribal Council Education Authority said the new deal will boost federal funding for the six First Nations schools by nearly 50 per cent.
The deal is part of the Canadian government’s move to close a yawning funding gap between on-reserve schools and provincially funded schools across Canada. As of April, the federal government committed to funding all First Nations schools at comparable levels to nearby provincial schools.
“This gives us some stability, some room to breathe, so we can start to focus not on survival, but rather on achieving things the education authority wants to achieve,” Al Rollins, CEO of the Kee Tas Kee Now Tribal Council, said Tuesday.
On Thursday in Cadotte Lake, 480 kilometres northwest of Edmonton, chiefs of the Loon River First Nation, Lubicon Lake Band, Peerless Trout Lake First Nation, Whitefish Lake First Nation and Woodland Cree First Nation will ink an agreement with federal Indigenous Services Minister Seamus O’regan that community leaders hope is a game-changer.
Schools will be funded at about $24,000 per student, up from about $17,000 per student, which will bring them on par with provincially funded schools in the nearby Northland School Division.
The funding gap has left the First Nations schools without services urban schools might find indispensable, such as access to speech language pathologists and psychologists, and intramural sports. That will change, Rollins said. The boost will allow the education authority to pay school staff 20- to 30-per-cent more, hopefully easing recruitment and retention problems. Only six to seven per cent of the 250 school employees are First Nation members — a number the authority is anxious to increase.
High staff turnover is a challenge, Rollins said. Young teachers come from towns and cities to the relatively isolated communities and leave as soon as they have completed their teacher certification, he said.
Loon River First Nation Chief Ivan Sawan, also chairman of the school board, said the authority will use some of the new funding to train First Nation members to become certified teachers in conjunction with post-secondary institutions.
newer model For First nations education
The federal government’s new approach also includes $1,500 a year per student for teaching Indigenous languages, and funding for full-day kindergarten and pre-kindergarten.
The 1,200 Kee Tas Kee Now students will have increased access to land-based learning, which Rollins hopes will improve student engagement.
The deal also ensures the authority’s funding can decline by no more than one per cent per year, Rollins said.
Such agreements allow First Nations to design their own education systems based on local needs, O’regan said in an interview Wednesday.
“Governments coming in with a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work and it’s never worked,” he said.
“Usually, because it imposes a model upon a community and then government habitually leaves it, and doesn’t fund it properly.”
The 2019-20 federal budget includes nearly $349 million for about 11,000 students attending 32 Alberta First Nations schools and around 6,700 students who attend school off-reserve, Indigenous Services Canada spokesman William Olscamp said Wednesday.
An agreement between the Alberta government and the tribal council to share services with provincial school districts is still in place.
First Nations collaborating to create regional school boards is a relatively new phenomenon in Alberta. Incorporated in 2017, the Kee Tas Kee Now education authority began running Clarence Jaycox, Cadotte and Atimakeg schools in 2017-18. Last fall, the provincially funded Northland School Division handed over control of Little Buffalo, Peerless Lake and Kateri schools to Kee Tas Kee Now.