CALL OF THE NORTH
Teachers love lives, jobs in remote communities
Before classes got underway in northern Saskatchewan this fall, the region’s school division was faced with a daunting task: hiring 97 teachers — nearly a third of its teaching complement.
Jason Young, director of education for the provincially funded Northern Lights School Division, said teacher turnover in northern Saskatchewan was “unusually high” this year.
The division, which planned to hire 331 teachers this school year, was able to hire 83 teaching staff over the summer, but was still short 14 teachers when classes began on Sept. 4.
Young is still trying to fill 10 spots as classes stretch into their third week.
Young said attracting teachers to northern Saskatchewan and keeping them there can be a challenge. If people aren’t from the north, living in a small, isolated community can be difficult. Some who accept contracts quit and take jobs closer to home before even setting foot in a northern Saskatchewan classroom.
As the Northern Lights School Division continues to search for teachers to fill empty posts, some of the division’s longest-serving educators spoke about why they chose to spend their careers in northern Saskatchewan.
DEDICATED TO NORTH
Medrick Thomas has been teaching in northern Saskatchewan for three decades.
The 63-year-old was born in the northern Saskatchewan community of Cumberland House and worked in the Key Lake uranium mine as a young man, but he wasn’t enjoying it and started thinking about a career change.
A friend of his, a teacher at Cumberland House, was passionate and excited to be teaching Indigenous students about their history; Thomas decided he wanted to do the same. He was accepted into the Northern Teacher Education Program (NORTEP) and moved to La Ronge to start working toward his four-year bachelor of education degree.
Thomas graduated in 1988. There was never any question in his mind that he would return to work in the north, he said.
“No. I’m born and bred in the north.”
Thomas spent a few years working in the northern Saskatchewan community of Stanley Mission, but moved after his wife — who is also a teacher — got a job in her home community of Weyakwin, roughly an hour south of La Ronge. Thomas was later hired as the principal of Weyakwin’s Kiskahikan School in 2001.
He and his wife work alongside a secretary and educational assistant in the two-classroom school, which has 22 students this year. His wife teaches kids in kindergarten to Grade 5, while Thomas takes the students in grades 6 to 9. Students graduating from Kiskahikan have to go to high school in larger communities such as La Ronge or Prince Albert, where they either live with relatives or host families.
Thomas said he loves being in a community where he knows all the children and can remind his students that he held them as babies.
“I consider all of them my grandchildren,” he said.
He was not surprised to hear of this year’s teacher shortage and he wonders if the school shooting in the northern community of La Loche in 2016, which left four people dead and seven injured, is a factor.
“Since the La Loche shooting, the idea that maybe they have less security in the north than they would anywhere else, I think that has a lot to do with the drop in applications, that there is that stigma attached to the north and northern communities,” he said.
“If I was a new student just graduating with my teaching degree and looking for a job, I’d seriously think about that as an issue.”
BUILDING SENSE OF HOPE
When Lily McKay Carriere graduated from the University of Regina more than 30 years ago, the first thing she did was apply for a job with the Northern Lights School Division.
“I wanted to go to a small little village, a little school with a small student base, because it was something that would be parallel to what I grew up in,” McKay Carriere said.
McKay Carriere, now 60, was born in Cumberland House and moved to Nipawin when she was a teenager to live with a host family and attend high school, which wasn’t offered in her community at the time.
When she was in Grade 12, a counsellor pulled her into his office and suggested she apply for a teaching program at a university. She consented without knowing what was involved.
“I didn’t know what a university was. I’d never been to one,” she said.
McKay Carriere became the first member of her family to at- tend post-secondary education. Although she enjoyed the years she spent in Nipawin and Regina, she was anxious to return home.
She launched her career in Poplar Point, a community outside La Loche, and also worked further north, along the Athabasca Basin. She returned to Cumberland House in 1982 to be close to her family and began teaching at Charlebois Community School, where she had been a student herself. Today, the school has 230 students from kindergarten to Grade 12 and employs 22 teaching staff, including McKay Carriere, who is now the principal.
McKay Carriere said it can be challenging to work in the north, where unemployment and poverty are pervasive, but she believes that makes her work as a teacher more essential and she takes it upon herself to build a sense of hope for her students every day.
Many of McKay Carriere’s staff are northerners who got their teaching degrees at the Northern Teacher Education Program (NORTEP), which graduated its last class in the summer of 2017. Bachelor of education programs in the north are now taught through Northlands College, but critics of the closure of NORTEP say confusion over the shift has led to fewer people pursuing teaching degrees in northern Saskatchewan.
McKay Carriere said it’s imperative that the Ministry of Education work with Northlands to ensure the new program continues to graduate a steady stream of northern teachers because they are a huge asset to northern schools.
“You know they’ll be here longer than a year or two years,” she said. “When you have consistency and there’s little turnover, you can be guaranteed that you have a team that understands where these children are at from year to year.”
LOTS OF OPPORTUNITIES
After graduating from the University of Saskatchewan’s education program in 1988, Dawna Olson took a job with the Northern Lights School Division.
She assumed she’d be in the north for a couple of years and then move south, maybe to Prince Albert, where her family lived. But she fell in love with northern Saskatchewan and never left.
Olson spent her first two years as a teacher in Sandy Bay, roughly six hours northeast of Prince Albert, and then took a teaching position at La Ronge’s Pre-Cam Community School to be closer to home. She became principal in 2000 and retired last year after being in the school of roughly 400 students in kindergarten to Grade 6 for nearly 30 years.
In small communities, “your friends become your family,” and a small school division with lots of turnover offers lots of opportunities to advance your career, Olson said.
She moved from special education teacher to Grade 4 teacher to vice-principal to principal throughout her career.
Olson said some students are used to teachers coming and going from northern schools; she’s enjoyed becoming “part of their world” by staying put as long as she has.
She said she was sad to hear about this year’s teacher shortage and hopes it doesn’t have a snowball effect.
“That puts a lot of strain on everybody else in those buildings ... everybody else has to spread themselves thin, and I would feel that if you’re a new teacher and you’re in that position too and you’re being asked to spread yourself thin to help take over the loss of the other teachers, that’s probably very hard on you,” she said.
“Hopefully it doesn’t cost them people that are there already.”
When you have consistency and there’s little turnover, you can be guaranteed that you have a team that understands …