Using own experiences to inspire others
At Winnipeg’s Pathways to Education, the director offers more than just professional expertise
When Darlene Klyne looks at me, she locks eyes. Listen to my story, she seems to be saying. Don’t look away. I think to myself, I have been looking away for too long.
Klyne is the program director of Winnipeg’s Pathways to Education program. She is a 56-year-old status Cree. We’re sitting in a modest, three-storey community centre on Stella Ave., a few blocks from the CP rail yard, an industrial gash that defines one border of Winnipeg’s North End.
I grew up in the North End. Proudly so. Its grit has always appealed to me. For more than a century, it was an area where immigrants settled. In my day it was Poles, Ukrainians and Jews. Today, many First Nations people call it home.
I lived on a leafy, middle-class street, a world away from the hardscrabble neighbourhood where I sit today.
When I was in Grade 10, we moved to a bungalow a mile away, still in the North End. My father thought the old neighbourhood was getting run down. “Indians are starting to move in,” he told me. He feared property values would decline.
It has always surprised me how someone who has suffered the sting of prejudice can be so oblivious to it in himself. Our family name, Sandell, was adopted to conceal our Jewish identity and avoid prejudice. It was my grandfather’s doing when he came to Canada.
I knew the family move was for all the wrong reasons. But whatever objection I voiced was weak and futile. I feel shame recalling the episode now as I listen to Darlene Klyne.
THE BUILDING
where I meet Klyne was constructed 1909 as one of J.S. Wordsworth’s social gospel missions. It has served as a centre for the First Nation community since the 1970s. Recently, it became the headquarters of Pathways to Education’s most ambitious project yet — boosting the graduation rate of aboriginal youth. In this neighbourhood only one in five finishes high school.
“When you live in poverty, when you live in a family where there are addictions, it’s all about survival,” Klyne tells me.
Pathways to Education began as an after-school program in Toronto’s Regent Park housing project more than a decade ago. Pathways took a 56-per-cent dropout rate and turned it into a graduation rate that surpasses the Ontario average. Now it has spread to 12 communities in four provinces. But inner-city Winnipeg may be its steepest challenge.
The formula is tailored to each community, but the consistent elements are tutoring, mentoring and, crucially, support workers who advocate at school for both students and parents.
David Hughes, the president and CEO of the Pathways to Education Canada, says barriers such as not having bus fare to get to school and no help with homework are relatively easy to overcome.
“The biggest barrier is the fact that there is no one else in the family that’s gone on to school.”
Klyne tells me she dropped out of school when she became pregnant. Then she needed to earn a living. In job after job, she started at the bottom and worked her way into a position of authority.
AT THE AGE
of 44, she earned her high school diploma. She was only the third member of her family to do so.
Her mentors at the adult education program pushed her further. She considered going for a counselling certificate at a community college. Why aim so low, they asked. So Klyne became the first in her family to enrol in university. One of her daughters, Megan, enrolled, too. Four years later, they graduated together, both with their bachelor of social work. That set off a chain reaction.
Her second daughter, Sheila, enrolled in university. She is one year away from earning her human ecology degree. Klyne’s two sisters signed up for BSW programs and graduated. Her two grandchildren completed high school and, without hesitation, they headed to university.
“What was not even a dream for us . . . is now a reality and it is firmly entrenched in our family,” Klyne says. “When you graduate — and you will graduate — you go to university and you do something with your life.”