The report card is out on the NWT and it looks like it's a failing grade, yet again.
The territory is nearly halfway into its 10 year education renewal initiative and though some headway has been achieved through food programs, introduction of counselling services and language and culture revitalization in schools, recent scores for the Alberta Achievement Test (AAT) show we are still missing the mark with students.
For the 2016-2017 school year, attendance sits at 82.9 percent, down from 2011-2012 attendance numbers, which saw attendance rates at 84 per cent for the 49 schools in the territory.
John Stewart, director of teaching and learning for the Department of Education, Culture and Employment, when discussing attendance affecting achievement rates, said, "Eighty per cent sounds pretty good when you talk about attendance (regionally), until you scale that out. Over grades 1 to 10, they've missed two years if they're attending 80 per cent of the time."
It might be somewhat alarmist, but Education Minister Caroline Cochrane would be judicious to issue a state of emergency over our children's education. We can't continue to limp along behind the rest of Canada where our future generations are concerned.
The minister should closely examine the successes and failures of this renewal initiative and be working proactively to actually solve this ongoing issue of inadequate attendance and underachievement in the territory. Four priorities were set out in the Education Renewal and Innovation Framework: early childhood development and care; student and family support; Indigenous language and culture curriculum and resource development; and literacy. It's hoped these initiatives will be reflected more positively in the coming five years of the changes being implemented.
We can't avert our eyes and act like we won't be affected by this failure in educating our children.
A recent story in News/North shows smaller communities lagging behind the capital and the regional centres in the 2016-2017 results. Of total enrolment in the communities, only 27.1 and 17.7 per cent achieved acceptable results on their English Language Arts tests in grades 6 and 9, respectively.
In math, only 20.7 per cent of students in Grade 6 and eight per cent of students in Grade 9 in the communities achieved acceptable results on their tests.
How do we bring in Indigenous teachers to all schools in the NWT when programming at Aurora College is on hold? How can we expect to create future Indigenous educators when the test scores are so abysmal? And creating a university in the North won't make a difference if test scores aren't high enough for most students in the NWT to even attend at a university level.
In the education renewal strategy it reports that in 2012, on average, only four of every 10 Indigenous students would graduate compared to eight of every 10 non-Indigenous students.
When our young population isn't educated, there are external costs to our communities as a whole. Costs rise astronomically in the court system, in healthcare and in addictions treatment; homelessness grows, as does the strain on government programs to assist in these areas. More needs to be done to understand how we can assist students in gaining a meaningful education that helps them step out of generational poverty, addictions and trauma.
Good work is being done to build healthier minds and bodies in students across the territory, but that work has a difficult past to dig out of to create an environment that is somewhere Indigenous students in the NWT want to be their best selves – where they desire to learn and grow to overcome the troubled history their families have endured.