Public Education/residential schools/Northern Alberta

An Educational Story

Fort Chipewyan is a predominatly native community of Cree, Dene and Metis with a population of about 1000 on two reserves on either side of a municipal town site.  My school Athabasca Delta Community School is located in the town site and students bus in from the neighbouring reserves.  The school itself was built to have a trading fort frontier feel to it.  It works.

Native culture here, and likely in most native communities, values the importance of the family.  The role of the elders as a source of knowledge and wisdom is recognized and almost revered in native culture.  However, my truck driver/social worker pointed out that although these values are evident there is a significant disconnect between what is valued and what is practiced.  I was soon to learn that many families with links to residential schools are severely dysfunctional and native traditions were rapidly eroding.

Despite the fact that children are valued they are given very loose structure in their lives and little discipline. This type of scenerio often translates into students who do not know how to behave in a classroom and don’t want to be in school.  Many students rebel against the authority of the teachers.  They are openly and frequently defiant.  Students here, as in the general population, spend a disproportionate amount of time with video games.  I have grade one students telling me about the joys of playing “Grand Theft Auto.” 

I have grown to admire the public school teachers here and how they survive the ordeals of the every day classroom, their’s is not an easy job.  Sadly, some locals still regard teachers as outsiders and criticize them for coming to the community just for the money. Yet, in some cases they do not want native teachers in their classrooms as they feel they are not a qualified or as well trained. I heard one case of an Inuit teacher teaching in a Cree community causing one mother to complain.  After several months, and discovering that the Inuit teacher was quite capable, this mother had the good sense to apologize to the principal.  

I serve as the Special Education Coordinator at the only school in Fort Chipewyan and I work with most of the coded students, that is those who have been tested for learning disabilities and behavioural issues.  Of the approximately 230 students in the school I work with about forty on a regular basis. As I began working with my students it became very clear that there was very little literacy in their home life in the sense that they were usually not read to nor did they read for recreation.  They were after all ”Special Ed” students. But perhaps more significant is the fact that native culture is based on oral traditions and until Europeans gave the Cree a written language there were no written literacy skills. 

Many of my students are several grade levels behind in their literacy and numeracy skills.  I have high school students who can barely read and grade 3 students who do not know the alphabet or the sounds the letters make.  I work with a grade five student who wishes to improve his reading skills only to the point of being able to successfully take his driver’s test.  Many of these students are about to give up or already have.  Their anger and frustration quickly translates into acting out behaviour and severe discipline issues.

When a typical, if there is such a thing, middle class southern suburban child gets to school he has been read to, talked to and exposed to a wide range of vocabulary words and ideas thousands or tens of thousands of times before entering the classroom.  My impression here, in Chip, is that my Cree and Dene students arrive in school not having the advantage of the English spoken word, story times and chances at adequate vocabulary development. For many, English is a second language. My students begin the literacy race long after the green flag has gone down and too many of them never see the checkered flag.  This year our graduation class will be composed of four students.  The drop out rate is disturbing.

The Fraser Institute rates school in Western Canada based on very narrow perameters of performance and although I don’t accept their findings as difinitive, they do raise red flags.  My school is rated dead last in all of Alberta and many of the other low placed schools are also part of the Northland School Division.  

The sad thing about many of our students at all ages, but especially in the junior high grades is that they have given up on themselves. They have an unfortunate reverse or negative pride and seem to revere a lack of progress. It is just the opposite of self esteem expressed through a near total lack of achievement. Our school has no teams, or mottos and very little school spirit.

As an example, in the main foyer of our school is a fireplace with a circular sitting area.  Mid-morning, one school day while walking through I saw a senior student sleeping there.  To a guest at the school, or anybody else, the first thing they would see would be a student asleep on a bench.  I touched the student’s shoulder, big mistake, and asked him to sit up.  First I got the “don’t touch me I know my rights argument now prevalent in most schools everywhere, but after that episode I was told in strong indignant terms that he could sleep where he wanted, after all he said, “this is Chip not some southern school.”  Who was I to argue. I had already been told by some parents, whose children I had disciplined, that I don’t know the community or their kids.  Maybe they are right.

Students from “Chip” who have tried the public school system elsewhere, mainly in Fort McMurray and Edmonton, soon find themselves back at Athabasca Delta Community School because it is here that they can fail in their comfort zone.  They seem proud of their lethergy.  They take “pride” in their dysfunction.

Sometimes as teachers we get the feeling that we have been forgotten in our northern isolation. It is difficult and costly to get goods and services from the South as this is a fly in community with a winter road open for three months of the year. As a result of high transportation costs and a lack of care or resources the school and teacherages are very poorly maintained. 

Just this year alone our school has been closed due to furnace and boiler failures which resulted in frozen and burst pipes, which in turn caused massive flooding destroying my clasroom and everything in it as well as the ECS and grade one classrooms on the floor directly below my room.  Since the burst pipe had 7 hours of uninterupted flow time the water also took out the staffroom, hallways, the office and the library.  The sewers backed up and over flowed into the main floor washrooms.  The school was closed for several days only to be closed again due to, first a lack of propane pressure and no heat followed by too much propane pressure and a school overwhelmed with gas. Each event closed the school for several days.  Last year the school was closed for two months because of mold problems.  We don’t have to hope for snow days we just wait for something to break down and it always does.

I entered and won a writing contest this year promoting the merits of public education sponsored by the Alberta Teachers Association.  The contest required contestants to describe what it is that is special or unique about their school.  The contest operated under the theme of “My Alberta School.”  Naturally, I did not focus on test scores.  I entitled my piece “Continuous Small Miracles” and wrote about the small, everyday positive occurences that happpend in my school. 

My examples dealt with small actions and kindnesses taking place more on a one to one nature between students and teachers. After the contest I eventually concluded that under present circumstances the climate at our school and in this community will not significantly change, nor will our provincial test results, but there will be a multitude of successes on an individual basis based on those teachers and students who despite the odds rise above.  These people are special and they are the true success stories, and on that level my school is a great success and those successes speak to the strengh of the individual, not the system.

Having taught for 35 years and much of that with special needs students I have found nothing surprising in Fort Chipewyan in terms of what I read in the pysch/ed reports or through my daily work with students.  There is a cross section of many types of issues, problems and learning disabilities including: aspergers, oppositional defiance, ADHD, OCD, CD and all the other initials we use to identify and label students.  The difference here is that I have never seen such a high concentration of educational issues in such a small student population before.

Why is this?  I’m sure Fort Chipewyan is in no way unique from most other native communities in Alberta, or elsewhere in Canada.  I was still wondering about the big disconnect between values and reality as told to me by my truck driving social worker. The community of “Chip” values children, and education yet has a school with an extremely high drop out rate, and is the lowest rated school in the province.

Residential schools were a systematic and sanctioned way of robbing the natives of their culture and whatever vistage of heritage they might have left after they were cheated of land and other rights.  I’m no expert in this, but I know enough that this was a period of shame in our history and when the residential school here closed it wasn’t long before it was also demolished.

I was told one reason for the disconnect with values had to do with residential schools.  

Because of the harsh treatment experienced by many at, Holy Angels Indian Residential School (1902-1974), the Chip residential school and others like it, is where many natives lost their connection to families and family values. 

The government’s goal was to break down the culture and the family structure, thereby developing a group of people who were institutionalized; then when one throws alcohol into the mix with the dislocation of many communities from their lands that they knew, to poorer lands it eventually creates an entrenched cycle of poverty. Some of the former students of Holy Angels, now adults and parents, attend support groups today in order to deal with their horrible experiences as children while at the residential school.

After all of the social trauma inflicted on native populations “we” blamed natives for being useless. Due to the reserve system and residential schools  linked with a combination of government and church policies, it resulted in creating a true sense of learned helplessness with little sense of connection to anything, no sense of family, no sense of trust in others, or in themselves, and no sense of trust in authority. In fact the very concept of family was destroyed, but I guess that was the point of the residential school. 

Is it no wonder that because of abuse and extreme methods of discipline students who left those schools became parents who didn’t know how to parent and were reluctant to discipline.  Soon a generation developed robbed and devoid of heritage and tradition and seemingly helpless to rectify the situation. The evil of residential schools created more than one monster.  The legacy plays on in families and schools today here in “Chip”.

The reality is that much of the parenting in native homes is done by members of the extended family and more often than not by the grandparents.  In traditional native culture there was good reason for the grandparents to handle child rearing because parents would be “out on the land” making a living and surviving.  In modern society some parents seem to rely too heavily on tradition with the continued expectation that grandparents raise the children.  As contemporary society has developed the traditional roles have not changed and possibly family life has suffered in some ways because parents excused themselves from their parenting role. 

Presently, at a point in our school’s development and history when more resources are needed, along with smaller class sizes in order to better deal with the many obvious issues, educational spending is being reduced. It was only last year that the entire Northland School Board was dismissed by the Minister of Education and an acting superintendent was appointed to turn the jurisdiction around.  An extensive study was done which highlighted numerous weaknesses within the system as a whole.  Now with the most recent provincial budget, cuts have been made and again Northland and other needy jurisdictions, especially rural ones, will go without, while still being expected to do more with less.

I begin to wonder if public education is up to the task and whether or not it can succeed against such odds in isolated northern communities, like Fort Chipewyan and other rural areas in Alberta. Any one approaching my school might be quite surprised to read at least four large signs identifying several oil companies for their gifts to the school and the community. Similar signs appear in the enterior of the school. Most everything we have in our school, that is of value, from the playground equipment to the computer lab to the community resource centre has been paid for through the generosity of oil companies.  

As a teacher I value the contributions made by oil companies for they have made my job easier and improved education and the lives of our students, but is this what public education is coming to in Alberta? Public education is a system which is provincially mandated, board directed and tax supported.  In Alberta that means it is an inclusive educational system which according to the Alberta Teachers’ Association’s definition provides, “...opportunity to develop ingenuity, creativity, critical thinking skills and a strong sense of citizenship.”

It seems there is a continous and growing gap between the needs of an over taxed school system and the ability of a government to meet the educational needs in Fort Chipewyan.  In these cases gifts and contributions from oil companies fill that gap and signage appears advertising the donations.  Although my school is the beneficiary of oil company profits it also demonstrates the failure of public education to provide the opportunities to promote, “ingenuity, creativity, critical thinking skills and a strong sense of citizenship.” In the end the solutions become political and not pedigogical. I think the students in Fort Chipewyan deserve better. 

Fort Chipewyan is a community with an unfortunate history, one in which the residential school system tragically failed them.  For many, living in a reserve system with a residential school deprived them of their pride, heritage, traditions and family values.   What I see today is a people struggling for an indentity lost somewhere between surviving from the land and free spirited kids playing video games at home during school hours, serviced by a public school system unable to meet their needs.

 I will end with one last image.  While working with Statisitcs Canada 20 years ago I flew up the Athabasca River somewhere between Fort McMurray and Fort Chipewyan. We made a smooth landing beside a Cree summer fishing camp.  My job was to complete a census report.  I saw the elders fishing and drying their catch on racks in the traditional way.  A short distance away a Honda generator hummed and provided the electricity for the children inside the crude log cabin allowing them to play video games at midday.  I thought then as I do now, what is their future?