by Jennifer Pritchett
Northern News Services

NNSL (Feb 14/97) - A Yellowknife student attending school in Alberta has spent her life savings while waiting for the student assistance she expected.

Yvette Schreder quit her job, left her son with his father in Yellowknife and moved to Calgary, only to find out she didn't qualify for funding.

Schreder is enrolled in an upgrading program called Transitions at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, a program not covered by the NWT student financial assistance plan.

She didn't however, find this out until mid-January after she moved to Calgary and started the program.

"Had I known that the funding was not available for this program, I would have opted to take a different program and I surely would not have been so hasty to resign my position with the city of Yellowknife," Schreder wrote in a letter to the minister of education.

Since she wrote this letter, the Department of Education has upheld her appeal, and is now in the process of securing funding for her program.

Paul Jones, executive assistant to the minister, said that Schreder fell through the cracks.

"The application forms are now being looked at and will be changed to tighten this up," he said.

Jones maintains this sort of thing rarely happens.

Schreder said that she has been through an ordeal that she'd like to forget.

"I'm down to my last $20 as it is, and I still have to pay this month's bills," said the single mother. "I even went to the bank to get a loan on Monday, but it didn't look good because I don't have a job."

According to Schreder, she's not the only one in the program that has had their funding cut at the last minute.

"If I didn't have family here and if he didn't have family here, I'd be out on the street and so would he," she said.

While she expects to get the funding soon, she hopes what happened to her doesn't happen to anyone else.

"I know I'm not the first person it has happened to," she said. "I just hope it doesn't happen to anyone else."