SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - The government of the Northwest Territories is stepping in to address a problem teachers in Northern schools have noticed for years: fewer aboriginal students are graduating from high school than their non-aboriginal peers, and the gap starts early when many children stop showing up at school.

In 2007-08, 45 per cent of aboriginal 18-year-olds in the NWT were high school grads, compared with 69 per cent of their non-aboriginal peers.

The Aboriginal Student Achievement program, a working group under the GNWT, had its first meeting last month to begin to uncover reasons for the education gap.

Group members include representatives from the Dene Nation, corporate businesses, the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, the NWT Metis Nation, the Native Women's Association, the NWT Teachers' Association and school superintendents.

Dan Daniels, deputy minister of Education, Culture and Employment - the department overseeing the group - said the government has been tracking achievement levels of aboriginal versus non-aboriginal students for more than a decade. The working group, he hopes, will also function for several years to close the gap.

"It's for the benefit of students themselves, but I think it's for the benefit of the territory as well," Daniels said. "That's really where our future workforce comes from and it makes good economic sense to invest in the development of our students to their fullest extent possible."

The group is focusing largely on combating low attendance rates across the NWT. Statistics from the department's 2007 "Towards Excellence" report on education show that students in smaller communities - which are mostly aboriginal - attend school less than students in the territory's regional centres, which have smaller aboriginal populations.

In the 2006/07 schoolyear, for example, attendance among kindergarten students from the communities was 79.7 per cent, while the average for kindergarten students in regional centres was 87.6 per cent.

"Attendance has to be the one focus for us," said Nolan Swartzentruber, superintendent of the Dehcho Divisional Education Council and one of the group's members.

"So many of our families have had bad experiences with schooling, especially with the residential schools."

But some community school teachers say student education problems don't stem from race.

"The attendance issues and school participation issues tend to be, in my experience, not necessarily racial at all. We have both aboriginal and non-aboriginal students who don't do as well as they could or should do as a result of poor attendance," said Robert Byatt, principal of Thomas Simpson School in Fort Simpson.

"I think it would be far too broad a generalization to say that is an aboriginal issue specifically."

Byatt added that graduation statistics can be misleading, especially since many families with non-aboriginal children attending community schools tend to stay in the North only for a short time before moving on.

"By the time you get to Grade 12, most of the kids who are left in our school are aboriginal," he explained, though he said he supports the aboriginal achievement program.

"They're probably barking up the right tree, but it is a Northern issue," Byatt emphasized.

"I don't think it's necessarily a racial issue but it tends to come out looking like that just because those kids tend to be in the smaller communities."

Byatt said the territory's small communities don't provide enough incentive for young people to finish high school, much less go on to post-secondary studies.

He said many community members who have landed well-paying jobs have done so with reletively low levels of education.

"People can live quite comfortably here with not a lot," he said. "So it's just not valid, the argument that 'hey, you've got to get a decent education to get a job.'"

Lois Philipp is principal of Fort Providence's Deh Gah Secondary School, which currently has a 100 per cent aboriginal student population. She agrees with Byatt that student achievement is more a Northern issue than a racial issue, but said the challenges of living in the communities "often create conditions for failure."

"You know, a lot of addictions, a lot of parenting challenges, in terms of if you grew up in a residential school, you were never given those skills. So a lot of parents have challenges in terms of just being a parent," she said.

"A number of our parents haven't had a positive experience with education, so how do you create the condition so that they can actually become supportive?"

Philipp said she believes one of the most important ways to improve aboriginal education is cyclical: the NWT needs to train more aboriginal high school teachers who can act as role models for aboriginal youth to help ensure their academic success.

"How do you encourage young, successful aboriginal students that are graduating now to look at a career in education and say, 'hey, secondary education - that's a lot of fun!'" Philipp wonders.

Her answer?

"You just plug away at it. It's an ongoing challenge."