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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Yellowknife high school students have a new venue to socialize in as of last Friday thanks to a group of dedicated faculty who gave up their night in order to give their students a safe place to play.

St. Patrick High School students were given an open invitation to hang out at the school Friday night for the inaugural Lights On night in Yellowknife. The program's purpose is to give youth somewhere to go to have fun without using drugs or alcohol.

"We chose it as a school because we wanted to offer our students an alternative. A healthy, safe alternative for activities on a Friday night," said Barb de Bastiani, student support counsellor at St. Patrick High School.

The lights were on at St. Pat's from 8 to 11 p.m. Fifteen faculty were on hand to supervise, and just more than 50 students attended the evening event.

"One of the students said, 'I was with my friends and they had started to drink and I'm not into that so I remembered that the school was open,'" said Coleen McDonald, principal at St. Patrick High School. "That in itself was powerful enough. That tells me that there's a need - there is a need for it."

Students who chose to take advantage of the evening had many activities to choose from. The school gym was open and students played basketball, badminton and floor hockey. Students could also be found in classrooms playing Wii, while others spent time in the library playing cards and chess. There was also a jam session where students were invited to bring in instruments.

Food for the evening included free homemade pizza and french fries that were made by high school students planning a culinary trip to San Francisco, Calif., in the new year. Other spaces were used throughout the school, including the drama room that served as a movie theatre, and a general hang-out space in the main atrium known as the "rock space" due to a large piece of bedrock that is incorporated into the building.

This fun-filled evening has serious origins for faculty and students. Last June, a St. Pat's student died as a direct result of consuming substances, de Bastiani said, adding that the situations was "painful certainly for staff and students here and the community itself as a whole."

The event brought home the issue of substance abuse among youth in Yellowknife and throughout the North.

"This is an issue that impacts all of our kids," said de Bastiani. "It doesn't matter what school you go to, we know that there are a lot of students out there - a lot of young people - who just have too ready access to various substances."

A similar Lights On program is held weekly in Hay River. The program there has become so popular among youth there that the high school has opened it up to any former students under the age of 21.

For now, Lights On Yellowknife is only open to St. Patrick High School students and the plan for now is to hold the event one Friday a month. However, if student participation remains high and there is community interest, organizers said they would love for it to expand to include more Yellowknife youth.

"This is our first one so we just wanted to get the feel of it," said McDonald. "But we'd like to expand it so that it could be middle school and then if we had community support as well as perhaps teachers from the other schools, we'd like to open it up."

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