Across the North it's back to school time.
One lesson that students will no doubt be learning is about budgeting. Another lesson that will become clear to students is the importance of investing in the future.
Education in the North seems to bounce from crisis to crisis. Funding, teacher shortages, teacher housing debates, vandalized schools and communities wrangling over funding.
Such an ebb and flow of fortunes involves a lot of people: teachers, education boards, bureaucrats, legislators, concerned parents and community leaders.
Debates, discussions and forums abound with ideas, theories and principles.
But after all that, we are left staring at some pretty sorry numbers.
Fewer than 20 per cent of Inuit children in Nunavut graduate from high school; half of them don't get past Grade 9. Forty-two per cent of Aboriginal children in the NWT don't finish Grade 9. Across the North, less than 10 per cent of the students that start school graduate from high school.
The central crisis in education is that our system is failing the students. There is no need to debate that. The evidence is wandering around your community, hanging out somewhere.
The best hope for a viable North is an educated, employable people.
While keeping a firm grip on the traditions that define Northern culture, it is imperative that our students get the kind of education they need to face the world around them.
In the race to exploit our natural resources, we must not overlook the one with the most potential: the young people of the North.
Spending money on education should be viewed as an investment in the future. Educated kids will get jobs, make money, buy things, pay taxes.
What we don't spend on education now, we will spend later: on social services, on adult education, on the fallout of a society that hasn't met the challenge of educating its youth.
As nearly a million dollars worth of logs sit petrifying in the yard of the Fort Resolution sawmill, bureaucrats elbow each other for a better view of the forest and the trees.
RWED officials are estimating the sustainable yield and politicians are sharpening their axes, preparing to yell "Timber!" on new tax revenues, jobs and, ultimately, votes.
We spend huge sums of money each year on lumber imported from the south, while thousands of hectares of boreal forest burns off every year.
The process of turning trees to boards is taking as long in the North as it did to grow the trees in the first place. There is huge potential for a sustainable lumber industry here that is not being realized because bureaucrats refuse to see the forest for the trees.
As was pointed out in last week's story about alcoholism and dry communities: there must be a decision made and a collective will to ban alcohol.
For a government, any government, to simply ban anything which it feels is bad for its people simply will not work. No matter how good the intention or how right the decision may be, it won't work.
Canadians are independent creatures and we historically resist attempts at any government to try and legislate our morality -- and probably rightly so.
Alcoholism is an insidious and dangerous problem in the North which must be addressed -- but it must be addressed with the acknowledgement and active assistance of the majority of the population. Otherwise, it's a problem that will not go away.
It would seem that the Baffin Regional Hospital and the community nursing stations in the region are at long last on easy street. Or at least, they're about to be.
With the recent influx of several new recruits and with more fresh faces on the way this fall, many of Baffin's healthcare facilities will be operating at close to full complement. And with the development of a Nunavut-based nursing degree program, an effective and permanent solution to the nursing shortage seems to have been discovered.
We can only hope that health board officials remain alert and proactive and don't fall asleep at the wheel. Shortages like the one that materialized last fall put everyone in jeopardy.