LIIDLII KUE/FORT SIMPSON - The Dehcho Divisional Education Council is hiring two new regional staff members in an effort to support students, their families and schools.

The council is adding two regional school counsellors to their staffing ranks. The councilor position was created five years ago, said Nolan Swartzentruber, the council's superintendent.

Cindy Browning, sitting in her office at Bompas Elementary School in Fort Simpson, is one of two new regional school counsellors with the Dehcho Divisional Education Council. - Roxanna Thompson/NNSL photo

The purpose of the position is to work with the staff in the schools to try and build a bridge between the schools and homes, said Swartzentruber. The councilors also work with families to see if there are ways to support them in the effort to make their children more successful in school.

Attendance is one of the major issues that the councilors will be focusing on.

"Performance is directly related to attendance," said Swartzentruber.

Research by the working group for the territorial government's Aboriginal Student Achievement Initiative has found that in general across the territory the large majority of aboriginal students miss the equivalent of two years of school by the time they reach Grade 9.

Poor attendance can be the result of a number of factors including prior experience gained by parents that left them with negative feelings about schooling and family crises, said Swartzentruber.

Because attendance is measurable, as opposed to the effects of counseling, the effectiveness of the two new counsellors in addressing these issues can be tracked, he said.

The fact that the council located the funding to hire two positions speaks to the importance the organization puts on this type of work, he said. One of the positions has been present for five years but has been empty since November 2008. The second counsellor is the first new regional staff member the board has hired since the position was originally created.

Swartzentruber said education council decided to hire a second counsellor because, "There's quite a few issues right now and we wanted to provide more consistent support with all of the schools."

To help offset the position the council is using $25,000 each region received from the Department of Education, Culture and Employment under the Aboriginal Student Achievement Initiative. The rest of the funding was set aside in the council's budget for the year.

"It was a priority so we identified the funding so we could be sure we could hire the two people," said Swartzentruber.

Cindy Browning, who started work on Feb. 8, is the first of the two counsellors to be hired. Browning and the other counsellor will be based in Fort Simpson but are expected to visit each of the region's schools once a month.

Browning said she's looking forward to travelling to other communities and seeing if she can help with attendance issues. Sometimes parents can be scared of working with school staff who are in positions of authority, she said. Browning said she will be letting parents know schools are not scary places and they actually strive to provide a safe environment for children.

In her new role, Browning, who is from Fort Simpson, will be drawing on her background with Dehcho Health and Social Services where she was a community social worker. More recently Browning spent more than a year working as a special needs assistant at Thomas Simpson School.

"(I'll be) helping to bridge the gap between school and community and between parents and schools," said Browning.