Home page

Text size

E-mail this page

SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
The Yellowknife francophone school board has been waiting since January for a judge's decision on who's allowed to be enrolled in its schools and whether the territorial government should support an expansion of two of its schools in the territory.

Yvonne Careen: Principal at French-language school Ecole Allain St. Cyr said she is frustrated by the lack of a ruling.

"This is very, very frustrating for us all," said Yvonne Careen, principal at Ecole Allain St. Cyr. "We started the court proceedings at the end of October last year and (NWT Supreme Court Justice Louise Charbonneau) has not rendered us a decision, yet. So, it's a little bit difficult for us because we cannot proceed in any way, shape or form until we have her decision, and it's very frustrating."

The case before Charbonneau is three-pronged, Careen explained. The first two parts of the case involve renovating the two francophone schools in the NWT - Yellowknife's Ecole Allain St. Cyr and Hay River's Boreale. Planned renovations at Allain St. Cyr - which has 123 students in kindergarten through Grade 12, including 17 at the high school level - include a gym, a larger cooking facility for teaching home economics and extra classrooms, among other improvements.

"In order to be able to offer our students any options in the vocational trades, because we do not have the facilities here, or the staff, we have a partnership with the Kimberlite Career and Technical Centre (KCTC) that is run by Yellowknife Catholic Schools, and our students from grades 7 to 9 go to the KCTC once every six days for the afternoon," Careen said.

Students also go to the Multiplex and William McDonald School to use the gym.

"So, to entice our students to stay here rather than to go to Sir John or St. Pat's, we had to put those (programs) in place, but now it's a catch-22 because we don't have the space," she said.

The third prong of the case before the NWT Supreme Court involves who can attend French first-language schools. Section 23 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the section that deals with minority language education rights, lays out three clauses that guarantee admittance to minority-language-only schools.

In the NWT, those clauses are interpreted as meaning individuals must either have French as their first language and still be fluent; have another child who has gone to school primarily in French; or attended a French-language school themselves to have the right to enrol their students in a French-language-only school in the NWT.

However, the majority of French-language schools in English-speaking Canada can decide for themselves what students they will accept.

In July 2008, NWT minister of education Jackson Lafferty issued a directive that all students in the NWT who wish to attend a French-only school must fall under the three clauses outlined in section 23 of the Charter.

"What we're fighting for is the right to admit, or to decide who to admit into our school," said Careen.

Lafferty will not comment on his reasoning behind making this directive to restrict enrolment at the francophone schools until the judge has made her ruling, according to Megan Holsapple, media liaison for the GNWT's executive branch.

Suzette Montreuil, president of the Commission scolaire francophone des Territoires du Nord-Ouest, the NWT French school board, would not reveal how much the lawsuit has cost the board.

She said there is a significant number of Metis families in the NWT who have lost their language, but should still have access to French-language schools for their children if they so choose.

"The rate of assimilation of francophones is quite high, in the west of Canada in particular and in the NWT our estimation is it's about 50 per cent," said Montreuil. "A lot of those families have lost the French language, but in our minds they should still be considered eligible to come to the schools."

We welcome your opinions. Click here to e-mail a letter to the editor.