SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Colleen MacDonald says students are coming to her high school unprepared.

John Stewart, director of School and Instructional Services for the Department of Education, Culture and Employment(ECE) said the review is in the preliminary stages, but has already identified areas where schools across the territory - and across the world - could be doing a better job. - Evan Kiyoshi French/NNSL

The principal at St. Patrick school said researchers behind a territory-wide review of education, are making suggestions to better prepare students moving through the system, with the goal of boosting territorial graduation rates and test scores.

"A lot of our students are coming to us ... behind, definitely as far as speech goes, and speech reading, and language recognition," she said, adding the idea behind junior kindergarten - schooling for four-year-olds launched and then put on hold in Yellowknife last year, pending review after the territorial elections - came about because of discoveries made during the Education Renewal and Innovation initiative.

John Stewart, director of School and Instructional Services for the Department of Education, Culture and Employment(ECE) said the review is in the preliminary stages, but has already identified areas where schools across the territory - and across the world - could be doing a better job.

"If you look at graduation rates we would be substantially below the Canadian average, and ... in small communities it's even more pronounced than it is in Yellowknife."

He said territorial students fall between 20 and 50 per cent below Canadian averages.

There's a growing gap, said Stewart, between available information, either online or through other media sources, and the accepted body of knowledge being handed down from generation to generation.

"What that body of knowledge doesn't account for, is that our world is swimming with information, and that information is as accessible to a five-year-old as it is to a PhD student," he said.

ECE wants to figure out what things they're doing that work.

"Take every aspect of education and critically ask, 'is it serving our teachers and our students and the NWT generally, and is it serving them well?'" he said.

How teachers teach, what students learn, how they learn it, how school days and school years are organized, and how the curriculum accounts for Northern culture is under the microscope, said Stewart.

"In some cases we're doing great things, but at least we need to look at every aspect to see how we can improve," he said. "We're looking at how we integrate our values of the NWT into this place, since some of the curriculum we use comes from Alberta."

The territory's complicated past is being taken into account, said Stewart.

"If the first education system in the NWT was residential school, you setup a challenge right away," he said. "Schools have a whole bunch of baggage. The NWT had the highest rate of participation in residential schools of any jurisdiction across the country. They existed for 130 years in the NWT, and that's had an impact."

MacDonald said there's already a unit on residential schools being taught through the Northern studies course.

"It's a well laid out unit with lots of resources," she said. "It's taught at the Grade 10 and 11 level, and all our our students have to take it, and (ECE) has done a really great job in serving the teachers who teach that."

She said reviewers are looking at different pathways to graduation.

"Students, who instead of being a journeyman or a red-seal (recognized as the inter-provincial standard of excellence in the skilled trades), they've got a helper's pathway. That will impact the graduation rates."

MacDonald said the initiative looks at issues beyond the classroom, to help students from low-income families.

"Poverty is at the root of all those social problems," she said.

Claudia Parker, superintendent of the Yellowknife Catholic School(YCS) board, said school boards across the territory have already received funding to feed hungry students. She said she doesn't have statistics indicating how many students within at board school's fall below the poverty line, but that it's on their radar.

They've also received funding for DoEdaezhe, a three-pronged program teaching students self-resiliency, about their culture, and how to be good leaders. She said the program is running at Weledeh, St. Patrick and at St. Joseph school, but on a smaller scale.

MacDonald said new the new programs stand to make a difference, but she worries about how they'll ultimately be paid for.

"Right now there isn't extra funding," she said. When the GNWT put a halt to junior kindergarten - pending further review - they still required YCS and Yk1 to help pay for the launch of the program, each paying $235,000 per year, according to Parker.

"When you do put extra programming in how can you just be dealing with the same (budget)," said MacDonald.