June 21, 2005

Public forum tonight on Native education

Students' dropout rate twice as high
Will `kick-start' learning: Leaders

LOUISE BROWN EDUCATION REPORTER The Toronto Star

The Toronto Star and Ryerson University will co-host a public discussion Tuesday on elementary learning on remote northern reserves, as part of National Aboriginal Day events at Queen's Park hosted by Ontario Lieutenant-Governor James Bartleman.
As a follow to a recent Toronto Star series called Ontario's Forgotten Children, about elementary education on fly-in reserves, the Star will present key figures cited in the series to discuss the issue after a slide show of Star photographs of children in the three communities north of Thunder Bay featured in the series.

The lieutenant-governor, whose mother is Ojibwa, will welcome the public for a traditional drumming and dance ceremony at 6:30 p.m. at the Legislature, with a blessing ceremony by a local elder. The discussion and slide show follow at 7 p.m.

Native education is an issue gaining attention across the country from both public and private sectors:

The federal government will hold a First Ministers' summit in November on aboriginal issues, including education, from pre-school to post-secondary.

Canada's Auditor-General Sheila Fraser noted in her report last fall that natives' high school graduation rate lags so far behind that of the rest of Canada, it would take 28 years to catch up.

Former premier Bob Rae urged institutions of higher learning to become more active in reaching out to aboriginal children, as part of a recent report for the McGuinty government on post-secondary education.

Bartleman has launched five summer literacy camps this year in fly-in Indian reserves in Northern Ontario, all funded by the charitable sector, and hopes to expand the program next summer.

Literacy organization Frontier College is examining the idea of sending literacy volunteers into these five communities in the fall to keep the momentum going.

Katimavik, Canada's youth volunteer corps, has just finished a two-year pilot project with volunteers in the fly-in reserve of Fort Albany and is considering sending young volunteers to native communities on a more frequent basis.

Roots of Empathy, a widely respected program that fights bullying and fosters compassion by bringing babies into the classroom, has just set a special focus on aboriginal schools.
Admission to Tuesday's forum is free, but guests are asked to register first online at http://www.thestar.com/forum. Tuesday's comes as the Ontario government launches a sweeping new partnership with aboriginal leaders to improve life and learning for natives, particularly children.

Native leaders say the initiative will "kick-start" a move to close the educational gap between children living on reserves and their peers across the country.

"Our academic standards don't compare at all to schools in the rest of Canada, and we simply cannot bridge the gap without the help of the provinces," said former regional chief Charles Fox of the Chiefs of Ontario, who stepped down last week after five years and who has been key in launching the new partnership.

"If we want to start generating Grade 8 graduates who have more than Grade 5-level skills, we have to work with the provinces as well as Ottawa."

What the McGuinty government calls a "new approach to aboriginal relations" comes just weeks after the federal government signed an accord with native leaders to "transform First Nations education" by working more closely with the provinces and aboriginal groups.

Although Ottawa holds the purse strings for native health and education, there is a growing push to get provinces to share resources and standards in areas such as curriculum, tests and teacher training.

As a first step, Ontario Attorney General and Minister Responsible for Native Affairs Michael Bryant says the province will begin meeting regularly with native leaders to discuss ways to offer more help for needy students, designing new youth sport programs and address larger issues of native rights, justice and health.

In particular, the McGuinty government will begin hammering out a new aboriginal education partnership with Ottawa and native communities to try to lower the native dropout rate, which is twice as high as in the rest of Canada, and to begin closing the three- to four-grade lag in native children's literacy.