Thank you for the opportunity to present today.
I am Tom Harrington, the secretary treasurer of Northern Lights School Division.
I'll go into the background of the school division. We have about 4,500 students. We cover the northern half of Saskatchewan, and about 87% of our students identify as first nations and Métis.
I chose to focus mainly on question three, and mainly around remote communities and how they can prosper, because we're spread out and have a lot of concentrated remote communities whose needs we've seen.
It mainly comes down to two things: we need more support available locally, and we need to expand the opportunities that people have in their communities.
Almost all northern communities have a lack of services, which is well known. There is no stable food supply. There is often no fresh food, or there is fresh food that is unaffordable, so people can't access it. There are not enough health services, mainly mental health support, social services, or programs for early-years intervention for kids to get a good start in life, and people have to travel out for a lot of services.
In most communities the school is the hub. We are often the only physical presence in the community, so we have to provide more than just education. We have to try to provide as many services as we can.
If you combine the lack of services with the high unemployment rates, basically the residents are just trying to survive. They're not on the road to prosperity, but simply trying to survive. We need to remove a lot of these barriers and provide them with assistance. By that I mean there are always provincial-federal barriers, with different agencies doing different things. We need to drop those barriers as much as we can and just focus on helping people and providing opportunity.
A success story right now is the demonstration program currently running in the community of Sandy Bay, a family resource centre. There are also two other demonstration sites, one here in Regina and one in Yorkton. In all of the communities, they're very well received and well utilized. Sandy Bay, Regina, and Yorkton are very different communities, but basically the resource centre is a place where young families can come to get a wide variety of services. They can take parenting classes, and they can go to activities with their kids. In Sandy Bay they bring in fresh food. They have a program called the Good Food Box and they bring in fresh food to the community for a fair price. There are no barriers—anybody can come.
I've also provided information on the Sandy Bay resource centre. Basically in Sandy Bay, 60% of the community has registered and is participating in this place. It's a model that works, so everything is in one place and if you could expand the services available there, things like.... You can't just parachute services in, because people don't trust people who come from the outside. You need to have a physical presence there. There have been so many programs that start and then end, start and end, that people are leery of participants from elsewhere. But this program has worked very well.
The problem is that we need to find a way to sustain this model. Currently it's funded through the Kids First program, which I believe is federally funded. The federal government gives money to the province. I'm not sure about this program, but there is no sustainable funding for the resource centre right now.
The other thing is opportunity. In many of our communities there are good jobs. There are jobs in the schools. We need to find a way to have locals fill these jobs, because right now.... The school is always going to be there. It's stable employment. We need to bring training to the community.
Currently in La Loche they've started a DTEP program, a Dene teacher education program. They're going to teach local people in La Loche to be teachers, who will then go into our schools and local people will be taught by local people.
In a lot of our communities currently, we have to bring in teachers from Ontario and from the east, probably 30 or 40 teachers a year, who we bring in from out-of-province. They stay for a year or two and then they're gone, so there is no stability for the students and they don't see those role models who they can look up to and know that they could also become a teacher or go into nursing or social work.
Another program is the northern teacher education program. This is a teacher education program that has been running for 40 years in La Ronge. Over the years they have probably had 100 to 200 teachers teaching in the north in both federal and provincial schools. Currently, that program is under review. They want to attach that funding to another organization so they can save some administrative costs, but we just need to make sure that the program keeps running as is, because it's been a success.
Mainly it's about providing, as much as we can, training in the community so people can stay there, because when they go out, they have to move their whole family to a city, and the training success rate just isn't great. If we, as much as we can, have local training, that would allow people to step up and we'll start to see the benefits of having local people in those important positions.
Thank you for the opportunity today.