Good morning, everyone.
First of all, I too would like to apologize for not having submitted my comments earlier. I've been asked to do a quick overview of our education system in northern Manitoba, particularly for the young people who have to leave our communities to attend school. I guess that would be my primary focus for the 11 communities.
Our tribal council is situated in northern Manitoba, and we have 11 first nations who are members of our tribal council. Nine of our communities are only accessible by air, and the result is that the high cost of transportation in and out of our communities limits the mobility of many of our members to access a variety of services, including education. Our communities, as well, rely on the nearest urban centre, which is Thompson, Manitoba, for many of their services like groceries, hospital, and medical care. Things like that are very costly to attend, but are very necessary in many of our communities.
I want to focus on the young people. In our communities, we're still in desperate need to have high schools in all of the 11 first nations communities that we represent. Five of the communities still have to send out their children to attend high school elsewhere. For this 2016-17 academic year intake, Keewatin Tribal Council student services had 95 approved high school students. We have some students who have gone home due to not attending their classes and other personal issues that they have had to deal with.
Keewatin Tribal Council administers what we call the private home placement program for four of those first nations. They are Barren Lands First Nation, God's Lake Narrows First Nation, War Lake First Nation, and York Factory First Nation. Our private home placement program has had limited funding, and there has been no increase in that program for going on 20 years. The amount of money that's provided in that area has been very limited.
Every fiscal year, we face numerous high school applicants, and our tribal council has had to advocate for more private home placement funding. The other challenge would be the rising costs of tuition and the lack of private home placement homes. If anyone ever has the time to compare what kind of monies we were provided to that of the education system for high school students with the provincially operated schools, there's a huge difference. The provincial school program has annual increases, and they seem to provide care and support to our students. When they bill Indian Affairs, they're reimbursed dollar for dollar, but whenever our funding comes from the department, we get 70ยข to the dollar that the provincial government has access to. There's a significant impact on our abilities to provide adequate services to our students.
To those of you who may not know what private home placement is, when our students leave our communities, we have to find private homes for these students for the school year. It's been 20-plus years since the funding has increased, so we're still dealing with trying to recruit parents who will provide these services for 25-year-old rates. These private homes provide not only the shelter that the children need, but also food. It's like a replacement for the homes that they left.
As I said, there's the rising cost of tuition and those programs have never been increased. That's constantly hampering the ability and the level of services that could be provided to these students while they're away.
Overall, the level of funding continues to be inadequate. In comparison to provincially funded schools, as I mentioned, our band-operated schools do not even compare with the kind of funding that is provided to them.
As I noted, KTC house payments need to increase so that more homes will open their doors for our students who have been having difficulty every year trying to find homes. Subsequently, the retention rate in the private home placement remains low, leading us to have low rates of success stories. I believe that if we could find adequate homes for these children and give them a level of comfort or something comparable to what they would have at home, we would have more successful stories.
KTC student services also continue to administer the AANDC-funded, post-secondary program for six of 11 of our first nations, so six do the post-secondary program. We need more post-secondary funding. Student numbers continue to increase as more want to pursue their career of choice and dreams. It's good to see that more young people want to advance their education, but funding levels have not increased for many years now, so we've not been able to address many of the requests coming in from our communities.
The level of post-secondary funding needs to drastically increase, so our wait-listed deferrals can decrease. Tuition costs continue to rise, and this year the Winnipeg institutions have made it mandatory to include bus passes for students as part of the tuition costs.
At present, KTC, our tribal council, has 90 active post-secondary students in province and out of province, a number that we're very happy to have but we're lacking the ability to provide adequate services and supports to them while they're away from home.
That's pretty much all I wanted to say from the student side. Education is important for our students, and we need to do what we can to continue to support them while they're away from home. The level of supports and assistance that we can provide has a huge impact and influences their success rate while in school. Some students do leave or have to leave the system for a variety of reasons.
As I said, we're doing everything we can to let people know that it's not the children or young people who do not want to go to school, it's our ability to make sure that school is successful for them. I thank you very much.