Thank you.
Good morning. My name is Dr. Don Shackel. I'm the Assistant Director of Special eEucation at MFNERC.
The area of first nation capacity that I will speak to this morning relates to first nation children with special needs living in first nations communities in Manitoba.
Until recently, first nations students with disabilities had to leave their community in order to access services, or remain in their community without any services at all, or often be placed in the care of CFS to receive those services. Manitoba has the highest rate of childhood apprehension, with the majority of those children being first nation.
As an ally, I've worked in first nation communities for almost three decades now. It would not be uncommon for me to run into a deaf student in one of our communities who had absolutely no access to learn American Sign Language.
To better meet the needs of the lives of these children, the education directors and the chiefs of Manitoba mandated MFNERC to move forward on two strategic initiatives, which are different and unique from any other region in Canada. First, our leaders directed us to move away from a case-by-case service delivery model and create a collective system of community-based clinical services under first nation jurisdiction.
I'm thrilled to let you know and to report today that over 3,000 Manitoba first nation children are now receiving services in their home communities from a range of full-time, salaried clinicians, including speech language pathologists, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, nurses, mental health specialists, school psychologists, reading specialists, deaf and hard-of-hearing instructors, and American Sign Language instructors. Many of them are listening today in the schools where they're working.
The second mandate given by our leaders was to immediately begin training first nation community members so that our specialized services can relate to the language and culture of the students we're working with. We train first nation resource teachers, rehabilitation/education assistants, school psychologists, first nations speech language pathologists—who are bilingual in both their first language and English—occupational therapists, physiotherapists and first nation reading specialists. I'm so pleased and very proud to report today that we have over 300 first nation community members in these programs.
As our community members begin to graduate, we're seeing over 95% success rate. How do we accomplish that? We believe that the success rate on our credit, certificate, diploma, post-bac and master's level training programs relates to the following factors.
Number one is targeted recruitment and retention strategy. We have five-year and 10-year strategic plans. We have first nation-led partnerships with various Canadian and American universities. We have adequate targeted financial resources for travel for our community members to come out. It's important to note that most of our trainees are women and are working full time.
We have a cohort model with first nation peer supports. We have flexible and student-centred programming. We leverage interdepartmental funding from FNIHB and INAC, and we have a laddering approach. Most importantly, we treat people in our training programs like family.
I'm so pleased to report on that success.