Thank you all.
I'll take over at this point. My name is Shirley Fontaine. I'm the Associate Executive Director for MFNERC.
I'm glad to be here this morning on the unceded Algonquin territory. Thank you for letting us speak to you.
I wanted to speak about our mandate. Our mandate is lifelong learning. It's not just capacity-building and the training of adults. We are also responsible for looking after the early learning pieces of education and also K-to-12 education. For us, lifelong learning is very important. It's something that starts in the womb and continues throughout a person's lifetime. It's very important for us because it's part of our philosophy of the importance of lifelong learning.
We have a lot of unique programs in Canada. Our programs are very successful, and we respond to community-identified needs. Right now, we are working with the new federal program on early learning and child care for ages zero to six. We are helping first nations develop their own strategies at the local level and also at the regional level. That's something we'll be working on over the next two years.
Our goal is to establish a stand-alone first nations organization to look after early learning and child care in Manitoba. We will be providing supports for head start programs, day cares, curriculum and resource materials, curriculum development, and training and capacity-building for early childhood educators. A lot of what we want to focus on is traditional methods of raising our children. For kindergarten to grade 12, we offer a wide range of academic support services for first nations students.
Most of our staff in Manitoba are first nations people. Over 70% of our staff are actually first nations professionals. We have some of the largest numbers of Ph.D.s and master's degrees. We have one of the highest capacities of any first nations organization in Canada. We have really high retention rates. Over 40% of our staff have been with us for over five years, and many of our original employees, from when we first established the organization, remain with us today.
We also have something we call the Manitoba First Nations School System. We support the administrators of the 10 member schools. We provide services in instructional leadership; professional development, which is training; crisis response planning; and other essential areas where we focus on effective education for effective schools for our students.
We are in our second year of operation. We have documented increases in student attendance and retention rates. This is mainly attributed to our culture-based, land-based and language-based programming.
While we have been able to retain more staff, we still face challenges in terms of recruitment for our northern and isolated first nations schools—and that's across Canada. It's difficult to attract people to work in the isolated communities.
We also have something that's unique in Canada. We have our own virtual collegiate that offers services to high school students. Students don't have to leave their communities to get the credits they need to enter university and college. The types of courses we offer include science, math and languages. Those are the prerequisites required for university programming.
I'll give it to Don.