Thank you very much.
I have just a few things, to put it into context.
Calgary Academy is a private school, for sure. We deal with LD kids, learning-disabled students. Typically, in the community school system, about 14% of LD kids graduate from high school. Our claim to fame is that we have the enviable record of a 100% graduation rate and 88% of the kids going on to post-secondary, so we have a track record there.
The other side of it is that we have two other organizations. One is called Headwater Learning Solutions, which is the group that actually works with the Thunderchild First Nation. We have a foundation called the Calgary Academy Education and Research Foundation, which raises the money to do the work that we do so there's no dollar expenditure to the first nation, although Indigenous Services Canada is a partner in this. We're quite pleased that way.
Basically, the way this project came about was that we were approached by a group of Canadian philanthropists who were aware of the work we had done in inner city communities in the United States, where we had achieved extraordinary results, and some of the work we had done in developing nations. They asked us if we had ever done anything with first nations. We said no, that we'd never really been approached. They funded a two-year study, and we spent two years investigating first nations education in Canada.
Part of that two years was reviewing all the research and what the research said. Another part of the process was to go out and talk to people involved in first nations education across Canada. We started on the west coast, in Victoria, and we went across to the east coast into the Maritimes. We basically talked to chiefs, education directors, teachers, principals, etc. We were trying to get a good feel for what they saw as being the needs in the community. The final piece was to visit. I visited more than 100 different first nations communities to find out what they were actually doing. That's where Delbert and I, and George, came across each other.
One of the reasons for selecting the Thunderchild First Nation was having a chief and council unconditionally committed to excellence in first nations education. I could tell, having visited the school on more than one occasion, that the community embraced education. Although the results weren't there, there was certainly an enthusiasm for it.
The goal of the project is pretty straightforward. It's to develop an educational exemplar that's sustainable in the first nation's community—in Thunderchild, by Thunderchild First Nation—and the capacity, should they so choose or should other first nation communities be interested, to replicate it in other places.
We use the research-led, evidence-based approach to develop the capacity. Certainly, one of the key things is teacher retention. Our claim to fame at the Calgary Academy was having 90% of the original teachers who had started with us still there after 25 years. We've developed mechanisms for making this such an engaging and rewarding experience for teachers that they don't leave.
I could keep going on, but I'll just say that we're 18 months into it, and we've already seen some impressive results in terms of the growth in some of the key metrics.
The metrics we're looking at have three dimensions to them. The first one is educational: reading, writing and arithmetic, of course. The second one is teacher capacity to deal with the social, emotional and mental health issues of the students, and how we develop teacher capacity to do that. The third one is how we develop teacher capacity to deal with the cultural aspects of education.
That's where we are at this particular point in time.
George, go ahead.