First I'll elaborate on that data, because people hear 66% and they say, that's not bad—you're better than 50%. It's not 66% as a graduation rate. It's 66% of the 30% of students who made it to grade 12. The data working group that's been put in place, for three years, has been working very hard to try to have that accountability to the Yukon Education. It is very difficult to get any data, so YFNED being in place is now working very hard to develop our own data. We could have the relationship of saying, let's just ATIP it and figure it all out from there, but that's not being done—as our elders teach us—in a good way.
Ultimately, our goal is student success. It's determining how that will be. I really appreciated some other folks who spoke of.... It seems to be there's this benchmark of getting them to university, but that isn't necessarily always the path for all of our indigenous students. We've developed a model that will provide them success on their chosen path, because for us, a chosen path is to come home and be a community member. That could be a language speaker. That could be a doctor. That could also be a ditch digger. They are helping in their community. That's what we want: our people who are going to come back to the communities.
I bet you every one of us, in the last storm, really appreciated the person who was able to drive the snowplow. Those are the things we have to build in our children, the strength to do that, and that's what we're trying to do.
I appreciate that you brought up data because that is an important thing. It will give us the benchmarks and the ideas, and will find the gaps, because one of those things that we are seeing is that there are some successes. We implemented programming this year, and for the first time we have an improvement in math because of the indigenous-led math camps that we've been operating with targeted interventions to the students.
Now, if I could get Yukon Education to implement that same thing, instead of me and the organization doing a one-off of that, I think we would see greater achievement outcomes for our students. That's what we mean by indigenous-led. We need to listen to and hear from our people what the gaps are in the things we need for our children and how we can fit them in a ministry-operated system, in a first nations school board, or in a first nations school that's operated by an individual first nation.