[Witness spoke in Oji-Cree]
[English]
For the past nine years, I've had the best job in the world, which is obviously being a teacher. I've had the honour of working exclusively with indigenous students from northern Ontario. The vast majority of my students come from small fly-in communities. For the past three years, I've worked as the graduation coach at Keewaytinook Internet High School.
I could talk to you all day about student success and graduation rates—so let me know what you're doing later. I'm no expert, but I have seen what moves the mark and what makes the difference. What it boils down to are holistic student supports delivered by caring and dedicated people.
I hope today that I can talk to you at length about our successful adult education program. This program is delivered by our co-op teacher, who is the same person who oversees our nutrition program. This allows students to access healthy and tasty food at breakfast, at lunch, during evening study hall tutorials and weekend catch-up sessions. All of these classroom hours are of course supervised by our amazing teachers. Please ask me about them later.
Please ask me about our course specialist. She does really important things, like make sure our lessons reflect pedagogy that would make any ministry inspector smile. My favourite thing that she does is to work online one on one with students. Even a learner who is going through yet another lockdown or is out of town receiving medically necessary treatment not available in their home community—by the way, I'm not talking about complex care like seeing a specialist or anything like that, but X-rays—can access the support of a teacher.
Please ask me about our two full-time wellness workers. They work day to day to support students with their mental health and well-being, but they're also there in a time of crisis. They literally answer their phones 24-7, and I do not know how our school could function without their support.
Please ask me about our student success team made up of our special education resource teacher, our student achievement officer and our student success teacher.
I hope today you have time to ask me about our amazing native language teacher. She offers six indigenous language courses in three different dialects. She also helps teachers like me improve my pronunciation. She works very closely with our land-based teacher to provide culturally important learning opportunities on the land for our students.
Ask me today about our guidance counsellors, administrators, support staff and classroom assistants who are hired from within our communities. All of the success that we have seen and continue to strive for at Keewaytinook Internet High School is 100% a team effort.
If you ask me, I'll tell you what a graduation coach does too.
I can also tell you that as investors and stakeholders we all know that early supports will always be more effective than any late interventions. I promise you that a speech and language pathologist seeing a kindergarten student who is non-verbal will always be more effective than any tutoring I can give in high school. I promise you that a designated early reading intervention teacher in grade 2 will be far more effective in improving graduation rates than any IEP that can be written in high school.
We need to work with local education authorities to make sure that the desperately needed special education support is in place. I don't need to tell you the effect that COVID-19 has had in the last few years.
We also need to give my potential grads a reason to graduate. We need to work with local bands and industry to provide employment opportunities both on and off reserve.
Graduating from high school is not easy, and it shouldn't be easy. I don't want it to be easy. No meaningful learning has ever come from easy. As I have told many of my frustrated students, if graduating from high school were easy, then everybody would have a diploma.
We need to take actionable steps to get rid of unnecessary barriers—barriers that my children and your children will never have to face. Let's work together to get rid of these inequalities so that students can roll up their sleeves and get on with the meaningful and purposeful hard work of earning their diploma.
Chi-meegwetch.