Thank you, Madam Chair.
I would like to thank you for inviting me here today to speak with you. My name is Rebecca Mearns. I'm the president of Nunavut Arctic College. I work out of Iqaluit.
To give you a little background, Nunavut Arctic College is both a post-secondary institute and a public agency of the Government of Nunavut. It was created through the Nunavut Arctic College Act on January 1, 1995. The college is situated within Inuit Nunangat and serves the largest post-secondary region in Canada. It's represented by a network of sites, supports and people across the territory, providing a diverse range of programs, including adult education; certificate, diploma and degree programs; as well as cultural programming and certified trades. Nunavut Arctic College's facilities include 25 community learning centres, three regional campuses, one cultural school and one trade school.
Some of our longest-running programs include the Nunavut teacher education program, which provides graduates with a Bachelor of Education, and the environmental technology diploma program. Both programs have been running for over 35 years.
During my time with the college, I have seen the opportunities and the challenges that come with delivering post-secondary education in Nunavut. Today I will share an example of a program that has received significant investment for expansion of delivery, the Nunavut teacher education program.
The Nunavut teacher education program, through a tripartite working group between the Government of Nunavut, the Government of Canada through Canadian Heritage, and Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., received $34.7 million to fund the pathfinder project. This project not only allowed the college to expand the delivery of the program; it also included dedicated funds to revitalize the program. Through this funding, the college almost doubled the number of communities offering the Bachelor of Education program. This has been such an important investment in the college and for Nunavut, providing decentralized training for Inuit and other Nunavummiut and providing the necessary credentials for those individuals to become teachers within our elementary schools.
The program now embeds Inuit language and culture courses into the first two years of this five-year program. In doing this, students now have an exit option after two years, having earned an Inuktut language and cultural diploma. Exit and entry points are an important feature for adult learners. The college is proud of the work it has done to create these laddering opportunities. The pathfinder funding included academic and non-academic supports to encourage student success. Key supports identified by the college included academic tutors, Inuit cultural advisers and elders, and information technology.
I can't overstate the magnitude of this investment. Over the past two years, the college has gone from delivering the Nunavut teacher education program in eight Nunavut communities, with approximately 90 students, to our current delivery in 15 communities, with over 170 students enrolled. For a small institution with just over 270 staff and faculty positions, this is an incredible increase.
The rollout of this expansion has not been without its challenges, of course. One of our biggest challenges is space for the delivery of the program. The investment into the teacher education program has allowed the college to deliver the B.Ed., as I said, across 15 communities in community learning centres. Eleven of these 25 community learning centres, or CLCs, are small one- and two-classroom buildings. Seventeen of the CLCs were built in the 1990s or earlier, with one being built in 1965 and five in the 1970s.
By delivering the Nunavut teacher education program, we're dedicating that classroom space for upwards of five years. If that is the only classroom in that community learning centre, that means we're not able to deliver other programming there until this program is complete. Of course, there are so many programs that are of interest to our community members.
As we see increasing success through the expansion of the Nunavut teacher education program, it's evident that more major infrastructure investments are needed before we can explore the expansion of any of our other existing or future programs. This also means that investment is needed in the housing sector. Although Nunavut Arctic College does have the ability to offer some single and family units, we're very limited and often the requests highly outnumber the number of houses available for our students.