Lucky me. I was probably the most nervous coming in here today.
Prior to taking this position, I was a high school teacher, but the high school that I worked at was for northern students who left their remote communities and came to a site outside of Sioux Lookout. Attendance there was a lot different than it is inside a community where the students come from their parents. At the site that I was at—the high school I was teaching at—there was nowhere for the students to go. It was at the end of a dirt road in a beautiful setting. It was a peninsula surrounded by water and waterfalls, so they could go for a nature walk, but you could trust that they weren't very far.
For attendance, especially coming back postpandemic.... This is the first year in three years that we've had school every day. It's exhausting. Our staff are exhausted. Our students are exhausted. Now that it's April and June is sort of in sight and it keeps snowing, we're tired, as educators.
We try to have fun activities at the end of the day. In Lac Seul, our three schools have a different approach to ending their school day. They want to end it on a fun note, so every week the students have a handful or up to 10 activities, depending on which school they're at, because we vary in sizes, that they can sign up for. For the last hour of every school day, they could be crocheting, doing origami, doing drama or whatever the teachers and staff want to offer in terms of an extracurricular. Then the students are excited to go and participate in that activity that they chose to participate in.
That was helping, especially through the pandemic. That was one way we tried to focus on that in the elementary school.
With our high school students, we bus them in so they spend a lot of.... If they miss the bus, it's an hour to get to school. Since I've become the director, I've actually really pushed our staff to get the students to school. Their job isn't to get kids on the bus. It's to get students to school. We've purchased vehicles that hold numerous students. We're licensing our staff to be bus drivers, and they're getting kids to school.
Those are some of the ways that Lac Seul is doing this.