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Surviving the system

The crisis in Nunavut schools

PATRICIA D’SOUZA

Kootoo Kilabuk paces outside the second-floor boardroom of the Trigram building in Iqaluit. For Kilabuk, 17, the meeting of the Iqaluit District Education Authority going on inside represents his last chance at an education.

As his turn is called, he walks across the room and slumps into a corner chair. Kilabuk, who has yet to finish Grade 10, was suspended from Inuksuk High School in November for chronic absenteeism, being abusive, and "saying some nasty things," according to principal Terry Young.

The group of assembled principals and parents hope Kilabuk has learned a little bit while he’s been out of school and they’ve invited him to this meeting to honour his request to be allowed back into the high school. Though they say their first instinct was expulsion, they recognize that kicking him out of school permanently could severely limit his choices in life.

"It’s getting harder and harder now to get a job if you don’t have an education," IDEA member Ooleepeeka Gordon tells Kilabuk in Inuktitut. "If you have a problem, get some help. We really support you and we want you to do well in school."

Kilabuk nods in agreement. It’s difficult to imagine what may be running through his head as he gets up to leave the meeting secure in the notion that he’ll get back into class next Monday. What he’s been given is something that all students want: a chance.

Just getting through it

The goal of the education system is to serve all students. But in Nunavut, many educators have been wondering if the system is serving any of them.

Students see the successes and failures of the system more clearly than anyone. Some, like Kilabuk, fight to make it work for them.

Is there a crisis in Nunavut schools? Well, most students are less concerned with examining the system than simply getting through it.

They see their peers drop out, cope with fetal-alcohol syndrome, abuse and poverty every day. Even the ones who survive the system have trouble overcoming different curriculums in different regions and the startling switch to an English-language stream in Grade 4 – after four years of instruction in Inuktitut only.

Kootoo Kilabuk doesn’t say a word during his entire time before the IDEA. His attitude says he’s seen it all, but his eyes say he still has much more to see.

Miali Coley, 20, once strolled the same hallways as Kootoo Kilabuk at Inuksuk High School, but today she walks a different path. Coley graduated in 2000, and is now the assistant regional youth co-ordinator for the Qikiqtani Inuit Association in Iqaluit.

She says her job with QIA is only a stop-gap before she pursues her first love: teaching. Coley is heading to college in September, and dreams of becoming an Inuktitut university professor. "I want to create a curriculum that supports teaching Inuktitut to anyone who wants to learn it," she says from her office in Iqaluit’s Igluvut building.

Constant frustration

The biggest challenge during school, she recalls, was the switch to the English stream after years of Inuktitut instruction. "The jump was very difficult for me," she says. "Maybe people didn’t realize how hard it was for us. They didn’t realize we had been in a certain pattern for a number of years. I remember constantly being frustrated."

Coley overcame the frustration with the help of friends and family, and now speaks English with ease. But others, she says, didn’t have the same support.

I ask if any of her peers dropped out. "Yeah," she says with a great sigh. "I don’t know what it is — there’s a gravitation to want to leave. There are a lot of distractions and a lot of drop-outs. It’s their choice. Everyone chooses their own path. Mine was to graduate."

The former class president graduated with a vision of changing the education system to benefit Inuit youth. She laments that students in Nunavut must speak English to get ahead. "Students who don’t speak English — they’re missing out. There is no way of helping them grasp physics or chemistry in their way of learning," she says.

"Inuit came from the land. They didn’t have these things 50 years ago — this is so new," she says. "Everyone should have the opportunity to learn these things no matter what language they speak."

She strikes the desk in front of her emphatically with the palm of her hand. "There is more than one way of learning a subject," she says. "I wish they would create some sort of system that ultimately supports aboriginal students."

Next week: A different school of thought

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