EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Wednesday, May 3, 1995

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[English]

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): Order.

Today we are pleased to welcome Mervin Dewasha, president of the Canadian Aboriginal Science and Engineering Association.

We would like to keep the presentation to a total of one hour; we have other witnesses after. Ideally, it would be a twenty-minute presentation and questions. If you don't have enough time in twenty minutes, I guess you can overshoot it a bit, but the question period allows you to insert into your answers everything you want to get by us.

The floor is yours.

Mr. Mervin Dewasha (President, Canadian Aboriginal Science and Engineering Association): Thank you very much. I'd like to thank you for inviting me here today.

My name is Merv Dewasha. I'm the president of CASEA organization. I would like to introduce a couple of my guests. Karen Decontie is a native engineer. She has a Master's degree in engineering and she works for the parks program in Calgary. Her specialty is in bridges. Marc Lalande is our Quebec lieutenant. He handles the bilingual side of the French programs in Quebec for us. Marc is also one of our directors. Actually, he holds the portfolio of secretary to our organization.

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I'd like to begin my presentation and my opening remarks. To begin, I'd like to thank the subcommittee for inviting me to participate in the review of aboriginal education. I appreciate the opportunity to share my experience and views with you. The focal point of my presentation, discussion, and recommendations will be in the areas of financing first nations schools and related facilities and the Canadian Aboriginal Science and Engineering Association's support for aboriginal youth.

Before we get too deeply into the presentation, I'd like to share some of my background with you so that you can understand the context in which I am making my comments and recommendations.

I am a citizen of the Mohawk Nation and my home community is Wahta. I'm a professional engineer. I'm employed by Public Works and Government Services Canada. A special arrangement between the Department of Indian Affairs, Public Works Canada, and the Chiefs of Ontario office currently has me on assignment with the Chiefs of Ontario office. These three organizations are to be acknowledged for putting together a cooperative and creative arrangement that allows me to apply my experience to assist first nation communities and aboriginal youth.

Given the foregoing, I want to assure you that the opinions and recommendations I'm expressing here are my own personal opinions, for which I take sole responsibility.

The first area I want to talk about is financing first nations schools and related facilities. The present method of providing the required schools and related facilities in first nation communities is by capital appropriations through the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Historically, the appropriation has not kept pace with the need. This has created a lengthy waiting list for education capital that continues to grow.

A number of additional factors have contributed to the accumulated backlog over and above the long-term effects of inadequate budgets. Some of these are: poor construction standards prior to 1975; poor maintenance systems and a lack of maintenance funding prior to 1985; the aboriginal population growth, which has been higher than forecast in the initial levels; unreliable forecasts regarding the increase to on-reserve population as a result of Bill C-31 legislation; the reduction in the student dropout rate as a direct result of first nation control of education programs; the returning students from joint school agreements; and as I also mentioned, there is no provision for technical schools for first nation students in the space accommodation standards.

The current method of priorizing education capital means that first nation communities have to wait fifteen to twenty years before their needs can be addressed. As first nation communities continue to repatriate their students to their own jurisdiction, the demand on an already inadequate capital dollar will continue to escalate. Significant increases in capital would be required to begin to address the need. However, given the current economic climate, it is unrealistic to anticipate that this will occur.

There are alternative funding mechanisms that could be investigated further. One approach is for the first nations to finance their own schools and related facilities. One successful model is the alternative funding arrangements that were developed for the school at Kasabonika Lake First Nation. In 1992, after having the school project fully designed, the people of Kasabonika Lake were advised by the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development that funding for the school's construction would be delayed by seven years from the initial planned schedule.

We first met with Kasabonika Lake First Nation in February of 1993. Within four months we were able to secure a loan for approximately $7 million without the standard requirement for a ministerial loan guarantee. The project was approved for future year funding by the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. However, the project was required to be cost-neutral to the federal government. This meant the contribution from the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development would not be more than the present cost plus inflation to the year scheduled for construction.

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Creative cost savings were used to cover the cost of borrowing. One area of cost savings used was the room and board and transportation costs for grades 9 and 10 students attending school outside their home community. The savings generated by building the new school six years ahead of schedule will be used to serve a major portion of the cost of borrowing to have the facility available now.

The Kasabonika Lake First Nation school was completed in August 1994, significantly under budget and ahead of schedule, even ahead of the construction schedule we had placed on it for opening in September 1994.

Additional information has been submitted to the subcommittee regarding the details of that project. I think people should have received a copy of a brochure we've published to explain to other first nations and interested parties how the school was put together and financed.

In terms of recommendations, each community is unique. The following is a list of areas that warrant further investigation on alternative approaches that build on the unique circumstances within each community.

Funding for school construction based on an annual tuition supplement using a 30-year amortization period. This would increase current costs by approximately 3%.

Finance the replacement of joint schools using the difference between the federal school formula allocation and the provincial school tuition.

Reverse tuition from provincial schools. This would become applicable where natives and non-natives attending a provincial jurisdiction, and paying rent and taxes, could choose to attend the first nation school. The first nation would receive tuition and transportation from the provincial jurisdiction.

Review the space accommodation standards and current costs to ensure they are appropriate.

Finally, review the impact of a 12-month school year concept to reduce the space requirements and the space and education costs.

The second area I'd like to talk about today is the Canadian Aboriginal Science and Engineering Association support for aboriginal youth. In 1992, while I was on a special assignment with the Assembly of First Nations, I was asked to examine the question of continuing high unemployment statistics in first nations communities when there continues to be high expenditures on construction and engineering each fiscal year.

At the outset of the research we looked at the various stages of capital program planning. Those are feasibility, design, project management, site supervision, construction, and operation and maintenance.

By looking at the skills required to perform each function, one could see the high percentage of highly skilled jobs that required engineers, architects, technologists, technicians, and experienced managers.

In the construction industry, there's a high percentage of skilled technical jobs requiring certification. Conversely, only a small percentage of the jobs on any given project utilize unskilled labour.

When examining statistical information that compares the occupations of aboriginal people with all Canadians', the answer became obvious. In the technical and professional management occupations, aboriginal people are the most under-represented group compared with other occupations.

Comparing these stats to the unskilled labour market, we found that aboriginal people were over-represented in this category by almost 3 to 1 when comparing them with the national average, and under-represented by 5 to 1 in the professional and technical categories.

In your packages you have a graph that shows you the comparison between aboriginal occupations and the rest of the Canadian population.

Without a skilled workforce, first nations will continue to buy goods and professional services outside of their own communities. This only continues the cycle of limiting aboriginal participation to the unskilled labour jobs.

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The construction industry is becoming more technically specialized every day. This means the percentage of unskilled jobs will significantly decrease in the future.

Aboriginal people will need to develop a skilled workforce to participate in the economic opportunities available in engineering, architecture and construction. When we are examining new job opportunities that will be available within the next 10 years, the projections indicate that over 50% of the new jobs will require a scientific background.

During the course of the review, we became aware of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, known as AISES, and specifically it's objective to increase the participation of native youth in science and engineering fields.

The board of directors of AISES has lent its support to develop a Canadian organization with comparable goals and objectives. In January 1993 the Canadian Aboriginal Science and Engineering Association, known as CASEA, was incorporated as a non-profit organization.

Aboriginal professionals from coast to coast have given their time and energy to develop the organization.

Additional details regarding CASEA are contained in the information packages. I believe those information packages have been made available to the members ahead of time.

CASEA is a new organization that operates totally through volunteers who are the members who, for your information, also have full-time and in most cases very demanding jobs.

Progress is being achieved - albeit slowly, because of our dependency on volunteers donating their time. However, our activities and accomplishments are increasing each year. To date involvement with CASEA has been largely with engineers and architects; however, we understand that we will need to broaden our membership to include individuals in all science- and math-based careers.

I personally feel that there is a need to accelerate the support of aboriginal youth to pursue a career in science- and math-based occupations. This is the trend to the future, and that is where we as aboriginal people are most underrepresented in today's labour force.

Many organizations we've worked with are cooperative and supportive of CASEA initiatives. However, every initiative requires the support of our limited, but growing, volunteer membership.

There are many areas that require involvement and support of aboriginal youth in the science and math areas. Some of these areas are math and science teacher training, science camps, native role models, guidance and mentors for students pursuing math- and science-based careers, career day support and speakers, community support programs, student employment relevant to science, career information and employer-employee placement services.

Science- and math-based careers are very different from other careers. First, the bases are acquired starting in about grades 5 or 6. The skills and abilities to solve problems are built upon each other progressively, from grade 5 through to university. A slow start or missed opportunity is very difficult to make up later in terms of one's education.

The competition in maths and sciences is great. Only the very best can continue in their career path, and it takes many years of dedication to succeed.

We have a responsibility to assist students who choose this academic path. We must start early to educate youth and provide continuing support and enhancements to the education system. It is more difficult, but possible, to enhance older youths' pursuit of a science and math career.

There is a need for further analysis to determine why aboriginal youth are not pursuing careers in maths and sciences. When the identification of the problems is complete, we will be able work on the outline of the support and the corrective action that will be required to remedy this situation.

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The Canadian Aboriginal Science and Engineering Association is dedicated to aboriginal youths in science and math. It is prepared to accept support, volunteer, and work with other organizations in seeking solutions. Financial support is necessary. However, we need human resources as well.

The recommendations I have in this area are three. First, better coordination of information systems is required for aboriginal youth support programs specific to science- and math-based careers.

Second, CASEA should receive core funding to support some full-time staff, in recognition of its support for aboriginal youth specializing in science- and math-based careers.

Third, for your consideration, the Government of Canada should fund a research project that would review and provide an analysis of barriers to aboriginal students pursuing math- and science-based careers in comparison with those of all Canadians.

The recommendations from the study should include an implementation plan, critical checkpoints to ensure the implementation plan is on target, and achievable enrolment targets.

In conclusion, I would like to thank you for inviting me here today and for taking the time to hear my views.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): Thank you, Mr. Dewasha.

[Translation]

I will ask Mr. Bachand, from the Bloc, to be our lead questioner.

Mr. Bachand (Saint-Jean): This was a good presentation, Mr. Dewasha. I would like to ask you a few questions. Could you tell me how many members you have in your association? Do they come from all across Canada and how many do you have from Quebec compared to the rest of Canada?

You said that the Association operated only with volunteers. Does that mean that the Association has no full-time staff? For instance, if one wants to write to the Association, is there any staff to receive and answer these letters or suggest solutions?

I for one am confused as to the funding. Who funds the Association? Do the members have to pay to belong to the Association? Where do you get your funding from? What is the annual budget of the Canadian Aboriginal Science and Engineering Association?

Finally, I find it hard to understand why native youths are not more attracted to science and maths. You raised this issue in your presentation and you seemed to suggest that some research should be done in order to identify these problems. If I understand you well, no such research has yet been undertaken.

Mrs. Decontie, whom you have introduced as an engineer herself, could explain to us what her experience has been, why, in her view, there's a problem, whether financial or other. Perhaps you could elaborate a little on this since you have been trained as an engineer, which is very unusual. There are probably not many native engineers in Canada.

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Maybe you could explain to us, why native youth are less inclined to pursue a career in engineering or maths.

[English]

Mr. Dewasha: You had quite a number of questions there, so if I don't cover some of them, maybe you can remind me.

First, on membership, we have about 40 members right now who are national in organization. We have them from Halifax through to Vancouver. As you can tell, our board of directors is also national. We have some student memberships. We also have students who are attending places such as Concordia University, McGill University, and the University of Toronto. A couple of universities have also joined our organization.

Our fee structure is very minimal, because we're not looking so much for money; we're looking for people to devote their time and effort to support our objectives. Our fee structure is $5 for students - that basically covers some of the costs of mailing letters and so on to students - and $20 for members. We also have a corporate membership; if you're a provincial organization, then it's $100, and it's $500 for a national organization. A couple of corporate memberships have joined us from Saskatchewan.

Those are some of our sources of funding for the membership component.

We have many more people I've contacted and found over the period during which I've been working. To be frank and honest, people are there, and I can't force them to give me $20 for a membership. I think it's more important that they want to join and they want to support the program.

The other aspect is that we're a young organization. We took out incorporation documents in 1993, just two years ago.

I've been of the philosophy, as well, that if the only reason you join an organization is to pay your dues and get a membership card, and then a year later get another letter or a reminder, then I don't think very many people would join. During the last two years we've striven to balance developing projects and initiatives in order to demonstrate that we are an organization that is capable and willing to carry out projects to support aboriginal youth. That gives people some basis for joining, and it's now starting to take place.

If you will refer to the package we sent out, it lists a number of initiatives we carried out in 1994. Many of those initiatives relate to some of the recommendations I have here that show that we need support programs to enhance and encourage aboriginal youth.

We have a role model video under production that should be finished in June. We have some programs started with some of the universities that are encouraging aboriginal youth in those areas.

I don't want to duplicate everything that's in that package for you.

We have no full-time staff. We are just a group of people who have come together and dedicated some of our time and effort to do these things. We all take our turns in speaking at career days and working with aboriginal youth, attending some science camps, helping to organize science camps. Many of the activities we have are purely volunteer ones.

If you call and you write to the address we have for our organization, that's where I work. I work at the Chiefs of Ontario office in Toronto. They're good enough to allow me to utilize their facilities and their reception services, phone services and the other support systems. I'm not there all the time. I have a very busy schedule with my work requirements, but when people write and call, we make an effort to get back and get the information back to people.

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Our membership in Quebec: I think we're about three or four?

Mr. Marc Lalande (Secretary, Canadian Aboriginal Science and Engineering Association): It's a bit more than that. As a matter of fact, something like 20% or more of our membership is from Quebec.

Mr. Dewasha: He's my secretary, and takes care of memberships. He's more knowledgeable than I am on our membership.

As to why aboriginal youth aren't enrolled, we know from some of the numbers and statistical information that we get from Statistics Canada and other areas that per capita it's very low as compared with the rest of the population. We don't have all the answers; we can only speculate on some of the feelings we may have. We think many of the programs other communities or Canadians enjoy aren't available to first nation communities.

Many of our first nation communities only see social workers, health workers and school teachers in their communities. They don't know what engineers, architects or scientists do. When some of those people come to the community, they're only there to work for the chief and council, to come in and do a presentation and hop on the next plane and go back out. We think some of those organizations and consultants and engineers should be encouraged to put in appearances at schools to tell students what they're there for, what they do, and what kind of careers are available in those areas.

That's one of the initiatives we want to try to get started on with Industry Canada, to develop an existing innovators program by adding an aboriginal component to it, so that when engineers and architects are in communities we can have an organized mechanism to expose kids to their fields.

I also think many of the community support services aren't there. Some of our communities don't understand what engineers and architects do. If there's not encouragement from the community or from the home to pursue some of these careers, kids won't pursue those kind of careers. We have had very few people enrol and graduate in those areas. I think there are probably other reasons.

I read a report done by the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations that points out that very few teachers in communities have a math- or science-based background. If they did identify an aboriginal student that had abilities in that area, they would have difficulty, with their limited abilities, enhancing or developing that kind of career.

Those are a couple of examples, but I think there are probably more reasons as to why students are not pursuing these areas. I think some people believe science is not part of our history and culture.

When I address the elders in this area I realize we have a very rich ancestry of engineering and architecture. Look at the irrigation systems and the buildings that were here before the North American people came; there were marvels in engineering and architecture. In the agricultural area there was cultivation of a number of varieties of corn. In the medicines, it's just a shame that European people did not accept or believe in some of our traditional medicines. We've lost much of that knowledge and much of that research. Aboriginal people had found cures for things that our medical system today does not have cures for.

I think we have to try to get that kind of support and understanding back within our own communities, to be able to encourage youth to go into those areas.

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We also have to try to develop programs to entice kids to say, look, there is a future here, there are jobs and careers there. We probably have more people now than we need in the social work and the health work programs. To go into those fields isn't going to get you a job.

I don't want to carry on too much longer. Have I covered your questions fairly reasonably?

Mr. Bachand: Yes, absolutely.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): You covered it very well.

Mr. Murphy (Annapolis Valley - Hants): Thank you for your presentation. I had some of the same interests and questions Claude had, particularly about how we are going to get more interest in the sciences and the maths, particularly at the elementary school level.

Is it anything to do with the way the recruitment of teachers is done, particularly non-native teachers who end up on reserves and don't have the strengths in the science area? If they don't have those strengths, they're not going to challenge the kids; you've talked about that. But is there anything that could be done with regard to that kind of recruitment?

As well, do you have any other ideas about how to enhance elementary kids getting a taste for the sciences, having their appetites whetted so they can move on?

The other area I wondered about was the funding operations. I looked at a number of your initiatives that have taken place. A number of them have a whole host of different departments funding them and partnershipping. Have you any ideas about how better to coordinate that funding, and could you comment upon partnerships that you may be entering into with other groups to move on the science and math areas?

Mr. Dewasha: Some of the activities we have must be based on enriching the teachers' abilities to teach science and math. I've been able to develop a project with the University of Toronto that's going to take place this August. We're hoping to bring together 50 to 60 aboriginal science and math teachers in Ontario in partnership with the University of Toronto and First Nation House and the Outreach Program.

We have sponsorship from DIAND, Dupont of Canada and part of the University of Toronto has a bursary fund; I can't remember its name. We've pulled together a team and are working on bringing together the teachers.

Actually, tomorrow there's another committee meeting, but I'm going to miss it.

We're looking at this as being one of the mechanisms of finding out what's right and what's wrong. I don't want it to be a teach-the-teachers episode. We want to get feedback from the teachers who are on the front lines by asking if they have community support for math- and science-based programs. We want to ask them questions: What are your problems? What are the kinds of issues faced?

We're also going to try to give them some new tools and experiences to be able to teach science and math.

Concerning your question about recruiting the right teachers, I worked in Saskatchewan with the Department of Indian Affairs from 1975 to 1980. The experience then was that it was very difficult to try to find teachers who wanted to go into remote northern locations and work for the year. We used to have to send a hiring delegation to the Maritimes, where people were less fortunate at finding jobs, to try to attract them into northern Saskatchewan.

There is a history of not being able to attract the best teachers in most of the communities. The retention level of teachers in many cases is less than a year.

The teachers aren't there. I think that has a big influence, because the teacher is such an influence on the students. When I look back at my time in education, the teacher who influenced you isn't there in those communities.

I think we probably have a big job trying to influence our leaders to put more effort into trying to recruit the best teachers, particularly getting teachers who have a background in math and science.

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One of the things I'm fairly critical of is part of the teacher education program. In the Ontario system, for teacher qualification a teacher only requires 72 hours in math- and science-based careers. That's two weeks. That's not very much training and development to be able to go out and teach the science and math programs.

Yes, a lot of work has to be done in community leadership. There has to be education, teacher training and development, and support for the youths and the kids in the community.

Mr. Murphy: A lot of universities have science fairs or things like that for the students who are in grade schools. For instance, this year in the Yukon, I believe, they are having a massive science fair, where they attract almost 1,000 kids. I wonder if that could be a vehicle - this is just a suggestion - to whet the appetite.

You mentioned the chiefs and the boards, the band councils, maybe not being stringent enough in terms of the recruitment. I think from some of the things I've heard, I couldn't agree more, that some of it is sight unseen.

Would it make a difference if the bands had more involvement of education committees that were separate and apart from the administration of the bands, with more parental involvement? Would that help enhance recruitment quality? You're right that the commitment is under a year, which is not much of a commitment, not much of a role model for kids.

So I just wonder if that difference between the administration and the educational committee with a lot of parental elections to a board....

Mr. Dewasha: There are two things. First, I agree with what you said at first about science fairs and science camps, but in most of our communities, no one has taken the time to organize those activities. Those things haven't been done. We've listed those as some of the objectives we have as an organization, and it is going to take some years, some work and dedication to encourage those communities, those teachers, those people in those areas to do those kind of things.

It's also going to take the same kind of dedication to try to influence aboriginal leaders on recruiting better-quality teachers and having the need for science- and math-based careers. I've been doing a lot of that, because as part of my work I've been speaking to the Chiefs of Ontario, and previous to that with the Assembly of First Nations. I speak with a lot of chiefs and deal with them on it. I deal with a lot of the community membership, people, conferences. I'm working to try to spread that word and to enhance that area.

In response to your question about whether or not I think it would be beneficial to try to divide the political leadership from the education authority, I think off-hand, for most communities, I would probably say no. Nearly all the chiefs and leaders I have met are very dedicated people, and I don't believe these people are either taking money out of there and going and doing other things or don't have the total interest of their community at heart. So I don't see that as being a necessity.

There may be one or two places where education may end up taking a second seat, but generally, across the country, I think aboriginal leaders are very conscientious people who are there to do the best job for their community. In fact, I think you may lose by trying to encourage that, because in many of the communities those leaders are going day and night. They're the busiest people. They work very hard. They're dedicated to try to get the best programs they can for their communities.

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That's why I think in an organization like ours we're not looking at getting involved with political decisions in the community or trying to take over the education program or teaching. We're a group of people who are trying to say that we think we need to enhance and provide support to that function, particularly the math and science function, which is a very difficult career. It's probably one of the most difficult ones to pursue.

With that, I'll end my answer.

Mr. Murphy: Thank you.

[Translation]

Mr. Bachand: I looked at the projects on which you are currently working. There might be a dozen of them and I focused my attention on one of those. I don't raise that question in a partisan spirit but rather out of curiosity.

You are organizing summer camps for English-speaking native students in partnership with Concordia University, McGill University and the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec. Is there a reason why those summer camps are only for English-speaking students? Are some universities refusing to work with you? Did you ever consider having a summer camp for French-speaking students in partnership with French-speaking universities such as the Université de Montréal or the Université du Québec?

[English]

Mr. Dewasha: Maybe I could ask my friend, Mr. Lalande, to respond. He is very familiar with organizing the Concordia one and the other efforts that are being made in Quebec.

[Translation]

Mr. Lalande: Sir, I must tell you that we are setting up a summer camp for young French-speaking natives in co-operation with the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi and the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec. This will occur this summer.

Obviously, this project draws on our previous experience with Concordia University. This initiative was launched at Concordia through the efforts of someone who developed the idea. It has been a big success and we shall try to set up another summer camp this year in Chicoutimi.

I can tell you that French-speaking native students from the Algonquin and Cree nations will take part in the project. You will be surprised to hear that Cree natives, as well as Inuit in northern Quebec, also speak French.

[English]

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): I have a question, seeing that we have a bit of time.

I think everyone is aware of the lack of curriculum and of support for sciences in the schools. I'm wondering if a recommendation would be to have high schools, or at least one or three or whatever, that specialize in sciences. Wouldn't that motivate the elementary system to prepare their students for it? Do you think the lack of these specialized high schools maybe works against motivating the elementary level to prepare their students for specialization?

I'll ask the question differently and blend the two.

Would it be a recommendation to start creating opportunities for those who are achievers, or should we concentrate on starting at the junior kindergarten and start building the whole network of abilities?

Mr. Dewasha: I think you have to start developing abilities in about grade 5. It is around grade 5 where those students who have some talent and some exceptional skills to develop in those areas get identified.

If you don't start developing at that age, if they get behind because of the science and math.... The things you learn in one grade and the following grades build upon each other, so if you have a lack of an enhanced enriched program in the early age groups, then the chances of competing later on are reduced very significantly.

Second, we do have and we have started some enrichment programs. They are in cooperation with Industry Canada and the Shad Valley program.

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Eight universities across the country have a very élite program for about 400 students each year across Canada. We've had 8 and 5 - somewhere in there - native students participating.

They have done very well. People believed they wouldn't do, and wouldn't compete very well, but they have. They have done very well and they have led their groups in many of the areas.

In a net context, we are able to access dollars to be able to sponsor more students. I was actively pursuing major corporations to sponsor other students until I found out we aren't getting enough applications. So I just started a campaign this week where we have 200 education counsellors in Niagara Falls this week. We have a presentation going on there encouraging them to find native students who can qualify and compete in that area.

I just started a letter-writing campaign across the country. About 200 letters just got out of my office this week to encourage that.

We've started a couple of those things that are going in those areas.

Your comment about looking at specialized high schools or something: I have mixed views on that. One, I can see that, yes, you could bring some kids together with special teaching skills, and the competition type of thing. But the family and the community support are also important.

As you can tell from my presentation, one of the problems we had in Kasabonika, in a northern community, is that kids were graduating from grade 8 at 13 years old. How many of you people would want your children, your young daughter, to leave home at 13 years old, go to some place hundreds of miles away, and live with a strange family you don't know and you have never met, and you get to see your kid only once or twice a year?

To do something like what you were suggesting, try to develop a special school in one location to do that...I'm not sure the benefits of doing it would outweigh the problems that would be created by taking those kids away from the community at an early age.

I think more should be done to try to enhance what can be done within those communities and if necessary to try to generate some science camps and some enrichment in those communities there. When kids are a little older, maybe in the grade 11 and grade 12 area, when they're leaving the community anyway because of lack of numbers in the specialty school, you can then top things off in that area.

But I'd be very leery about your suggestion because of the family values and the influence of the family.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): What motivated the question is that we did visit a high school that brings students from all over. There were 140 kids on the waiting list to get in. It's not a specialized curriculum school but it is very popular, it is working very well, and there is a waiting list of 140.

Ms Decontie, you seem very young, so you must be a recent graduate. You graduated from a Canadian university?

Ms Karen E. Decontie (Member, Board of Directors, Canadian Aboriginal Science and Engineering Association): I graduated from McGill University in 1988.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): We visited universities, and I personally felt a lot of extra help and assistance is given to aboriginal students who are taking courses in the arts and in social work. Did you get that type of support in the sciences, or were you on your own?

Ms Decontie: I was on my own.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): That's what I suspected.

Ms Decontie: I didn't know of any other native person on campus.

I also did a master's degree. I finished just a year ago. At the University of Calgary we have over 250 native students and we have a student association. We have a meeting place, which made my university experience really different the second time around - just having that support there.

We also had three people in engineering besides myself. I think we still have all three of them in the courses right now. But the retention rate...we're experiencing the same problems. When you go through engineering you see 50% of the people dropping out. It's the same with the native people. Maybe they're not prepared for the work that's involved. Maybe it's the career opportunities that are available after. A lot of our people don't want to leave our communities.

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A lot of different factors go into whether or not someone will succeed.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): Generally speaking, I'm being fair by saying that in the sciences you're pretty well on your own and you have to swim.

Ms Decontie: Yes.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): Whereas if you would be in the arts, there would be more help, financial and in all aspects. Is that a fair...?

Ms Decontie: Yes.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): Okay.

Mr. Murphy: I'm sitting here thinking about the answer you gave me to the question about the committee on education versus the band council. My reason for asking the question has nothing to do with diversion of funds or anything; it was more the enhancement of education as a priority on reserves. Maybe you thought it was the other way that I was asking it. It was more regarding the enhancement of it.

It's not my suggestion that an education committee...most education committees would advise the board, or advise the band council, wouldn't leave them out of the decision-making. Obviously if you involve more people...because I think if you ask parents what they want for their kids they're going to be able to tell you.

I guess I'll come at it again just to make sure we're on the right wave length here. What I'm now asking, and maybe I didn't correctly put it the first time, is, would involving more people be more helpful in spreading the concern and the interest and the priority of education on reserves?

Mr. Dewasha: In that context, yes. I think the more people in the community that get involved and support the education program the better. I see in the southern communities there's lot of involvement. There may not be as much in the north. Maybe there should be.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): Mr. Dewasha, Ms Decontie and Mr. Lalande, we would like to thank you very much. You provided us with a new direction for investigation, and it's very interesting. We appreciate your contribution.

Mr. Dewasha: Thank you.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): I'd like to welcome Mr. Glenn Sinclair, the superintendent of the Mestanta Technological Institute, as well as Ms Audrey Sam, the chief executive officer of that institute.

I think you were here for the few first minutes of the other presentation. We try to do our testimony within one hour. Ideally, it would be a 20-minute presentation, allowing for questions, which permits you to add to your presentation within the question period. We don't force you to stick to answering exactly the question; we would like you to, but we're very flexible.

The floor is yours.

Mr. Glenn Sinclair (Superintendent, Mestanta Technological Institute): Thank you very much. We'd like to thank the committee for inviting us here. We feel it's not only a great honour but also a great opportunity to share some ideas.

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Quite often we feel that in the whole issue of aboriginal education we're either talking among ourselves, between educators that are facing the challenges, or between communities, and meanwhile, there are official activities going on at other levels.

We're very happy we can bring those levels together. There are some things we'd like to share with you that we've found to be rather innovative answers. They may not suit everybody, but hopefully by hearing them, you then can use them in the future to challenge other people.

What we'd like to do is this. Audrey and I have a little bit of a routine. We've been working together now for almost two and a half years.

It has been three years since I first met them. They rejected me at first. They were smarter at first, and then I guess they got a little less smart later on.

What we'd like to do, and what we've done, is to provide you with backup material. We're not going to address the inside workings of our school very much. That's in our calendar, and we think that calendar is quite explanatory and can give you quite a good follow-up to some of the things we're going to say.

The middle section of the newspaper discusses our latest building activity. On about page 11, you'll see a spot that says, ``A new building, another chapter,'' and the next two or three pages are all about us. So again, I'm not going to talk a lot about our buildings. That's an issue we want to get into later.

We're not going to read our briefing notes to you. We have some highlights. I'm going to be a human flip-chart holder. It's one of the ways we save money; instead of buying flip-charts, they just buy me and then they take me around to meetings and I hold them. It will allow Audrey and I to do a little bit of dialogue with you, and we'll get through in our 20 minutes. We'll make sure we stop then to allow for questions.

I don't want anybody to try to figure out where we are in these. Again, when you're done, this will give you some back-up to our philosophy.

I do apologize, sir, that my français est très mal.

Mr. Bachand: We have translators here.

Mr. Sinclair: Good.

We tried to address your questions in our presentation. Audrey will take you through some of the highlights and some of the concerns we have.

As innovative and exciting as we think Mestanta is...and by the way, it's actually pronounced ``muh-shtan-duh'' - the Nlha7kapmx word for ``Try it'', what an elder would say to a young kid: ``Don't say you can't do it; try it''. That's the motto of our school.

As exciting as that process has been, we don't want to leave you with the naïve idea that everything we touch turns to gold. We've had some tragedies as late as last week in our community, and we're not suggesting that's going to be solved in a minute, but we do think we have some approaches that can do it over the long haul.

One thing we should mention before we start, and we'll refer to it again, is that we call our classes by the year they start school. So you don't have a kid that graduated supposedly in 1993 still in school in 1995 and everybody asking why they got the grad jacket.

At the back of the room, we have one of the members of the class of '98. Actually, that was a requirement of being the chair. We told her if she wanted to get into education she had to make sure she was intimately involved.

Ms Audrey Sam (Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Mestanta Technological Institute): Mestanta is aboriginal-owned, but it's at arm's length from our chief and council. That was the community's decision through a referendum. They didn't want to see the chief and council being too close to the ownership of the school. So we have a separate board that consists of elders and parents.

Our school meets and exceeds Ministry of Education standards. Basically, we've reached our classification; our group won standing. We have many additional programs that are often over and above the ministry's curriculum.

We operate, as Glen said, a full 12-month calendar school year. We have a 12-hour day, with evening and occasional weekend studies.

Mr. Sinclair: To add a note to that, when we were designing our program one of the concerns we had was that you can't design in an aboriginal community a very effective school that misses out on the seasons, but especially summer. The very time when you can get out and do things that a lot of students want to do, our schools close down.

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The Lytton First Nation was very concerned, because there wasn't any model around. So we created one. It's very interesting, because in B.C. yet you'll hear that there is a public school in Williams Lake and a couple of others and they're going through the labour pains on this. The Lytton First Nation just started.

We said, ``We're going to start in July''. In the first year I think we were at 18 students, because nobody really believed it. Last year we were running full buses. In this year the only complaint has been, ``How come we take breaks?'' This is because now the kids have got into the habit.

One of the things a lot of people forget is that the reason we have the school year we do is right around us. The Upper and Lower Canada agricultural communities needed the kids in July for haying and in August for the crop. If you get rid of that mentality for a little while, kids don't realize that's really when they should have time off.

It works better for teachers, because now they can take holidays on the shoulder seasons, and we find that the kids now are able to start to learn things. When the plants are growing, the elders will go out....

By the way, the elders are much more eager to go out on a long hike in the spring, summer, and fall than they are to come into a classroom to try to describe something. ``Now, next summer, if you're with your parents, you should ask them...''. Well, elders won't teach that way. So that was a very important reason we said we would go to 12 months. Even Indian Affairs didn't believe we would stick to it, but now it's just part of the natural life cycle of the kids.

Ms Sam: It also helps us because of our phys ed program. Because we're unable to have a gym at the present time, with our capital situation, we take students out on ski trips and ice skating and swimming and things like that elsewhere. So we can do those.

We have a strong sense of roots through extensive LFN studies, including language and the use of the seasonal nature of each term.

Mr. Sinclair: As you'll see in our calendar, each term has a different focus, depending on what the community would have been doing over the past hundreds of years. So fishing comes when it does, at an inter-term break. The kids aren't missing school; they're down fishing, because that's when we have class breaks for two or three weeks.

Ms Sam: Vigorous preparations for the future through curricular focus on renewable resources and entrepreneurial skills training. That is really exciting as far as our community goes. We have a lot of opportunity there using our land resources and providing opportunity for students who look toward their own job opportunities to work toward their training in that area.

Community-oriented, plus business-partnered: We have been working with the forest industry in our community. We're into the possibility of signing off a licence with the forest industry in our community.

Mr. Sinclair: To put that in perspective, we have a forestry program as part of our renewable resource management. We already have survey crews that are competing in the open market for contracts. We were actually selected by one of the local sawmills to do a degradation study of their roads. These are students who have yet to get their grade 12, although some of them may be 20 or 30 years old. They were never considered by the neighbourhood to be anything but dropouts. They only get to share in the contract. So if they screw up and have to go back, then they don't get paid any extra for that, because obviously the first time was the training time.

It's very interesting to see how quickly the entrepreneurial spirit can start to dig in. They say, ``Guys, we're not messing up, because we're not coming back to this mountain for four days in the rain''.

It has been a rather interesting partnership, because the client doesn't pay any more, but in the end they get the job done to the standard of the Ministry of Forests. Now some of these guys are starting to buy their own 4x4s as part of the shares they're making from some of these student contracts.

So it has meant a quick turnaround of some of the attitudes in the area.

Ms Sam: Operations budget: 65% of provincial, due to 35% of ours happening to go to capital. Trying to cover all of the leasing arrangements of our portables has been really draining on our budget.

Mr. Sinclair: To give a back-up to this too - and this is something Audrey and I could spend the rest of your day on, so we'll try not to - the government has made a decision that it will pay us the same rate as the provincial school district that we're in. That is fair enough. We understand that kind of logic.

.1640

In fact, when I was director of education for Indian Affairs in Saskatchewan I helped bring that policy in. However, what they don't do in British Columbia is recognize that over and above that the province gives the school district capital for its schools and capital for its buses.

We even had to pull out of the one joint arrangement we had with the school district because our cost per kilometre had to include the capitalization of the bus. The school district asked if we could imagine them going to their taxpayers and telling them they were paying twice as much on this deal because they were paying for a bus that they didn't have to pay for. As I said, it came up accidentally in a conversation and that's how we found out just how much difference there was in the rate that was thought to be equitable and isn't.

This is one area where we are not quite so joyous. When we go to do a lot of our programs, which Ms Sam is going to address in a couple of minutes, you have to bear in mind that we've already taken 35% off the top. That includes 10% for busing. We're not talking about the operations; we're talking about buying those big yellow things. We started out with one and we now have eight that run, some of them as far as 200 kilometres per day round trip, which makes 400, because you have to go down and start the trip, come up, and then take them down at the end of the day. Then there is 25% for our building leases, because of course at this point we still aren't going to risk building a permanent structure until we know we can pay that mortgage for the whole time.

Ms Sam: We're always having to make dual reports, one to the responsible agency and the other to Indian Affairs.

Mr. Sinclair: You asked in your report for a way to make more use of money. We'd like to give you three examples. One, because we are an independent school registered with the province we have to meet all the curricular standards. They come in and investigate us at no cost to the federal government. The federal government then wants another set of reports. Our argument is if we got the standard and it's already verified by the Ministry of Education, why isn't that sufficient?

Two, because we are registered as a society and we have to meet both the Consumer Affairs and Revenue Canada criteria because we are a charitable institution, we have to file audited statements. Then we have to file statements again with Indian Affairs. We just question the need for reporting to another department, when you already have these other institutions that are equally arms of government. We think we should be reporting to them because they are the ones that are first and foremost.

Third, we've been trying to put in a sewage system for some of our school pods for almost a year. Everybody's signature is on the thing except Indian Affairs, because they keep wanting to make sure we really have everybody else's signatures. It gets really frustrating, this dual reporting, when you in fact have set up a system that avoids that. We just think perhaps this is one place where you can give some inspiration to the department by saying that maybe where there is another government agency, due to the nature of the independent school structure, that is making sure that happens, why not, when we have all those things in place, just say fine? We think it could eliminate at least one person per band in the federal coffers across the street and save $75,000 a body - there's some money that could be going into special needs education.

That was just a little promotional plug there, in case you missed it.

Ms Sam: In our school we offer preschool and kindergarten. We don't receive funding for the preschool. It's half-time and it's treated as though it were a full-time kindergarten. They go all day and they are learning. My feeling is we should be putting an importance on early learning and promoting skills with the parents in working with their children. A lot of that could be with a portage type of programming at an earlier stage even before they hit preschool.

The classes of 1993 are basically what we are dealing with right now. We've taken in students where they're at and where they've come from within the public school system. We're dealing with a lot of students who have been lost in the shuffle or simply have a lot of special needs. They were classified as special needs, but often when our school notifies the public school system for records of the special needs or what have you on the students, these records are difficult to get.

.1645

Mr. Sinclair: Or they're very vague, even though we know they were on the list - you can get it from Indian Affairs - of these people for whom special needs money was paid.

Some of the kids said, ``Yes, we were in the stupid room''. You can imagine how motivated they are to come to school for a while, to get over that kind of mentality.

Ms Sam: So we lead into the proper resourcing in the area of special needs. We're testing students immediately, as soon as they register at our school, and developing individualized programs for the students. We find a lot of our resources are going into the special needs component.

Mr. Sinclair: One thing we just want to emphasize here, too - we see we have about three minutes left, so we'll just wrap this up - is that we stress the word ``overcome'' as opposed to ``correcting''. A lot of these students are beyond the ability to correct.

The little kids who are coming in are one thing. This is the other difficulty of running the school this way. You have one group of staff who are focused on trying to keep kids on a normal stream and you have to have another group of staff who are specialized in dealing with the problems, problems some of them have never seen before.

What we are hoping with these students is that we can help overcome some of their problems, at least to the point of self-esteem, at least to the point of job willingness, or more importantly, business willingness. But there are some students we will never, as long as we're in operation, finally get to, and that's one of the reasons we have a lot of resources that go into social types of things.

This is the unique thing; there are students without learning skills, there are young people without hopes or dreams, and they're sort of training in the midst of what we would call noise as well as baggage. They come to school already not in a sound learning framework. It may have been welfare day the day before, it may have been a number of things, there may be a greatly dysfunctional family - all those kinds of things. So it's not just the baggage the kid brings, it's the baggage that gets....

Ms Sam: We're looking at all of our resources and all of the areas they're going into. We have social counselling dealing with anger, suicide, conflict resolution, and that type of thing. Many of our students are faced with sexual, physical, and mental abuse. Parenting skills is an area that's really lacking in our parents. Many of our people come from residential school, and basically they didn't learn the parenting skills. There is also substance abuse, fetal alcohol syndrome, special needs, learning disabilities, and developing special programs.

Looking at the public school legacy, it's push, push, push. You push ahead through the system or else push out many of the students who have been lost in the shuffle because they've been suspended from school for whatever reason. We're finding that a lot of those students are wanting to come back now after a couple of years, so they're coming and registering at our school.

Students didn't progress, and many are tested behind, some as many as six years.

Mr. Sinclair: We notice our time's up, so we'll allow you to revert to questions. If there are other things that are on the charts, we'll pop them up at the appropriate question.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): I'd like to thank you for a very interesting and informative presentation.

[Translation]

Mr. Bachand: I would like to thank you for your excellent presentation, which showed us another side of Indian Affairs. Considering your dynamism, I find it hard to believe that you could work for them. I don't mean that the public servants of Indian Affairs are not energetic but I did not expect so much from you. It is very satisfying to meet someone with so much energy.

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I would like to ask a few questions on joint housing. First of all, if I am not mistaken, your school offers programs going from preschool until grade 12. Are those programs offered in the same physical area? From what I understood, you do not only have young persons as students, you also have adults who want to return to school, perhaps in grade 8 or 9.

Could you tell us how all those persons can live together, despite the age difference? This is very different from the type of schools that we have been exposed to so far.

In my own case, in grade 1, we were all six years old, boys and girls. We all had the same age through each grade. Our school went form grade 1 to grade 4, after which we went to another school for grade 5 until grade 7, and then we went to high school. In your own school, if I understood, you have a kind of melting pot. I would like to know how all these persons can work side by side.

I would also like to have an idea about the way your curriculum was developed. You seem to say that your standards are higher than provincial standards. I suppose your curriculum has been developed on the basis of native culture. How did you go about it? Have the elders met, with the teachers, in order to develop a curriculum based on the provincial standards, while trying to go even further? Tell us how you achieved it.

As far as your drop-out rate, I have a feeling that it is lower than in other native communities, not only because you seem to be very energetic, but also because your school population seems to be very diversified, which must be very stimulating for the students. So, I suppose your drop-out rate is lower than elsewhere. I might mention in passing that the drop-out rate in Montreal is around 40%. What is yours?

My last question bears on the relationship between the band council and the school board. You stated that both operate at arms' length from each other. Am I to understand that your school budget is completely different than the band council's budget, and that it is administered by people other than members of the band council? This is a very important issue because we sometimes have the feeling that education needs, even though they exist everywhere, are sometimes somewhat put aside by band councils, which decide to channel more money into economic development than into education.

If I understood correctly, you have a separate budget. If that is so, what is the relationship between the band council and your group? Who manages the school? Is there any relationship between both bodies, and who follows up on things and how?

[English]

Mr. Sinclair: You asked some really good questions. I'd like to start with your last one and have Audrey explain, because this is a very critical thing.

Very few schools have opted for our model. In fact, in B.C. very few have, and on the prairies because of treaty concerns you might not find any independent schools.

Audrey is very well versed in this, because she led the referendum question. It actually went to a referendum.

Ms Sam: Yes, that was the major concern of our community. They heard of things happening out there in Indian country where chief and councillors saw the money coming into the budgets and decided they could use this money elsewhere.

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Our people felt strongly that, no, they didn't want to have this happen; they didn't want to see politics interfering with the school. So they decided they would have the school as a separate entity from the band. It is still owned by the LFN.

But yes, the school has its own budget. It's administered through our own people within the school, our own staff. We just provide audit reports to the council at year end, and they can come into our AGM and ask questions or what have you.

We do provide continuous reports throughout the year. We're invited to chief-and-council meetings. That's usually my job. I'm the connecting person.

We also have our feasts, or ``eaters'', within our community. That provides an opportunity for band council or community members to participate and ask questions or what have you.

Mr. Sinclair: Actually, at our AGM the chief and council are no different from any other parents. It's been very important to the community to see this. Their connection with the board is that they appointed Audrey as chairman of the board for five years, so they couldn't mess around in the meantime. They made that decision in the incorporation papers. So we're incorporated as a separate society. They can't even come in and look at our books. They have to wait for our audited statements.

The other thing I think we should mention, because Audrey is very modest today, is that these eaters are not just any old eaters. The public system does it and gets two or three parents out. We started our first and we had 150. At the last one I think we had 400 people. We had two sittings of meals. These have become the social event of the community, because it's the first time the school has opened itself up to any kind of questions. At the same time, it's not just a question night. The kids put on shows; they do all kinds of things.

The relationship has been very carefully crafted so it's part of the community but it is well known that the money...we have a contract separately with Indian Affairs Canada, and now we have separate contracts with the other participating bands. We think it's the first time in Canada this has ever been done between aboriginal first governments and an aboriginally owned school.

Those contracts, by the way, were negotiated without anyone from Indian Affairs Canada even being involved. They probably don't even know it's happened yet. We just have our own lawyers do that.

That's the important thing I think you have to understand. The board we have deals directly with its own lawyers and deals directly with its auditors. We've seen our auditors more often than we've seen the Indian Affairs finance officer. That's the way I think responsibility gets developed in the school system.

Her board is accountable to the people they meet on the street. In fact, one of our board members rides a bus at least two or three times a week. So the parents call or talk to her; that kind of thing. Audrey is in the school every day. So there's an accountability there. She's the one who reports to the band council.

That is very different, and they can't touch the money. They have loaned us money and we've paid them back. We do deals with them; but it's the same kind of deal as if we were to do a deal with Indian Affairs or if we were to do a deal with the forest company down the road. The same practices are in place.

We think it's much more efficient. No money is going to economic development, although we invest in economic development. We partner with them. But when the band knows it's getting x amount in tuition fees, everybody knows x amount will then be spent on the school.

Mr. Murphy: I would like to hear more about the drop-out rate. As well, you talked about testing for children or whomever it is who comes into your program. Where do you get the funding to get psychologists and people who do this?

Mr. Sinclair: We take it out of our budget. We feel you can't teach a kid if you don't know where they're coming from. It means some classes are bigger than we would like. It means there is a certain series of textbooks that may not be on our shelves in twenty cases; there are only three of them. We share things and we have our staff work together. We have found our teachers are more motivated when they know that student Y is at that level and that's how to deal with them. It's just been a case of sharing and more -

Mr. Murphy: Where do you get the psychologists from?

Mr. Sinclair: Our connection is with the University of British Columbia's children's centre, or our own connections. I've been involved in this field for a little longer than the flood, but for a while, over the years. At the same time, Audrey has been very involved.

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We do some trial and error. We've had some people do work for us, and I'll admit one of the things about working for these people is that if the person doesn't work, we don't have him back. We get a reputation very quickly that way. People say: ``Don't go up to MTI unless you're able to give top quality for the investment, because they'll fire you in a moment''. I don't mean fire; we just won't hire them back.

Consequently, UBC screens who they recommend, and we're now getting a reputation. Audrey goes to the CEA meetings and some of the other non-native education circles. So we're now getting the reputation that we play with the big boys and we're prepared to pay if you're good; but if you're not good, we don't want you, thank you. When we get our reports we can take them to a medical officer, a social worker or whatever and they will all understand them because they've been written by professionals.

All our teachers have to be members of the British Columbia College of Teachers, which means we have a standard. If we don't like someone's performance it goes before his or her board.

Mr. Murphy: Tell me a bit about the sciences we were talking about before, preparation of your students, and the numbers that graduate.

Mr. Sinclair: We've actually had Merv to our campus.

Mr. Murphy: I'm sure he has been there.

Mr. Sinclair: One of the things Merv does - Audrey will have more to say on this, I'm sure, but I would just like to get a couple of things in - is that every time he can bring in an aboriginal educator of some significance he does. They make sure they tell the students they're aboriginal and they can do it.

We started with a real focus on science and renewable resource management. One of the interesting things is that those in the Lytton community do not have ``traditional'' art. In their history they had engineers, because they fish along the canyon. If you want to do it sometime - I won't, I'm not that brave - they have these structures hung along the canyons. We just tell the students they have to learn some of this stuff because it's their culture; it isn't some newfangled thing.

We look at the forests, fish, wildlife, ecotourism, and all those kinds of things and start to build those stairs. That's how they learn some math. If we're talking about fish there are reproductive things, so it has to be science but it's also math.

I'll tell you a funny little story. To do the surveying you have to do fractions, or ratios. Our kids told the instructor they couldn't do fractions. Obviously, in the school they'd been in, Indians can't do math. We told them we didn't do fractions in this surveying course, but the kids soon found out they had to do ``radios''; they had to explain these were ratios. So they went out and did a first set of surveys. When they came back, they'd had a problem. About three months later we were working on the problem and Noel forgot, and told the kids to look at it as a fraction. The kids said, ``You told us there weren't going to be any fractions in this thing. We can't do fractions.'' He said, ``What do you think you've been doing with surveying?'' All of a sudden, the kids lit up. They realized not only had they done fractions but they got paid for it. Once that happens, it changes your approach to science and math very dramatically.

There are some other things about curriculum that are tied to drop-outs, which I think I would like you to address, that we didn't quite get to.

Ms Sam: I wanted to get back to one of the questions about K to 12. We start at the preschool level and we go up to grade 12. We're also adding to the post-secondary end of it.

As far as having adults in the classroom, it seems to be really working. We have an elder who is 85 years old who has decided to come back to school after all these years to learn how to read and write. That is so significant as far as our students are concerned. They look up to her. I think she's a real model for them.

Mr. Sinclair: It's also the discipline.

Ms Sam: Yes.

Mr. Sinclair: Can you imagine her turning to a 16-year-old who's starting to act smart in class and saying: ``Do you want to be like me and have to wait another 40 years before you can learn to read and write? Now, get to work.'' Teachers love having her in the classroom.

We have fewer drop-outs because we don't let them quit. They may need time out, and some of them were working on some programs. You've probably heard of the Stein Valley. The Lytton people are the keepers of the Stein. We're developing a number of programs where students may go into the Stein for one, two, three weeks or longer. It's an outward-go type of thing. We won't let them drop out, but we do realize that sometimes they need time out.

.1705

There is a dynamic about the school. I guess part of it is that first of all, the students are treated like real people. Merv noticed it when he was there, but the people who really noticed it were the provincial evaluators.

The older people take care of the younger ones. You might have a 40-year-old who will be taking a 20-year-old with him on the construction class, and then that 20-year-old may be in another class with a 14-year-old, who then may be in another setting with a 6-year-old. There's a sense of protection. They may be cousins or they may be family.

So when you raised the question, I was thinking, ``That's right, that's the way you and I did go to school''. But that's not...and they're all in the same.

We have one part that's sort of primary, but the kids still have to walk past elementary to get to another part, and they just do. When I was designing part of the campus all of my colleagues from the non-native world said it wouldn't work because they would all be clustered. But they aren't clustered, because they have to go to one pod for science, and they have to go to something else for another subject. They all get on the same bus.

Nobody's in upgrading. You can't come to our school for upgrading. If you're 40 and you don't have your grade 12 diploma, we're going to get you in a program to get it. So nobody's in the ``slow learners'' class. Nobody can say to someone else that they're in the slow learners class. Nobody knows where you are. You're just a student at MTI. You have your hat, your jacket and whatever it happens to be.

Part of it is the attitude of the board. If they don't see any difference in you, you don't feel a difference.

Do you see what I'm saying? If nobody tells you you're a little different, you don't think you are. Once you get that seeded it's like the grass. You let it grow a little bit and you don't know that when you first threw the seed down it was all dirty ground.

That's my feeling about it. You may have a more realistic approach.

Ms Sam: Even in our name we're encouraging everyone to ``try it''. It doesn't matter. Learning is lifelong.

Mr. Sinclair: We strive for two things, career or business. We're not training anybody for the world of work. I defy you to find more trained people anywhere in the world than there are on Indian reserves.

Right, Merv?

Let's put it this way. In the Indian community, there are enough people who have been given carpentry training to build all the houses that ever got knocked down in any given year by any typhoons in the world. But are there any of them who work as construction crew bosses? Are there any guys doing finishing of houses? Are there any of those crews that do roofing?

No. And that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to develop guys who are able to go out in a truck and make money as a twosome or as a threesome, as they do in our society in a larger sense.

When you look around Ottawa, there are all these little guys running around in their paint trucks and their roofing trucks and everything like that. If you go to an Indian community you see the same trucks, but they all have the names of Abbotsford, Chilliwack or Kamloops painted on their sides.

But not now. We won a contract to roof a historic church. You think that didn't make some proud boys going downtown at lunch hours? We have some guys who can now survey with the best of them. We have greenhouse operators, lumber producers and bus operators.

We have one of the first aboriginal bus driver training programs right in our curriculum. Why? Because the women in our community are prisoners if they don't have drivers' licences. The community is split by the Fraser River and the Thompson River. You can cross the Fraser River only by ferry. You can't just walk into town if you want to - well, you can if you're one of these Olympic walkers - so we said driving was now requisite, just as in any community.

We actually have ecotourism. This is interesting. I have to tell you this neat story. We have a grade 4/5 class negotiating a loan with the bank so they can set up the deli to start offering some decent food at lunch for the other classes to buy from them - for a profit, thank you very much.

Mr. Murphy: How old are those students?

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Mr. Sinclair: They're normal grade 4/5 students, about nine or ten years old. They're having the banker come to them because one of them heard that big businessmen do that. They asked John, our administrative officer, if they weren't big business people. He said yes, or course, not knowing why he was saying yes. So they asked him to ask the banker to come to meet with them. They went out on their own and got their own bank account, because they're going to operate a deli.

That's the other kind of thing. If you don't say you're getting ready for the world of work and that you're either going to be in business or in a career, you start getting kids....

It gets back to what Merv was saying. We get asked who these people are. So we started saying, well, you do you see the plumber there? Why do you think you couldn't do that job? We start to get some of these 20- and 30-year-olds to do it, and then we start to get the teenagers to do it.

We have two teenagers on the greenhouse project who have been able to buy new vehicles. No, they're not brand new vehicles, but for those teenagers they are. The other kids talk about Clint getting himself his own car. He's been going to school for two years and attending. He's been doing a work study about 50% of the time. He finally saved up enough money to buy himself a $1,500 car that's in perfect shape. The rest of the kids now see Clint as a role model, and Clint didn't get paid salary. He got paid shares in the moneys made from projects. Do you see?

By the way, that money came out of our tuition. We keep channelling it back in. We have now put 40 people in the community, and that money coming in is being invested in the community through their salaries. We have probably 50 people on our payroll. Ten of those are out-of-community teachers. Everybody else is from the community, but most of those people in the community did not have careers. If they did, and if we moved them over to our school, they've been back-filled in their own careers. We added about 40 productive people in a community of 1,600. That's probably the same as if you had 4,000 new jobs in this city.

Now if you brought something into this community that brought in 4,000 people.... That's the kind of impact I think Mestanta has made. And I think this kind of school would do that anywhere.

We're not inventing all of the stuff we're doing. In some cases, we're just taking the rules of the road out there and making it happen. We're saying, take that money, put it into the hands of the local community, and don't let the politics of the place get in the way. And all of a sudden - bingo - all kinds of things start happening.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): Is there is a competing school in your community?

As well, are you selective in your acceptance of students, or are all applicants accepted?

Mr. Sinclair: Before I let Audrey answer that, it is like saying right now in Quebec City, is there a competing team in Quebec in the play-offs? There is a school. We don't like to consider it our competition, if you know what I mean. They're -

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): When there is $7,000 per student there's competition.

Mr. Sinclair: Yes. We do have competition. There is a public system.

Go ahead, Audrey.

Ms Sam: We've opened our doors to anyone. We have non-aboriginal students also attending our school. It's now getting to the point where we're running out of space, so we've had to cut off any new registrants coming in this last term, because we simply can't do it in staffing. Class sizes are getting larger and larger as we go along.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): If a student doesn't follow the rules and regulations of the school, do you send him away? If so, the public system then must accept that child. Is that happening?

Mr. Sinclair: We haven't done that directly. We actually found that happening the other way. The public school has to take them. They have no choice. But we have not...we have traded.

There have been a couple of instances where we've recommended to the public school that they provide a student with services that only they have, and we then took a student they were having a problem with. We haven't sent anybody there. We have not allowed any student to quit. We have put students under suspension for a little while, but not for long enough that they have to go elsewhere. We've still been sending homework to them.

Our bigger problem is the one that Audrey's mentioned. We don't have the space, and until we get our capital things worked out with the finance people in Indian Affairs that's going to be the....

.1715

I should mention that because we're now group one, the province gives us a 50% tuition subsidy for all the non-natives that come. This has helped some of those parents. We then give the parents the option to work off the other 50%. If they're working, they can come in and volunteer their time, or do a variety of things for us. That has been taken up by several parents.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): I'll try to word this question, because I see an opportunity. If a community has no control over its school - and I suspect in your case the school was built around the director of education and a CEO; I suspect two individuals came in with a lot of experience and offered a service, were hired, and are producing - could we imagine that where they don't have control over their education, the band could hire these two specialists in the same way as we hire computer experts to come in and put in a system, and then have an elected local board of trustees, and maybe solve their problem of providing education to their kids by contracting out the administration of the school?

Mr. Sinclair: Let me put it in this way. I was the outside hired gun, but Audrey was inside the community. When I first met Audrey, she was running an education program, and very well, I thought. It was not a big program by larger standards, but it was a very efficient one.

So I said to the people, ``If you are serious, then we have some people in this community we can train''.

Audrey has been, in essence, on a seven- or eight-year training program. By the time she gets done, she'll have a degree in education, plus she brings all this experience.

I think some things made the Lytton community exceptional. That was their willingness to be a little bit right of centre, this idea of entrepreneurship and so forth.

The one advantage Audrey had in her board is that there was no interference from the band council. So we could get into donnybrooks behind closed doors, but when we wanted an answer, as we did on the capital, we could go to Merv and it didn't matter that he came from Ontario. The band council had nothing to say about it.

We brought in a lot of expertise, because our board has been very committed.

They still go through training exercises. We went through four major workshops in six months as we put this school together. They made a deal with me that they were to get as much out of my brain over.... I'm with them until the year 2000. They have an option that could go a bit longer.

The point is, they took two things: one, ``Hands off, band council''; two, every expert who comes leaves with us the ideas they bring. There's also a third thing: if you come and work with us for a while, they understand intellectual property. It's in all our contracts with our consultants. If you work with MTI, you can't take the package and go market it. Well, you can market it, but it had better have MTI's share of the revenue coming back.

While she was director of education, Audrey had been setting aside little bits of money, until she built up enough for them to have a study. Even when they retained me, they didn't get any Indian Affairs money.

So I guess there was a commitment in the community that was a bit stronger than in some of the ones I've been in. There are several other independent schools in B.C., and two other systems I helped set up. I don't think they're quite as strong as this one, but they're stronger than the band-operated ones, because nobody can get at the money. But as importantly, no one can get at the decision-making except by either going to the annual general meeting and getting on the board or going and dealing with the board.

This has been very important. When Merv came out - we have technical services from DIAND in Vancouver advising us - we made that decision. It was not Indian Affairs, not some outside body, and definitely not the band council. So if the band council tells us, ``We want this thing done in this way'', we can say, ``Fine, we'll get our own expert in to see if that's the best way of doing it''.

Of course, this means in the community they're always getting two opinions. I think that makes for a stronger community.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): I'll ask another short question, and I'd like a short answer, because I'd like to get it on the record.

.1720

How important is the condition of hands off for band control in relationship to autonomy for the education system? How would your success be measured if that condition were not there? That's very important, at least to me, because that focuses on some of the recommendations I think we should be making.

Ms Sam: I have to go back to how the school came about. It was through our Lytton First Nation education committee, which is part of the chief and council. Numerous people have sat on the education committee for years, including myself. Some of us have worked in the public school system, and many of us are parents and elders. I think we've seen a system that has failed us for a number of years. I really wanted to see something happen in a positive way.

I have to go back to the feeling that we're more focused because we know what we want to see as far as education is concerned. I myself couldn't care less about the money. That isn't the issue as far as I'm concerned. That's why it doesn't get in the way for me.

I think the chief and council respect the people who are on that committee, and they respect me, because they've known for a number of years they have wanted that. The LFN has wanted to see its own system. But it wasn't until this past while that we were able to do it.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): I'll just go a step further. Do you believe the community is able to pick up and assume full responsibility for their school, apart from the administration?

Ms Sam: Yes, without a shadow of a doubt. If the band -

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): I'd like you to say yes rather than shake your head, because I'd like this on record.

Ms Sam: Yes.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): I'm sorry. I don't want to misguide you. When I say I'd like you to say yes, that's only if it's yes you want to say.

Ms Sam: No, I strongly believe that. I think this is the key thing. The people own the school; the students own their school. When you go down there, they are smiling faces. They're uplifted. It's their school. They feel so proud of it.

If the chief and council changed tomorrow and they decided they didn't want that school any more and they tried to say that, they tried to take the school away from the community, there'd be an uproar. The people, the elders, the kids, would -

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): It's theirs.

Ms Sam: Yes.

Mr. Sinclair: Let me give you a very graphic example of this. There's a road that runs right through our campus. It's not used very much, but it does get back to a proposed recreational ball field and stuff. Some people live down it, and our construction workers drive down it. The students did not feel that was a safe idea. They stuck up their own little roadblock. It just says on there, ``No vehicles past this point''.

One day I had to take Audrey down to the school. We were in a hurry. I have a four-wheel drive, so I drove up around the block. Before we had gone ten metres, there were kids wanting to find out.... Then when they saw it was Audrey who was with me.... Had I been by myself, they would have stopped me.

That's how much the ownership is. This is ours; therefore woe betide anybody who gets in the way.

Because most of the people who are on council are parents too, they also feel that, and you're not going to see that happen.

But no, this is something that is....

Ms Sam: Deep.

Mr. Sinclair: Yes.

Ms Sam: There's another example. Elders phoning down to the school, for instance, gave me an earful one day. They said, Audrey, you're going to have to do something about the secretaries and people who answer the phones down at the school. It's Mestanta, not MTI.

Mr. Sinclair: ``Use our language'': MTI's a sanam7 word, you see.

Mr. Murphy: You get your funding, but you take 35% of that funding for capital. Do you have any problem with DIAND about that?

Mr. Sinclair: Yes. In fact, we have a meeting again tomorrow.

Our problem isn't with DIAND's attitude. They think we have a very novel approach. We have been to the director general of finance and we've given him what we think is a really.... Give us a surcharge on our tuition. If the student enrolment goes up, we get more, but if we lose the enrolment, we go down. Don't build us a big monument. Let us make our best determinations.

When we made the presentation, they responded by saying it was a great idea. Within a couple of weeks, budget time happened, and we know what happened on this Hill as well as across the country.

.1725

But we would just like a response, because we know they must have some questions and so forth. Our feeling is that the region is not very happy with us, because we don't need them other than to write their signature once a year on our deal. That could be eliminated. You could do that with a good, intelligent clerk over here across the river.

No disrespect to clerks, but that's all we need.

The people in Ottawa seem to understand that we have a different approach to capital. Key it against our enrolments, the way the province does, but just give it to us. Don't say you're giving us the same amount of money, because you're not. Give us a blanket surcharge -

Mr. Murphy: Global budget.

Mr. Sinclair: - yes - and leave us alone. If we then overbuild, we have a problem. If we underbuild, we have a problem. Then we'll either stick-build or we'll go modular, depending on what's appropriate. But then it's accountable to the board.

The problem I have now with curriculum is that the board takes their heat if they don't do something. And they can do something about it. They call in the language instructor and department heads, and we have a talk on our committees. But with capital, they can't do a thing. They have to have the buses.

We have a case where a community -

Ms Sam: You have to have the building.

Mr. Sinclair: - yes - switched from a public system 18 kilometres away to our school, which is about 75 kilometres. So anybody who says bus trips are a no-no with parents...if they think it's worth while at the other end.

What did that mean for us? It meant we had to go and get another new, decent-sized, highway-cruising bus, because when I first went there all they had were wee little city-type buses. That's all they had been given any money for.

So there are some times I think government has to say, okay, we're not asking for new money, but take the money formulae and get them out to the communities.

Ms Sam: It would be nice.

Mr. Sinclair: Yes, she's right. There are lots of things we think we're doing that are, in fact, breaking new ground. But we at least would like to get back up to a level playing field so we could show you what we could do. We think we're doing a lot better than the local school or are more attractive than the local school, with the same money on the operating table. But they get all the capital; they have two buildings on which Indian Affairs paid 60%.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): What percentage of your budget is salaries?

Mr. Sinclair: About 50%.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): That's good.

Well, I'd like to thank you very much. Your presentation was very interesting, innovative and creative. I think that's what we have to do now to succeed - become innovative and creative. So I'd like to thank you very much.

Ms Sam: Thank you for allowing us.

The Acting Chairman (Mr. Bonin): I would ask the members to stay for a few minutes so we can plan our next consultation.

This meeting is adjourned.