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When kids can't visit school
Like any 14yearold, Shayna Cheechoo was excited and a little nervous for that start of senior high school.
But Shayna's school year was cut short just a couple days into her Grade 9 year. She was called towards the principal's office at lunch around the third day of school, told that her "tuition" had not been paid, and was sent home.
It was not really a private school in which you pay tuition to go to classes. It was a public, provincially funded senior high school, just like thousands and thousands of her peers across Ontario, neither Shayna nor her parents had given any thought to the thought of paying to go to high school.
But Shayna isn't considered the same as any other student in Ontario. She's First Nations, and her parents survive a reserve that neither she nor they are people in. Nobody appears to know where funding for Shayna's schooling may come from. Consequently her tuition went unpaid. Along with a 14yearold girl had to suffer from the flaws from the government education funding system.
Shayna's father, Bill Cheechoo, is a Moose Cree member while Shayna and her mother are Eabametoong members. But she's never populated her reserve and, within the last 4 years, her and her family have called M'Chigeeng First Nation, on Manitoulin Island, home.
Bill Cheechoo is annoyed by the response of the high school principal for sending his daughter home at lunchtime. "What if no one was home and the doors were locked?" he explained. He's also frustrated with Eabametoong First Nation, as his efforts to have them purchase Shayna's schooling go nowhere. He's trying to temper his frustration with M'Chigeeng First Nation after all, their community is where his family lives, and M'Chigeeng continues to be good to them. But most of all, Cheechoo is frustrated having a system that seems designed to prevent First Nations people's right of mobility.
M'Chigeeng's elementary school principal and education director Neil Debassige shares Cheechoo's frustration with the system. Debassige is an awardwinning educator whose school has earned accolades for its efforts to create the Anishinabe language to students and community members alike. Shayna is not the only nonM'Chigeeng student attempting to attend
Debassige's school. Each year the First Nation deals with a number of cases just like hers.
Which puts the college, and the band council, in an awkward position.
On one hand, they want to educate as numerous children as you possibly can especially First Nations children. However, it is $11,000 per year to teach a child. When the First Nation does not get reimbursed for all those extra children it educates, what's the impact on M'Chigeeng's own students?
"This is a big political issue," Debassige says.
Meanwhile, the problem is compounded by the fact that reserve schools aren't all funded in the same manner. Some schools,canada goose sale online, like M'Chigeeng,canada goose sale, have five year funding agreements. Other First Nation schools operate on oneyear funding agreements. The government government's reaction to the problem so far is to tell schools such as M'Chigeeng to change back to the one year funding formula if they are concerned about funding for nonreserve students. But as Debassige explains, the fiveyear funding agreement was a part of the best direction, allowing his school to organize for the future. They do not want to go backwards; they simply want help sorting out the problem of funding.
As M'Chigeeng's councillor accountable for education, Robert Beaudin says the very first Nation is expecting the problem to develop as more First Nations people relocate around the country.
To begin with, Beaudin wants to visit a First Nations funding formula that would allow individual First Nations the opportunity to flex the number of students they're educating, even by 3 or 4 students per year. That will alleviate problems like the one facing M'Chigeeng with Shayna. When it comes to broader issue, Beaudin sees an answer in agreements between First Nations that will cover the costs of scholars moving in one reserve to a different, and regional agreements that will help you to support mobility between First Nations.
But so far,canada goose, Beaudin says the us government has refused to understand the problem, leaving First Nations such as M'Chigeeng scrambling to locate bandaid solutions to an increasing issue.
Fortunately, in Shayna's case, her tuition funding has been taken care of and she is back in school with the rest of her peers. But as her father puts it, "there have to be other kids coping with exactly the same thing."
M'Chigeeng intends to bring these questions, and also the broader issue of who funds First Nations students who live on different reserves, to the Assembly of First Nations' education conference at the begining of October.
"We have to take responsibility for educating our very own," Beaudin says. "But we feel 'our own' is over the spectrum. 32
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