Promotion of Excellence at Schools with FNMI Students, Part 1

This is the first of five articles on Excellence at Schools with First Nation Métis and Inuit (FNMI) Students. In each article at least two major ideas that promote Excellence are featured.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, we promoted two major trends at our schools. The first trend was a commitment to inject local First Nation content into every aspect of the school program of studies, enrichment activities, and school field trips while we maintained high daily academic standards. In essence we made local student experiences and cyclical cultural and seasonal trends in the area an integral part of our curriculum.As a principal and later first time Superintendent of Education at the Gitksan-Carrier School District, most professional educational and administrative leaders worked with local community authorities and principals at Federal, First Nation and provincial schools to increase the performance levels of our students.

We created new resources for schools with First Nation parents and community activists by tapping into the talents of local elders, cultural and academic leaders in each community. Our school cultural teachers and students became involved with K’san Village artists, artists-at-the-school initiatives, and performance of local dance traditions as well as with the Land Claims Research initiatives in the area. This comprehensive effort at making the curriculum and arts activities relevant to the local and cyclical activities of the communities we served led to elementary school language, cultural and dance programs and the systematic injection of indigenous art forms and local knowledge skills of elders, hunters, food gatherers, artists and specialists at each community. At the Kispiox School, several young artists created the First Gitksan Art Coloring Book in 1979.

The relationship between the school and community it served became a two way vibrant and complex relationship in which each group of stakeholders influenced the others. Some professional staff members were adopted by hereditary chiefs and invited to sit at the potlatch feast table.  Our interests in the salmon cycle contributed to the creation of an on reserve hatchery and other local craft and art activities. Local specialists created booklets on local histories of each community and several linguists cooperated with elders and Gitksan speakers to have the first comprehensive Gitksan Language and Cultural Programs. These efforts were innovative at the time but the real innovation was linking all these efforts to development of the students’ traditional speaking and writing skills into each of the official provincial academic disciplines. In short, we used the students’ heritage language and culture as a basis for developing English language and core academic skills. The predominant focus was in mastery of the BC curriculum but teachers made great efforts to educate themselves about the Gitksan culture, stories, traditions and legends.

By the end of my superintendence in 1983, all the schools were transferred from Federal to First Nation administrative control and the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs reported that although we made up only 5% of the FNMI population in BC, our District had almost 33% percent of all FNMI high school student graduates in the province. The principals, school staff, home school coordinators were so focused on raising academic and cultural standards in the delivery of the school curriculum that they had an enormous impact on student achievement as well as maintaining a highly motivated school staff. The excitement of being part of a larger district drive to raise academic and cultural standards made parents, school staff, leaders, elders and local school committees feel that they were members of one team with a single goal. During this period some parents, teacher assistants and cultural workers went on to enter a Teacher Training Program sponsored by the District and the University of Victoria. It was a teacher training program that was located at Hazelton during the school year and on campus at U of Victoria during the summer.

The second major strategy for building excellence for FNMI students is ensuring that each school has a set of prioritized goals that are approved by a local education authority and recommended by the principal. The first administrator to do this in the 1970s in a systematic way was a first time principal, Ben Kawaguchi, at Gitsegukla School. He worked with the education authority members to set annual priorities. He ensured that resources were allocated to major the priorities set for the First Nation school. The problem with all our school systems is that we tend to tackle as many problems or trends as arise during the school year rather than remain focused on key prioritized issues.

A more sophisticated variation of focusing people and resources to major annual priorities was created by Kawaguchi soon after he left Gitsegukla, BC for the Peigan First Nation. As Director of Education in the early 1980s, Kawaguchi persuaded the Peigan Board of Education to focus on a single major priority each year rather than many or a handful of priorities. The strategy of a single major priority each year soon made the Peigan First Nation schools, students and high school graduates the leading First Nation School in Alberta and Canada. Provincial, Federal and First Nation educators came to Brocket to visit the schools and chat with Board, administrators and students to understand the reason for the excellent student performance results. All went home knowing that they had to have an overriding priority for student and staff but few have been able to implement such discipline at their jurisdictions. As Kawaguchi pointed out to his Board members, they can focus on 100 priorities each year and get 1% improvement on a hundred things or they can focus on one priority and try to get 100% improvement. By focusing staff and community effort on selecting several (100) ideas of improvement within a priority plan (for example, “This year our priority is to improve our social studies program with a 100 different ways.”) the school and community were able to communicate their efforts and spread great ideas and practices amongst the entire school population.  “With a clear focus on what part of the curriculum we wanted to improve we also made sure that teachers and staff who worked outside of the curriculum priority, to also align their assignments and professional development to the strategic priority to build consistent themes that would link student learning in unique and innovative ways” according to Kawaguchi.

During his Director of Education stewardship, he ensured that the Peigan Board members set one major new academic priority each school year. He ensured that the core subjects and technological innovations were updated in a cyclical manner so that reforms were revisited and refreshed while maintaining a major priority each year. This strategy of focusing on an overriding priority is easier to explain than actually do since at FNMI schools there are so many pressing social, economic and political issues that it is difficult for education authorities, administrators and school staff to have the discipline to have a single overriding academic excellence priority during the school year. However, a focus on academic priority is built on teaching staff strength and can serve to unite staff and school leadership with clear outcomes that the community can see and attribute to school staff and leadership effort.