Feds accused of shortchanging kids

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This article was published 19/09/2016 (3330 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The city’s first self-identified indigenous school board chairperson has demanded the federal government start funding First Nations education adequately before more generations of children are lost.

“The federal government is nowhere to be found,” newly elected Winnipeg School Division board chairwoman Sherri Rollins said. “Maybe we need a national department of education.”

When children from First Nations without a high school come to Winnipeg to study, they’re so far behind that they need far more resources than other children, she said.

Because of chronic federal underfunding, she charged, “When that child comes to my schools below grade level, that’s a $25,000 child, not an $11,000 child,” Rollins said, referring to per-student spending. “I want the feds to step up on this. They’re going to lose another generation.”

Rollins, the only indigenous trustee in Winnipeg, said it’s decades overdue for city school divisions to have an indigenous board chairperson.

When she ran in the division’s south end in 2014, “It was a priority for me to indigenize WSD. I set up the indigenous advisory council so I wouldn’t be alone.

“I want all the bands, from Brokenhead to Grand Rapids to Red Sucker Lake to South Indian Lake, to know they’ve got a home in the division when they come to the city.”

Rollins cited the role the division’s new elder, Myra Laramee, a retired principal and unsuccessful board candidate, will play in promoting indigenous academic achievement and support programs in the division.

Rollins is also the first of the class of 2014, the rookies who won six of the nine board seats, to become board chairwoman.

WSD has just launched Ojibwa and Cree bilingual programs, which Rollins is confident will expand in both grades and the number of schools in which they’re offered.

“It is hard to get bilingual teachers of any sort,” and indigenous languages lack curricular material, Rollins said.

She’s determined to continue encouraging mothers to get involved in inner-city and North End schools, even if they lack education: “Educational assistants, they may not have high school — within 10 to 15 years, they’re teaching in our schools,” she said.

“I’m Huron, and I’m non-status,” said Rollins, a 41-year-old provincial civil servant who grew up in Ottawa and whose ancestors came from the Windsor, Ont., area.

“In Ottawa, you met a lot of people like (former national chiefs) Ovide Mercredi, Phil Fontaine. As a kid, I was so excited to meet them,” she said.

Rollins said city school boards should have had indigenous board chairpersons and more trustees years ago.

“I watched Linda Ballantyne get blanketed at the legislature” as she was honoured as the indigenous board chairwoman of Frontier School Division, Rollins said. “You go to the legislature, you see white man, white man, white man.”

Rollins was in Ottawa after being elected to the WSD board, and met the wife of the late aboriginal leader Elijah Harper — credited with helping to kill the Meech Lake Accord in 1990) — who is now a school trustee in Ottawa.

“I told some executives of the Manitoba School Boards Association that, and they had no idea who I was talking about,” Rollins lamented.

Rollins said she encourages indigenous residents of the division to contest the Nov. 5 byelection in Ward 7 — including Point Douglas and Elmwood — left vacant when Allan Beach moved out of the division. The list of potential candidates Rollins is trying to recruit includes Kevin Settee, an unsuccessful 2014 trustee candidate who’s now president of the University of Winnipeg Students Association, she said.

Meanwhile, Rollins said, acting with board approval, “I’m going to take over the Ward 7 duties — Point Douglas and Elmwood can’t not be represented.”

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca