Manitoba’s new hires to boost Indigenous, French education

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This article was published 05/01/2024 (695 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba Education’s newest staffer will be tasked with improving graduation rates among Indigenous students and tackling the challenge of teacher recruitment and retention in northern schools.

On Friday, the education department announced it has chosen an inaugural assistant deputy minister of Indigenous excellence in education and is in the process of hiring another senior bureaucrat to revive its French-language office.

Métis educator Jackie Connell will assume the former post at the end of the month.

“Indigenous youth deserve the same kinds of experiences in school and the same opportunities and then, in turn, the same outcomes as non-Indigenous learners in Manitoba,” said the assistant superintendent of senior years and career studies in the Frontier School Division, which encompasses remote communities ranging from Gillam to Stevenson Island.

Connell frequently visits remote classrooms in her current role. She has seen first-hand how chronic staffing shortages — what she calls “a state of emergency” — negatively and disproportionately affect students who are First Nations, Métis and Inuit.

Manitoba’s four-year graduation rate was 83 per cent in 2022. Roughly half of Indigenous teenagers graduated “on time,” compared to 91 per cent of their non-Indigenous peers.

As far as Connell is concerned, teachers are increasingly introducing Indigenous perspectives and lessons into their classrooms, but “system change” is required to make public schools more equitable.

“When it comes to our education system, it really looks very similar to how it did about 100 years ago,” Connell said, adding she is specifically interested in bolstering attendance levels and Indigenous representation in classrooms and school board offices.

The incoming assistant deputy minister will provide advice on Indigenous and equity-based policies and research. She noted she will draw on her experience as a former principal at both R.B. Russell Vocational and Children of the Earth high schools in Winnipeg.

“She has a lot of connections in the north and in an area where we need to recruit more and more teachers,” Education Minister Nello Altomare said.

The new job acknowledges the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s call to action No. 62: establish senior-level positions in government dedicated to Indigenizing education.

The department is also searching for an assistant deputy minister to oversee the Bureau de l’éducation française.

In the recent election, the NDP pledged to reinstate the role, which was reassigned under the Tories in 2017, in turn sparking backlash in the francophone community.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca