School bursting with students — and pride

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This article was published 25/10/2014 (4209 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

GRAND RAPIDS — Grand Rapids School has changed a lot since Annie Ballantyne was in Grade 3.

The school had two rooms back then, kids could be punished for speaking Cree, and the strap was close at hand.

Now, Grand Rapids School is bursting at the seams, teachers care about the kids, and parents send their kids to school to learn to speak Cree.

And Ballantyne? She’s the principal.

The way Grand Rapids School used to be makes it hard to connect with parents who have long memories, said Ballantyne.

“There were a lot of discipline issues, and the way they were handled was pretty severe,” the principal recalled.

These days, Ballantyne walks the halls of the nursery-to-Grade 12 school and kids call out to her.

There are 300 students, of whom 95 per cent are members of Misipawistik Cree Nation. It’s one of the larger schools in the Frontier School Division.

It’s full, which is a problem, because there’s an enormous number of kids on the way. “Next year, we’re getting 61 nursery students. The year after that, 55,” said Ballantyne.

The birthrate has soared as people return to the community, she said.

“We’ve had to give up the music room, the art room and the computer lab for classrooms,” she said. The school may need portables to get by during the short term, but a major expansion is crucial, as are repairs to the teacherages.

About a dozen local students go to Cranberry Portage north of The Pas for technical and vocational school, where there’s a residence for boarding students; otherwise, everyone stays in Grand Rapids.

Ballantyne went to Cranberry Portage for senior high school, back in the day before Grand Rapids offered full high school, and before highways 60 and 10 made it a three-hour drive.

“We flew to Cranberry Portage — there was no road then,” she said. Kids came home only at Christmas and for the summer, unless a parent was willing to drive a long way south, then far off to Highway 10, to fetch the kids.

There are already too many students for the school to offer everyone 30 minutes of gym a day, lamented Ballantyne, who covets a second gym. She’s aware Education Minister James Allum would be popular in Grand Rapids and MCN with a timely capital funding announcement.

Grand Rapids School is trying to attract more Cree-speaking teachers, she said. “We’d like to get the Cree language back. We’re trying to do the whole class in Cree,” Ballantyne said.

Parents lost their ability to speak Cree, she said; “(Children) get Cree with their grandparents,” and then the kids teach their parents to speak Cree.

“We have a breakfast program that feeds all the kids,” Ballantyne said. There’s a large kitchen where 30 kids eat and there are trays to take food to the rest in their classrooms.

One of the former portables is a parent room. “They’re teaching them how to knit, they’re making blankets,” said Ballantyne.

And no one should blame the kids and teachers if their gaze occasionally drifts to the magnificent river flowing past the back of the school field. “This property used to be my grandfather’s land,” Ballantyne said with a smile.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca