Tapardjuk: Nunavut schools will hire elders

Nunavut plans to bring elders into the schools as counsellors, Louis Tapardjuk, the education minister, said in the legislative assembly last week.

“We will be hiring elders. They will be hired as school counsellors,” Taparduk told Nunavut’s committee of the whole, whose member MLAs have examined the education department’s budget request for 2010.

The education department wants $206.7 million, an increase of more than $12 million from its 2009-2010 revised budget.

Of this, $1.6 million is being earmarked to hire elders in Nunavut schools as counsellors and culture instructors, part of a total of $3 million for district education authorities to support activities that the DEAs choose, Taparduk said.

“When a student does something wrong, they are not going to be just sent home. The school principal and the parents and the guardians and the school counselor will have to meet with the student,” Tapardjuk said.

The DEAs will handle the hiring of elders and decide how they are going to be using those cultural teachers in or outside the school environment, such as in on-the-land programs.

And the education department plans to produce an elders’ guidebook, which will be available to the DEAs.

But Tuniniq MLA James Arvaluk questioned hiring school counsellors who may not have adequate training and be able to offer encouragement to students to complete a higher education.

“Should you not be looking for people who can properly assist the students and who have the proper levels of education? They should either be teachers or have post-secondary education and should be able to properly encourage students to continue their educational careers after their graduation and know of all of the opportunities available to these students,” Arvaluk said.

In response, Taparduk said the education department plans to start an in-house training program for student counsellors so they could get the proper qualifications while on the job.

“The school counsellors will have to know Inuit culture and speak the Inuktitut language and that they have to know the community,” Tapardjuk said.

To remedy what he called a “lackadaisical approach towards education in Nunavut,” Tapardjuk also promised a new policy on suspensions.

This would see “parents and counsellors also working with the students.”

“When a student does something wrong, they are not going to be just sent home,” Tapardjuk said.

A new curriculum inspired by the Nunavut Sivuniksavut program is also in the works.

“If our budget request for $800,000 is approved, we will be able to enhance the culturally relevant curriculum and also to teach students to be proud of being an Inuk and their elders,” Tapardjuk said.