When kids can’t go to school

Like any 14-year-old, Shayna Cheechoo was excited and a little nervous for the beginning of high school.
But Shayna’s school year was cut short just a few days into her Grade 9 year. She was called to the principal’s office at lunch on the third day of school, told that her “tuition” had not been paid, and was sent home.
This was not a private school where you pay tuition to attend classes. This was a public, provincially funded high school, and just like hundreds of thousands of her peers across Ontario, neither Shayna nor her parents had given any thought to the idea of paying to attend high school.
But Shayna is not considered the same as any other student in Ontario. She is First Nations, and her parents live on a reserve that neither she nor they are members of. No one seems to know where funding for Shayna’s schooling should come from. Consequently her tuition went unpaid. And a 14-year-old girl had to suffer from the flaws of the government education funding system.
Shayna’s father, Bill Cheechoo, is a Moose Cree member while Shayna and her mother are Eabametoong members. But she has never lived on her reserve and, for the past four years, her and her family have called M’Chigeeng First Nation, on Manitoulin Island, home.
Bill Cheechoo is frustrated by the response of the high school principal for sending his daughter home at lunchtime. “What if no one was home and the doors were locked?” he said. He is also frustrated with Eabametoong First Nation, as his efforts to have them pay for Shayna’s schooling have gone nowhere. He’s trying to temper his frustration with M’Chigeeng First Nation – after all, their community is where his family lives, and M’Chigeeng has been good to them. But most of all, Cheechoo is frustrated with a system that seems designed to prevent First Nations people’s right of mobility.
M’Chigeeng’s elementary school principal and education director Neil Debassige shares Cheechoo’s frustration with the system. Debassige is an award-winning educator whose school has earned accolades for its efforts to bring the Anishinabe language back to students and community members alike. Shayna is not the only non-M’Chigeeng student wanting to attend
Debassige’s school. Every year the First Nation deals with a handful of cases just like hers.
Which puts the school, and the band council, in an awkward position.
On one hand, they want to educate as many children as possible – especially First Nations children. On the other hand, it costs $11,000 per year to educate a child. If the First Nation does not get reimbursed for those extra children it educates, what is the impact on M’Chigeeng’s own students?
“This is a huge political issue,” Debassige says.
Meanwhile, the problem is compounded by the fact that reserve schools are not all funded in the same way. Some schools, like M’Chigeeng, have five year funding agreements. Other First Nation schools run on one-year funding agreements. The federal government’s response to the issue so far has been to tell schools such as M’Chigeeng to switch back to the one year funding formula if they are worried about funding for non-reserve students. But as Debassige explains, the five-year funding agreement was a step in the right direction, allowing his school to plan for the future. They do not want to go backwards; they just want help sorting out the issue of funding.
As M’Chigeeng’s councillor responsible for education, Robert Beaudin says the First Nation is expecting the problem to grow as more First Nations people relocate around the country.
For starters, Beaudin wants to see a First Nations funding formula that would allow individual First Nations the ability to flex the number of students they are educating, even by three or four students per year. That would alleviate problems such as the one facing M’Chigeeng with Shayna. As for the broader issue, Beaudin sees a solution in agreements between First Nations that would cover the costs of students moving from one reserve to another, and regional agreements that would make it easier to support mobility between First Nations.
But so far, Beaudin says the federal government has refused to acknowledge the problem, leaving First Nations such as M’Chigeeng scrambling to find band-aid solutions to a growing issue.
Fortunately, in Shayna’s case, her tuition funding has been sorted out and she is back in school with the rest of her peers. But as her father puts it, “there have got to be other kids dealing with the same thing.”
M’Chigeeng plans to bring these specific questions, and the broader issue of who funds First Nations students who live on different reserves, to the Assembly of First Nations’ education conference in early October.
“We have to take responsibility for educating our own,” Beaudin says. “But we believe ‘our own’ is across the spectrum. If you’re native, you’re our own.”
Let’s hope the federal government realizes that there is a problem here, before another young boy or girl has to be told they cannot go to school.