Student successes hailed at FNSSP conference

Ninety-two percent of Keewaytinook Internet High School students successfully passed their courses in the 2009-2010 school year.
While the KiHS is proud of its students’ successes to date, vice-principal Freda Kenny is aiming for higher success rates.
“We measure success by the number of students who would complete a full high school program (of) eight courses, so 52 per cent of our students right now are successful in obtaining those courses,” Kenny said Dec. 2 during the First Nation Student Success Program Conference.
“If you translate those figures ... to a program of six courses, our success rate jumps to a 75 per cent success rate, which we are quite proud of. But we want that rate to go much higher and that is one of the things we are currently working on.
“These are our successes and we are proud of them. But we recognize we have a long way to go as well.”
Kenny said literacy has always been one of the foundations of the KiHS program.
“Each of our students’ work is evaluated each day they come to school,” Kenny said. “Ten per cent of the grade is based on literacy. We evaluate spelling, punctuation, grammar and sentence structure. That is something we have stressed — we want our students to be able to express themselves with written language.”
The FNSSP is designed to improve literacy, numeracy and student retention, said Ron Marano, Nishnawbe Aski Nations’ FNSSP coordinator. Northern Nishnawbe Education Council, Kwayaciiwin Education Resource Centre, K-Net and NAN have been working together on the FNSSP.
“We hired a literacy specialist, a numeracy specialist and a student retention specialist,” Marano said, explaining there are 24 communities involved in the FNSSP. “They try to help give resources and training to the teachers up north that are part of the project.”
The First Nation Student Success Program Conference was held Dec. 1-3 at the Prince Arthur Hotel in Thunder Bay with numerous presentations including Developing Literacy in a First Nations Context; Evaluating Bilingual Learners; They are 14 and They Can’t Read Yet; High School Lessons Learned; Not Just Another Math Book! (Jump Math); How We Can Use Assessment to Improve School Outcomes; Intermediate and Senior Level Assessments; Student Retention & Parental Involvement and Sharing Our Success.
Pelican Falls First Nations High School FNSSP teacher Desta Buswa stressed the importance of literacy in teaching students.
“We looked at our literacy results (in year one) and we went from a 50 per cent pass rate before FNSSP ... to a 37 per cent pass rate after a year of FNSSP,” Buswa said, explaining that anytime a new initiative is implemented there could be an anticipated implementation drop. “That’s obviously not the direction we are aiming to go, so we asked what can we learn from that. What can we do differently?”
Buswa said Pelican Falls is now targeting their Grade 9 English classes to improve their students’ literacy skills so they will achieve better results in the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test.
“That literacy test is a test of Grade 9 completion, not a test of Grade 10 completion,” Buswa said. “That’s just when we do the test.”
Kwayaciiwin Education Resource Centre has developed a number of curriculum and student retention initiatives under the FNSSP.
“Our program has been extremely successful,” said Roy Morris, director of Kwayaciiwin Education Resource Centre. “Our staff have been visiting communities, doing presentations and engaging teachers and principals and the communities.”
Morris said Kwayaciiwin has completed the school reviews and has engaged schools in developing their school improvement plans.
“Our program also identified resources to help them implement some of the recommendations that the school improvement plans identified,” Morris said. “We are trying to provide resources directly to the communities so they can use those resources for their needs.”