Walpole Island Elementary School is beaming, after the results of a five-year project were released this week in Toronto.
Walpole Island First Nation, Kettle and Stony Point First Nation, the Martin Aboriginal Education Initiative, and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) at the University of Toronto released the results of the Model School project – which was implemented by the Martin Aboriginal Education Initiative in the 2009-2010 school year.
The purpose was to provide training and support to teachers and principals in schools operated by Kettle and Stony Point First Nation and Walpole Island First Nation in order to improve students’ achievement in literacy.
Steven Styers, principal at Walpole Island Elementary School, told the Sydenham Current it was an incredible partnership.
“One of the pieces of evidence that the Martin Initiative used to demonstrate success was EQAO testing, because that is something everyone can identify with,” Styers said. “We have many other indicators of success; about the school environment and other academic pieces of evidence, but the EQAO in itself is a pretty spectacular success story.”
Styers said the turnaround at Walpole Island Elementary was staggering.
“In the beginning, the first year of the project, only 20 to 25 per cent of our students were at provincial levels at reading and writing and math. At the end of the project, our writing went up to 91 per cent, our reading went up to 78 per cent… which are at or exceeding provincial standards. It is unheard of progress with a school.”
Styers said it was based on a turnaround school model that Ontario uses, “which is really just investing in the capacity of teaching.
“Research proves the quality of teaching is a direct correlation to student success. They are the most influential persons when it comes to student success in the school. I’m the second, because my job is just to provide support and facilitate teaching throughout the school. The teachers, they are on the front line. It is the teachers we need to invest in.”
Styers said Walpole Island Elementary School had great teachers, but the systemic barriers facing First Nations education, “not having access to school boards and all of those resources” makes it a difficult job.
“The Martin Initiative provided us with professional development for our teachers bi-weekly for four years. To me, that was really the key to this project, investing in teachers. There was a little bit of money involved, but one of Paul Martin’s goals was to fix this problem without throwing tons of money at it.”
Styers added: “We don’t see these type of long-term effective partnerships in First Nations education. We usually see, what we call false generosity or scraps… here is a proposal that will last a year. Here is some money to have for this year, but nothing to sustain this type of progress.”
Styers said the Walpole Island school will look to keep building on this recent success.
“That is our challenge at this point. Now we have the capacity, we certainly don’t want to go backwards. That is not an option here. We are not going to go backwards, because once again now we’re our own experts. We still face all the systemic barriers, the isolation, the disparity of funding, disparity in resources, but we have the experts here. We’ve been trying to circumvent these systemic barriers for years and some aspects we have and some we haven’t. This partnership was one of the most effective I’ve ever been a part of and has been one of the highlights of my career for sure.”
Styers said creating high standards for everyone, students and our teachers, was one of the first goals.
“here is always a thought in First Nation’s education, inaccurately, but some people have this mentality that our kids are somehow deficit. This did not create an equal playing field, but it was help. We proved and Paul Martin proved that with that help, our kids did exceed provincial standards.”
“Our job is to continue to work hard like we did the last four years, continue increasing our capacity and continue finding ways to circumvent the systemic barriers. We’re still in a predicament where 97 per cent of our budget is salaries, but with that being said, our salaries are far below our provincial counterparts. What do we have left to buy books and technology? That is the challenge. Our funding has been frozen for over 20 years.. so it’s nothing new. We’re going to continue to succeed.”
Styers said Martin “hasn’t completely walked away” now that the project is completed.
“The partnership is still in place and we have access to some professional development, certainly not the way it was during the project,” he said. “Mr. Martin’s idea is to roll this out to other First Nation’s as a template for how to help schools improve.”
Cool act.