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Nunavut, Nunavik teacher shortage hits school boards hard this fall

Does no one want to be a teacher in the Arctic anymore?

JANE GEORGE
Nunatsiaq News

MONTREAL — As teachers discover that they don't need to leave the South for good job, a serious staffing crisis is battering Nunavut and Nunavik school boards this fall

The pool of qualified, competent teachers available for work in the Arctic is drying up, due to increased demand for teachers in southern Canada.

School enrolments are increasing in the South, where there are fewer new teachers to replace those who have recently retired.

This means many students in the Arctic will end up with young, inexperienced teachers, fresh out of school, and some students may start the school year this fall without any teachers at all.

In the Kivalliq region, where 35 out of 140 teachers are newcomers, Whale Cove's school faces a complete changeover in staff this year, with a new principal and teachers.

But that school can be counted as fortunate.

Some Nunavik students may sit at home

Less than week before classes are due to start, Kiluutaq School in Umiujaq has no teachers for its English sector students, and still needs one teacher for its French language secondary program. If no teachers are found, some students may end up sitting at home, instead of in school.

"They're not going to start, that's it," said an administrator with Nunavik's Kativik School Board.

In the Baffin region, where the education board's personnel office was too "swamped" to answer any questions from a reporter, they're still trying to recruit teachers, just days before most Baffin schools open.

It's the same story all over the Arctic.

Advertising by the Kitikmeot Board of Education netted only 150 applications for the region's 20 vacant positions, a figure termed "dismally low" by board official Ian Critchley.

In the past years, the Kitikmeot board would receive up to 600 applications, without doing any advertising at all.

Teachers with personal problems

"And the type of person who is applying now is different," said Critchley. "Now, we're tending to get people who want to come to the North for some reason. There is still a sense of isolation, and we get people who are running away from something."

But the problem goes beyond the problem of finding experienced teachers with no hidden personal problems.

Keeping teachers is an additional challenge. Many experienced teachers who have been in the Arctic for two, five or even 20 years left this year, a situation affecting the quality of education.

"It's tough," said Joe Taukie, the vice-principal of Cape Dorset's Sam Pudlat School. "The kids get to know the teacher who was here for four or five years. Their communication skills improve, and then it has to start all over again."

Apart from the job boom in the South, the brutal cost of rental housing in Nunavut is often cited as a major reason for the flight of experienced teachers from Nunavut.

Teachers in Nunavut stands to earn at least $50,000 a year, but rents may cost $900 to $1500 a month, taking a big chunk out of their after-tax incomes.

The high cost of housing also discourages some from even looking at jobs in Nunavut.

School boards are telling single-income earners that they won't be well off financially if they move to Nunavut. They encourage single teachers to share lodgings, or look for teaching couples.

Some teachers haven't been able to find suitable housing in Nunavut either.

"That was an incredible stress on them," said Pangnirtung teacher Donald Mearns. "You try to prop them up, but they're not happy. They come here, they're excited, Pang is beautiful and the people are friendly, and then they get a bad taste in their mouth and decide to leave after two years."

Nunavik faces same shortage

Nunavut's reduced benefit package is also said to be a factor in its exodus of teachers.

In Nunavik, teachers may rent subsidized housing for as little as $200 a month and receive two paid trips home a year, but its schools haven't fared much better than Nunavut's.

This year the Kativik School Board had to fill 50 vacant positions, and is struggling to find nine more teachers.

While there's no magic formula for keeping teachers, a dose of community involvement, along with some financial breaks, does appear to help.

In Puvirnituq, where the local school has strong community input into its curriculum and administration, many southern teachers from the South have remained for more than10 years.

Rankin bucks the trend

In Rankin Inlet, there will be only two new faces among 35 teachers this year. Maani Ulaayuk School principal Margo Aksalnik attributes this to the community's lower cost of food and air transport to major cities.

And schools in Rankin Inlet and Arviat have benefitted from bringing in student teachers from the South who do practice teaching in the communities and often choose to return afterwards.

In Coral Harbour, where half the teachers are local residents, staff turnover has also been greatly reduced.

"The long-term solution is to train our own and import less," said Bob Moodie, Nunavut's deputy minister of education. "This will have nothing to do with quality, but if you're from here, you are more likely to stay here."

The Nunavut government plans to invest an additional $2 million this year in teacher training. It also wants to train teachers to teach at the high school level.

"We are going to offer courses for our current elementary teachers who are clustered in the lower grades, so they can get certified for a teaching specialty for the higher grades," said Moodie. "If we train our teachers in the North, it solves several major issues for us at the same time."

In Nunavik, where teacher training programs began more than 20 years ago, many Inuit have qualified as teachers. Some who have completed bachelor of arts programs now teach at the secondary level.

But, according to a Nunavut school board official, graduates from teacher education programs are most successful teaching with Inuktitut-language materials, now available from kindergarten to Grade 3, and in some subjects at the higher grades.

A long-time Nunavut teacher, who agreed to share his thoughts after a guarantee of anonymity, doubts that any Inuit graduate from a teacher training program without a high school or college diploma would feel comfortable teaching advanced courses in subjects such as mathematics.

"If you really want to drop the standard, that's the way to do it. That is really going to kick a hole in the education system," he said.

He said that he's already seen many new Inuit teachers burn out or turn to other employers, such as the Nunavut government, where on-the-job stress is less and the benefits are greater.

"The expectations are very large and the support is falling off," this teacher said. "Who the hell wants to be a teacher?"