On the morning of April 22, Deborah Reid, the principal of Chief Sunrise Education Centre, placed a reminder on Facebook that the school can help people obtain a high school diploma if they are a few credits short.
By early that afternoon, she had already received four calls about the opportunity.
“There is a need,” said the principal of the school on the Hay River Reserve.
Reid has been offering what she calls self-paced courses for mature students for about three years, beginning when she was a program support teacher.
In that time, 11 people have been assisted in obtaining a high school diploma.
“I’m happy about that,” she said. “It made a difference for a few people.”
The mature students have been 18 years of age and over.
“A 40-year-old graduated this year with me,” Reid said. “He always wanted to get his Grade 12 and didn’t know how to do it.”
The principal said she casts a wide net, mostly in K’atlodeeche but even beyond, to help people who might have left school prior to graduating.
“Sometimes life gets in the way for people and they have to leave school and they’re close but not that close, not close enough,” she said. “And they miss out on opportunity because that Grade 12 graduation diploma is like a piece of gold and it’s often an entrance into other places. So they’re stuck and they have trouble trying to make a regular program work for them coming into a school with classes that are run from a certain time to a certain time, and they just are struggling with that.”
However, her self-paced program allows students to do courses on their own time and at home. They can contact Chief Sunrise Education Centre if they need help.
“Maybe they’re eager one week and they get a lot done and they send it to me,” said Reid. “Then the next week something happens in their life and they can’t get at their work. It’s not going to be a big problem, because they’ll just start where they left off.”
How long it takes to complete the courses is up to the students.
“So doing these self-paced courses sounds good, but it’s actually quite difficult in some ways because you don’t have other colleagues in your class that you can talk to and brainstorm with,” said Reid. “So it’s very much like the old correspondence courses used to be.”
Reid has a master’s degree related to working with early school dropouts, focusing mainly on Inuit youth.
“So I’ve done some work in that area,” she said.
And she said that the NWT doesn’t have a great record of people finishing high school.
The reason Reid began offering the self-paced courses goes back to her own family.
“I kind of started this idea because my brother only needed one course to graduate, and he never graduated,” she said, noting that her parents had pictures of their five children hanging on the wall, all in graduation gowns, except for that brother.
“He always felt bad about that. I always felt bad about that for him, too,” she said. “It always kind of pulled on my heartstrings. So if I’m in a position to help somebody graduate, I’m going to help them.”
