Education — Issue No. 12 — Wednesday, October 4, 2006 (HTML)

2006 Legislative Session: Second Session, 38th Parliament
SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
MINUTES AND HANSARD

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
EDUCATION



CONTENTS

		Page

Presentations		235
J. Gosnell Jr. R. Beuschel M. Timbres F. Abraham T. Saunders S. Cunningham D. Jarvis F. Siegrist S. Lakusta M. Saunders G. Olafson R. Henry C. McLean S. Lindstrom

Chair:	* John Nuraney (Burnaby-Willingdon L)
Deputy Chair:	Vacant
Members:	Daniel Jarvis (North Vancouver–Seymour L) Richard T. Lee (Burnaby North L) * Lorne Mayencourt (Vancouver-Burrard L) * Mary Polak (Langley L) * John Rustad (Prince George–Omineca L) David Cubberley (Saanich South NDP) * Rob Fleming (Victoria-Hillside NDP) * Norm Macdonald (Columbia River–Revelstoke NDP) * Doug Routley (Cowichan-Ladysmith NDP) * denotes member present

Witnesses:

Flora Abraham (College of New Caledonia)
Rebecca Beuschel (Literacy B.C.)
Sarah Cunningham (Learning Difficulties Centre of B.C.)
Joe Gosnell Jr. (Lheidli T'enneh Band)
Rhonda Henry (Support for Dyslexia and Learning Differences)
Donna Jarvis (Learning Difficulties Centre of B.C.)
Susan Lakusta
Stephanie Lindstrom (Support for Dyslexia and Learning Differences)
Charlene McLean (Support for Dyslexia and Learning Differences)
Terry Neilson (College of New Caledonia)
Gloria Olafson (Support for Dyslexia and Learning Differences)
Marc Saunders (Prince George Public Library)
Teresa Saunders (Principal, Centre for Learning Alternatives, School District 57 — Prince George )
Frank Siegrist (Prince George Native Friendship Centre; Learning Circle Literacy Program)
Marcia Timbres (College of New Caledonia)

J. Nuraney (Chair): Before we begin our formal meeting, I would like to make a statement. On behalf of the committee and the members of the Legislative Assembly, I would like to offer our sincere condolences to the families and friends of the three young people who tragically lost their lives south of Hixon on Sunday. May their souls rest in eternal peace.

My name is John Nuraney. I am the MLA for Burnaby-Willingdon, and I am the Chair of the Select Standing Committee on Education. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the Education Committee's public hearing in Prince George. It is a real pleasure for us to be in your fine city and to hear directly from you about the important topic of adult literacy.

For your information, today's meeting is a public meeting which will be recorded and transcribed by Hansard Services. A copy of this transcript, along with the minutes of this meeting, will be printed and will be made available on the committee's website at www.leg.bc.ca/cmt/education.

In addition to the meeting transcript, a live audio webcast of this meeting is also produced and available on the committee's website to enable interested listeners to hear the proceedings as they occur. An archived copy of the audio broadcast will also be retained on the committee's website.

Let me also, for the benefit of the presenters, read out the mandate that this committee has. The Select Standing Committee on Education was reissued the following terms of reference by the Legislative Assembly on February 20, 2006: that the committee be empowered to examine, inquire into and make recommendations with respect to finding effective strategies to address the specific challenge of adult literacy and, in particular, to conduct consultations to consider successful strategies from other jurisdictions on the promotion of adult literacy and specific strategies to improve literacy rates among aboriginal people, English-as-a-second-language adults and seniors.

The committee is encouraging participation by written and telephone submissions and has extended the deadline for this process until Monday, October 23. We are required to report back to the Legislative Assembly no later than November 30, 2006.

Today we have a number of people working with us. Andrew Costa and Mike Leblond are here from Hansard Services. They record what is said during the hearing, and then Hansard produces a transcript of what people say, which is posted on the Internet.

We also have staff here from the Office of the Clerk of Committees. Kate Ryan-Lloyd is Clerk Assistant with the Legislative Assembly and also our Committee Clerk. Our researcher Josie Schofield is at the information table.

I would now like to invite the members of the committee to introduce themselves, beginning from the right.

L. Mayencourt: I'm Lorne Mayencourt, MLA for downtown Vancouver. Vancouver-Burrard is the name of the riding.

N. Macdonald: My name is Norm Macdonald. I'm the MLA for Columbia River–Revelstoke.

J. Rustad: John Rustad. I'm the MLA for Prince George–Omineca. Thank you for being here today.

D. Routley: I'm Doug Routley, MLA for Cowichan-Ladysmith. I'd like to thank the T'enneh people and all the aboriginal peoples of this region for allowing us to hold this meeting on your traditional land.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Now I would like to encourage the presenters to throw as much light as they can on the mandate of this committee to help us in our work.

We consider it an honour to be in your territory. Please begin when you are ready.

First of all, as the Chair alluded, my name is Joe Gosnell Jr. There is a senior that is my father. I am a Nisga'a member. I am from the Nisga'a Nation. My role and title with the Lheidli T'enneh Nation is that I'm the general manager for the band operations.

Unfortunately, Chief Dominic Frederick is unable to attend due to an unscheduled personal commitment and sends his regrets. However, I will read the presentation, and I will read it in the context that the chief councillor would have wanted it presented. Without further ado, I think I'll just get right into the presentation.

I'll begin with the written presentation. Forgive me for not maintaining eye contact as I read through.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you for your presentation. We'll now have the opportunity to ask you questions.

M. Polak: I want to say right off the bat that I really appreciate the approach in terms of outlining some specific areas of concern and also identifying the fact that it isn't good enough just to put money in it. I mean, per capita, per student for aboriginal students, the support finances that go out are higher than many other distinguished or separate categories, and yet clearly, there are things that aren't working.

I have two questions with regard to that. The first is that you mentioned financial accountability. I'd be interested in any ideas as to how we could do that better. Right now school boards have to file their reports according to generally accepted accounting principles, but I don't know that that helps the community find trust in the numbers. I'd like to hear what you think about financial accountability.

The second would be…. In his document the Chief references the importance of showing and documenting actual results. I'd love to hear how the community would see that. What kinds of results should we aim at and strive for, for aboriginal students?

J. Gosnell: First, in regards to budgets and confirming and ensuring that funding or any moneys are properly expended and accounted for, I would probably suggest that a more in-depth audit, maybe, to those regions that receive the biggest portions of the funding, to ensure that the funding gets allocated from the government to specific regions and then is broken down and from there goes to school boards.

Again, Prince George is one of those regions where they receive a lot of that funding. Specifically, I'm here to represent and present information on behalf of some of the aboriginal members. For them to have some sort of comfort and confidence and to verify, through whatever schools are involved and that have the biggest aboriginal student populations…. Target those areas in regards to an audit, and confirm that those moneys have been expended the way they were intended.

As an example, aboriginal educational assistance. As a board member on the Aboriginal Education Board, I have no way of verifying, other than through the audit that is presented to me, if that in fact was utilized and expended for the purposes intended. If I'm unsure of that, then I can imagine what the constituents I represent feel and where their confidence is at.

In regards to your second question, I would have to speak from a position on behalf of the community that I'm here to speak on behalf of. I would definitely like to see statistics and results that apply to this community or this nation so that we see, monitor and report ongoing progress. And that's to all areas. The most important area is to attain and maintain the provincial average in education — you know, that same standard in language and cultural activity.

D. Routley: My role in the opposition is as a critic of apprenticeships and skills training. So I appreciate your bringing to light that need for training. I see it more as a training shortage than a trades shortage. There are very, very high unemployment rates on all the reserves and off reserve. I come from Cowichan. In Ladysmith we have over 90-percent unemployment in the Ladysmith band.

I agree with you. I'd like to see more training spaces. In looking at what is working and what isn't, the Burns Lake example has been brought to me as one that's very successful in the community, directed by community, with supports all the way through for the students that have kept people in the program. Have you looked at what they're doing in Burns Lake?

J. Gosnell: Yeah. There are quite a few models and successful models that are running.

The problem is that there's a huge transportation issue with the community that I work for and that I represent today. Although when you look at it on a map, basically, the Lheidli T'enneh reserve lands are almost situated right in Prince George, and that's the perspective that most people have. If you don't know where it is…. I have to admit, a lot of people in Prince George aren't even aware that Lheidli T'enneh reserve exists, and most people don't know how to get there. There's a huge problem.

Again, what's common to first nations reserves is the lack of transportation, employment, education and health services that exist there. It is a reality. Unfortunately, it's the same story that is told over and over again. Because of lack of general education and knowledge to Canadians, it's really hard to describe unless you actually go out there and see and hear for yourselves the day-to-day challenges.

I do, and I have looked at Burns Lake. It's nice to see, read and hear about, but each community…. They're individual communities. They're different. Expectations are different. One huge challenge is transportation to this community.

D. Routley: One other comment. The last bullet, school board representation. I was a school trustee as well and an employee of a school district, Cowichan, where we have a high first nations population in our schools and in community but virtually no employees who are first nations. It is a part of our education accountability agreement for us to attempt to address that imbalance, but it hasn't happened year after year after year. The agreements themselves expire after five-year periods and are renewed with hope, but it still doesn't happen.

If you had 15,500 students, 19 percent being first nations, if it were a completely equitable mix, out of 800 teachers there would be 160 first nations teachers and probably around 30 teaching assistants and over 130 support staff.

I hope that you'll lobby your school board to be accountable to that kind of agreement and begin hiring more people from your community. We certainly are trying to do that in Cowichan but so far not with a lot of success. I hope you have a lot more success than we have so far. Just a comment.

J. Gosnell: Yeah, I think it's a common issue, mainly because of the structure that's in place already in the environment. Employment opportunities. I won't get into that, but those are the challenges that each district has in front of them.

J. Rustad: Thank you for coming today and sharing your perspective. I have a couple of questions. I want

to keep in mind the mandate of this committee. It would be great to go broader than this, but the mandate of the committee is more around adult literacy and literacy in first nations. Of course, sometimes in order to be able to deal with literacy going forward, you need to look at the early components and certainly, with the literacy issue that we have, strategies that we can move forward with.

I was interested in your comments around the trades and the need in terms of more training. We have had quite a bit of success in terms of expanding training, and we have implemented some mobile training units to be able to go into communities. I think the real challenge there is getting the literacy skills to begin with, to be in a position where you can then apply them further in terms of going into a trade or other occupation that you may be interested in.

So the two questions I wanted to ask about. One is: particularly on reserve, what kind of literacy initiatives are in place? Or are there any literacy initiatives in place? Around that, depending on what that would be, what do you think it's going to take to attract people to want to take that step forward?

When I hear many presentations around the province and just in general discussions I've had with people, when people come and say that they've furthered their education, they've graduated and they've gone back to school and got their Dogwood, there's always a sense of pride in terms of the accomplishment. But it was always a hurdle to overcome to get to that point where they would make the commitment to go forward.

So I'd really be interested in your ideas around how, particularly on reserve, we could have effective literacy programs that would be of interest and be related to the individuals that perhaps would want those services, and how we could pull them in.

J. Gosnell: That's a good question. Our understanding is that the committee's mandate basically is targeting literacy. This approach, this presentation, looks at it and is asking the question: what are the sources to target and to begin, I guess, addressing issues to be able to put resources into certain areas to address it? That's the general approach.

There aren't any real literacy programs for the reserve or its community members. I believe that with technology…. I think that's one area that we would really like to be in on, the technology of today. Kids go to school on a day-to-day basis. School ends at 2:30 or three. They have no access to the library or anything else that residents here in the city of Prince George have access to.

Basically, if they want access to a library, they're going to have to rely on their parents, if they have a vehicle. My view is to bring the resources to the community via the technology. Again, all of us here are well aware of and utilize the Internet. It's a common day-to-day tool that we have no second thoughts of. It's like using the phone. For a lot of the members of this nation, that's not available. It creates a disadvantage.

I'm not only referring to students. It's young adults and adults alike who probably sit at home wishing they had on-line access to maybe attain grade 10 or 11 to get into carpentry or to drive an 18-wheeler. Those little things may seem little to us, but to them, that's another opportunity to get into a trade, to start their own career.

J. Rustad: A follow-up, and it's not quite related to this. It's more for your work on the Aboriginal Education Board in the school district.

A couple of years ago when I was on the school board here, we had talked about the idea of an aboriginal education centre that would take a different approach to providing an education — an education that was encased or infused with aboriginal culture.

That initiative, unfortunately, stalled somewhat. I'm just wondering about your comments as to whether you think that's something that would be worth pursuing in the future.

J. Gosnell: I have to be careful. I have differing views as a parent. Again, I haven't, to date, confirmed with the chief in council that I represent here today what their position is on that. I think it would probably be safe to keep those comments to myself at this point. I don't want to put myself in a disposition with the nation and the council that I'm here to speak on behalf of.

I think your point about an important part of dealing with adult literacy is, of course, right at the beginning and the K-to-12 system. In particular, I'm interested in the point that you're making about assessment.

My background includes being a teacher as well as an elementary principal. The importance of identifying accurately and quickly things that need to be worked on, whether it's related to health or to different learning styles, is very important.

You've talked somewhat about some of the shortcomings. What sorts of things have changed? Have you lost services that used to be there, or are there services that you feel need to be added immediately? Do you have particular ideas about things that are most important?

J. Gosnell: On this subject, I feel a little bit more comfortable talking about on behalf of the nation and as a parent. Most definitely, it should be an issue. Personnel should be in place who know screening or assessing students. It doesn't matter what race they are from. I mean, in this article in today's paper it's a common problem, from what I read. It's not only a concern for this nation; it's probably a common problem for all parents, and not only in this city.

If it is a service that has been lost, it should be put back in place. As a parent, there are, I guess, automatic

assumptions — again, this is applicable to any minority group — that we're in a sense "profiling" some people or people from certain races.

I'll use myself as an example. Again, this is a common problem — not to get away from the educational part. Because I'm native, if I'm not wearing proper attire or business wear, and then if I go into a shopping mall, somebody's watching me or security is following me and my family around. That's the assumption that still exists. Nobody wants to talk about it, and it's just an example of those assumptions that are still lingering. Definitely, in the real world, it's going to continue to exist.

It's just reality. It's something you can't totally eliminate, but assuming somebody has a learning disability based on race is totally wrong. That can hurt a child, it can hurt a teenager, and it can really have dire impacts on self-esteem in whatever career they're planning or wanting to get into.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, Mr. Gosnell. It was very nice of you to come out and talk to us. We appreciate that.

R. Beuschel: Thank you. My name is Rebecca Beuschel, and I'm the regional literacy coordinator for the region covered by the College of New Caledonia. I've also recently joined the board of directors for Literacy B.C. I have years of experience working with families and adults in many different literacy programs and have worked with aboriginal communities as well as with adults for whom English is not their first language.

I'm just going to read this because, despite what my husband would tell you, I cannot talk for ten minutes off the top of my head. In order to prepare for today's presentation, I contacted many people in my area to ask the question: "How can we improve literacy for adults in our communities?"

The answer was the same with every person I asked: stop cutting programs. Many people then followed up with suggestions such as: offer more support to learners, and provide long-term funding so programs can build momentum and can make a difference.

My area of coordination is broad. It spans more than 600 kilometres from Burns Lake to Valemount, and then a few hundred more from Mackenzie down to Quesnel. There are many small communities in between the larger centres, and at the 15 hours per week that I get paid to coordinate and support literacy activities in my area, it is impossible for me to fully support the literacy efforts of these communities. Therein lies the first barrier: access to decent support.

Adult learners face so many challenges. I'm sure you will hear several recurring themes tonight, and I'm certain this will be one of them. Not all adult learners need support in all of the areas I am about to list, but many do, and many cannot succeed to any degree without these supports in place.

Transportation, food, child care, finances, poverty, remote and rural lifestyles and health are just some of the areas that present regular barriers for adult learners. Some of these barriers present obvious consequences. If you can't get there, you can't attend college. If you don't eat, you can't learn well enough to stay in the program. If you can't afford to be off work while the learning takes place and you have to choose, you choose to work instead of to learn.

Then some of the consequences are more subtle and very damaging. For example, if you don't attend a learning program for any of the above reasons, and you don't read well — you don't read often — you don't understand the letters coming home from school, so you don't participate in parent advisory committees, and you don't get involved in the school culture. You miss out on many opportunities to voice your opinion, and you miss out on chances to foster better communication between yourself and your son's teacher.

Before you know it, there is so much distance between you and your child's learning environment that you don't know how to pick up the thread, and so you don't. You let it go, and then it is gone. The opportunity to engage in your son's learning experience is gone. The opportunity to grow with your son in that context and learn what he learns is gone.

Adult learners often have to knock down or climb over so many walls before they get to the point of confronting their own learning needs that without adequate and appropriate support they cannot and they will not learn.

One recommendation I would make when thinking about how to enhance adult literacy would be to look at the entire situation of an adult learner. Don't just look at the learning piece, because it is not separated from everyday life and everyday barriers. Learning does not take place regardless of everything else; it takes place because of everything else. If the proper supports are in place and are available for the adult learner, the learning experience will be so much more valuable and much more likely to continue.

The second barrier I would like to touch on is the type of learning that is available. In my own experience I've met so many adults who cannot attend regular classes for all sorts of reasons: college upgrading does not suit their needs, computer or on-line courses do not suit their learning style or their temperament. There needs to be great flexibility for adult learners. If we offer help to the adult learner in the context of what works for him or her, then real and meaningful learning can take place.

For some individuals, a small-group setting in a social and safe environment might work, such as the local women's centre. For others, one-to-one tutoring in a public place such as the local library or in a private place such as their own living room might be best. Others might thrive on a conventional school setting, either evening or weekend classes or regular daytime hours. What works for some will not ever work for others. The learning environment needs to adjust to suit the needs of the learner and not the other way

around. There need to be culturally appropriate materials and resources available, and the learning content needs to be relevant.

Needs-specific and individualized learning programs need to be supported and sustained financially over lengthy periods. I know there's not a bottomless pot of money available, and much of what I'm suggesting requires a great deal of money to support it, but it is what I hear from people in my area every day. When I ask them for ideas on what can be done to improve literacy for adults, it is what I hear.

We need to help the adults so they can help their children, because if parents cannot help their children learn, how will the cycle of low literacy ever be broken? If parents cannot help their children, it falls back on the schools, and if the schools miss those children, the cycle continues.

In an effort to represent the people I support, I offered to read any statements or testimonials for people who could not attend in person today. Here is one such presentation. It's from a literacy coordinator in Valemount. Her name is Pat Powell.

I think this committee needs to hear directly from learners. I think moving through the province to hear first hand from individuals their concerns and suggestions for improving and enhancing adult literacy in their regions is a very good way to receive feedback. I would like to see this type of a forum take place in every community throughout the province.

I would encourage the committee to pursue local conversations organized by local people and attended by policy-makers and funding agencies. There is a very real need to hear the voices and the thoughts of the adult learners, and there is just as strong a need to hear from the advocates — in many cases family members — the practitioners, the program coordinators, the supporters and the teachers of the adult learners. The conversation needs to be real and ongoing. I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to speak today, and sincerely hope you listen closely to what people here today will tell you. Thank you.

L. Mayencourt: Thank you, Rebecca. I have a couple of questions. The first one has to do with Pat Powell's letter, which is the suggestion of a provincewide diagnosis system that would travel around the province. What is meant by that?

R. Beuschel: I don't know. She just e-mailed this to me and asked me to read it out on her behalf. I think what she's probably thinking of…. There are tests that can be done to determine if someone has a learning disability. As an adult they can be done, but I think they're about $900 a time, so that's a barrier for a lot of people.

I'm not certain, but I think within the school districts, you can get it done if.…

R. Beuschel: Yes, for the child. But for the adult it's very expensive, so lots of them just remain undiagnosed. They don't figure out what their particular issues are; they don't figure out what learning style would suit them; they don't figure out what programs would meet their needs. So they stop learning.

I think what she's thinking is that they usually have to travel to larger centres, probably like Prince George. That's a barrier, as well as the cost itself. I'm not sure about the $900, but I think it's around that. It could even be more.

L. Mayencourt: This would be for adult learners who were wanting to enter a literacy program or some other higher learning.

R. Beuschel: Yes. For example, an adult learner who has gone to the college to try upgrading, just can't do it and keeps being unsuccessful. Perhaps there's a learning disability there, but the testing is very expensive, and it might be difficult, so they don't get tested. They just drop out of the program rather than fail all the time.

They just stop going, whereas if there was a specific determination of what their problem was and then what programs could help them, they'd probably be more encouraged to stay in the learning environment.

The other question is…. You've mentioned in here that it's great for us to travel around the province and that you wish we'd go to every one of them. I think all of us do as well. Oh, maybe not every one of them.

How do we get this kind of dialogue happening in communities? We had a really great meeting this morning

in Prince Rupert. We had some people that were in literacy programs. There were four women who were giving us a presentation. They were in school learning to read for the first time, and we were talking to them. How do we get people engaged in the conversation about what literacy is? Is it reading? Is it adding and subtracting? Is it social literacy? All those sorts of things. How do we get that conversation going for people?

R. Beuschel: Well, for example, I'm from Quesnel, and I think I'm the only person that has driven from Quesnel to appear this afternoon. That in itself is a barrier — that people would have to drive to Prince George to speak for ten minutes. They could just send their presentation. Most of them probably never will, because they just don't get around to it, whereas if you have a deadline, you're forced to meet it. I'm up at midnight doing my presentation.

I think contacting local people and going to those communities — for example, going to Quesnel, Williams Lake, Prince George — maybe for two hours at a time, and a bit more informally. This is quite formal, and there's quite a distinction between us and this table here. And the sound is really bad. You're probably not aware of that, but people sitting back there can't hear.

For example, I'm the regional literacy coordinator for the whole area that…. Wherever there's a College of New Caledonia, that's my area. If somebody had contacted me and said, "Would you be able to organize for us to come and speak to people in every one of your areas?" I would have done it.

I would have just phoned people I know — I know people in every town in my area — and said: "Where can we meet? Let's meet where learners are meeting. A couple of people want to come in and have a conversation about literacy and what it means. It'll be informal. It'll be an hour and a half, two hours, over coffee. They just want to hear your thoughts."

I'm sure they would be really well attended; they would be supported. And it would be easy to do, because an instructor or a tutor or a wife could go with someone who's having learning difficulties. You'd hear directly from the learners in, I think, a really positive way as well.

I think adults who have finally taken that step towards learning — and it's a gutsy thing to do, in a lot of cases — are so pleased when they're recognized and acknowledged and when their learning is being appreciated by society, that they're happy to talk about it.

It's probably limited funds for you guys to come and do this. I really appreciate that it is happening here in Prince George, but I'm sure there are a lot of people that aren't here that normally would love to have been here.

L. Mayencourt: May I just make a suggestion that if you can organize one in Quesnel or in some other area and you want us to come, I'm sure that at least one of the members of the committee would be willing to come and have that conversation. That is really what we're trying to do. We're trying to get everybody talking about it and to find the things that motivate people to engage in this and remove barriers. We need to talk to those people.

R. Beuschel: Mackenzie is also one of my areas. They have a couple of literacy programs on reserve quite far away from Mackenzie. It's about an eight-hour drive on a dirt road up Williston Lake. I'm not sure if they're coming today.

They were going to try and make it today just because they felt it was so important to talk about literacy in rural areas, which is such a barrier to get to and succeed with a literacy program. You need time, and you need years and years to establish it. You need to build trust. You need to build familiarity before even any formal learning could ever take place.

N. Macdonald: First, I'd like to thank you very much for your presentation. You've done a wonderful job of putting it down into two simple points, I think. The government has talked about making British Columbia the most literate society in North America. I think, pretty clearly, what you're saying is: if we're to achieve that, if we're serious about achieving that, we have to do these two things.

One is removing the barriers. You've talked about transportation difficulties, about day care difficulties. It's a whole package that has to be put together to support any program that's put in place. I think that's a really strong point and one we're hearing a lot of.

The second one is that need to individualize programs. Each area is going to need a different approach, and that approach is going to have to develop over time.

The question, maybe to the letter, is around the diagnosis systems. I know it's not your letter, but logically, you would have that within the school system — wouldn't you? It seems to me to make sense that you would have a strong diagnosis system in the school system. That's where you're likely to catch these things at a time when you can deal with them most cost-effectively.

R. Beuschel: I think Pat's probably talking about adults who are in their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond and, yes, have been missed. They had just been dismissed 30 years ago as troublemakers or attention-seekers or dumb or lazy or whatever. They were much more inclined to just push them to the back seats of the rooms and send them to the principal's office.

I think she's talking about those people. How can a 60-year-old now who really wants to learn but is struggling and doesn't know why he's struggling …? How can he find out if there is some learning disability that's blocking his learning without undergoing, perhaps, a journey somewhere into the biggest centre in the province and an expensive test?

M. Polak: I want to talk a bit about the choices we have to make in order to support whatever programs we've put in place and, as a context, to give you…. One of the things that is fortunate, I think, for the committee is that we do have at least three former school trustees. I'm one of them.

For those who've been involved in education, whether it's at the teaching level or at the governance level, one of the very common and unfortunate things about education is its tendency to gravitate toward, say, a temporary theme for a couple of years. A bunch of programs will develop around it, and then pretty soon we move on to something else, and that becomes the popular theme.

It always is a challenge to ask educators, who are certainly well-meaning and wanting to initiate some good change, to say: "Okay, make the choice. Tell me where it ought to go." Because I know from Pat…. And even some of the theming in your presentation supports the notion that yes, there needs to be more funding directed at supports.

The question that I have for you is: okay then, specifically to which supports should government direct that money? We could put millions of dollars in, zillions, all over, but if it's in lousy programs, it might just give people some jobs and not really help folks read — to be blunt. So to which programs should we be specifically directing that money, and how do we know that? Where are we drawing our information from?

R. Beuschel: I don't know to which specific program. When I think of adult literacy and the things it needs, it's like each learner needs to be looked at and given an independent learning plan. Someone needs to look at them — and I don't know who it is — and say, "Okay, without child care, this woman is never going to come to class, and class will work well for her because she's said it will. And these are her aims, and this is what she wants to achieve, and she's set out a three-year plan. So without child care and without some sort of income assistance, she's never going to be here, because she's going to have to give up one of her part-time jobs to be here" — something like that.

You look at what that woman needs and realistically try to support her as best as possible. At least that way, when you've done that, that's one complete person that hopefully is on the way to success. Then you do that again with as much money as you've got. Until you run out, you do that.

I think that just introducing a couple of adult literacy programs in each community and hoping people will come will probably not work. I'd rather see the money go to…. And it would be hard to do it, and I would hate to be the one to prioritize the learners.

If you work on the complete-package idea, I think there's much more chance of success. Then you have another successful person in that community who can hopefully then feed back into that community and enrich it more. But I don't know. I would not want to be setting priorities for funding. I just apply for the funding.

D. Routley: Thank you very much for the presentation. I note that every person you asked said: "Stop cutting programs." Maybe we could start there, because there are obviously programs that have been working that have lost funding. We've heard about the importance of assessments, especially in K-to-12. Dr. Satya Brink gave a presentation to this committee and pointed out to us that if we don't catch these issues in the K-to-12 system, we'll pay twice.

Your idea of prioritizing learners. She also pointed our way there by saying that there are more British Columbians in the second tier of low literacy than in the lowest tier — the lowest tier probably being affected by a lot of learning disability issues that weren't caught in the K-to-12 system.

You are helping us prioritize the funding targets in that way, because it was clear that there are different ways to access people for literacy training: adults who are working, maybe a sectoral approach — training at work; the K-to-12 piece; the English-as-a-second-language piece. So it is helpful for you to point us in that direction, and I appreciate it.

You also talk about the whole package, and I think maybe the social determinants of health come into that — literacy being one of them, and taking care of the child care needs of learners, taking care of the transportation needs and some of the other supports. Are those the kinds of supports you were meaning, in the whole package?

R. Beuschel: Yeah, that's it. And not just like I've heard other people say: "Well, if people can't get there, that's their problem because there's a public bus system." But that doesn't work for everyone. Some people might need taxi vouchers, and then you run into the cynicism of: "Well, people rip that off."

I've worked with family programs before where, unfortunately, the clients using the taxi vouchers have just got the taxi to wait awhile outside the grocery store while they go and get their groceries, and then the taxi vouchers skyrocket and the budget's blown, and you're only halfway through the program. I think that's just sort of part of it.

Looking at really how we can reach people, is it better to send a coordinator to that remote community and try to engage them in the learning they need? Or is it better to pay for all of these people — maybe there are six or eight in a rural community — to come into the larger centre, and then we will support them with their transportation? It's not just looking at how we've provided transportation and some coffee and some snacks and how that should be good enough, but looking really at who's missing and why they are missing and what they need. Maybe it's a really easy thing to try to fix why they're not there. I don't think so, but in

some cases it might be. It might just be something simple that's just been missed.

R. Fleming: One of the things we've heard at this committee is that, in terms of success in learning, you have to look at the obligations and the lifestyles of the people you're trying to help and provide the opportunities for. Often it's just not an option for them to come home from a tired day and do a class or to stop working, for example, if they had to support a family and upgrade their skills. We heard many times that workplace learning programs are very important and very successful in terms of participation and actual results in raising the literacy levels of individuals.

I'm just wondering if Literacy B.C. has been able to start any programs or has had any success in motivating…. I'm thinking particularly of large employers in some of the towns you represent, Prince George included — perhaps the wood fibre supply having a horizon and some of the job shifting that inevitably is going to occur — and whether you've been able to engage them in thinking about literacy quite seriously.

R. Beuschel: I don't know outside of Quesnel, where I live. The Literacy B.C. thing is maybe a bit misleading. I'm on the board of directors with Literacy B.C., but I don't work for Literacy B.C.

For example, in Quesnel at one of the mills they had a tutoring program. They brought an instructor in to tutor whichever workers wanted to be volunteer tutors. They tutored a co-worker who was self-identified as needing help. For two hours a week they tutored, and for one of those two hours each of the employees — the tutor and the learner — were paid. It was sort of like: "You're volunteering, but we're still going to give you some money to continue with it." It worked really well.

Little programs like that…. There may have been five matches in that program in any one year, but they made such a difference to the people who were both tutoring and learning in that situation. It didn't seem like such a thing, such a commitment, that you were giving up and that you were now finishing work and having to go to tutor someone voluntarily. Instead of finishing work at four, you finished at three. You were paid till four, and you stayed till five, and you tutored. It worked really well.

I'm not sure about other centres, if they've got workplace literacy programs like that. I suspect there might be the odd one dotted around the place, but I don't think it's very common. But I think workplace literacy is a topic, a bit of a flavour of the month, that is definitely being talked about in a lot of places.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you very much, Ms. Beuschel, for your presentation. I appreciate it.

Our next presenter is Marcia Timbres. She's accompanied by Flora Abraham and Terry Neilson.

M. Timbres: Thank you very much. We're here representing the College of New Caledonia. My name is Marcia Timbres. I'm the dean of the developmental education programs. I'm also an outgoing board member of Literacy B.C. With me are two ABE students, Flora Abraham and Terry Neilson. They're very excited and keen to be here. They'll be talking a little bit later. Also in the audience are some ABE instructors, Paula Davies, Susan Hatfield and Maureen Jones. They're here also supporting our students.

We're very, very pleased that there is so much interest in the area of literacy. Literacy for many is a lifelong struggle, and we trust, because it's one of the province's goals, that it continues to remain high on everyone's list, and it isn't just the flavour of this year.

We're very, very upset that the federal government doesn't share this same value of literacy, cutting almost $18 million in adult literacy programs. I have to tell you: those program dollars cut are going to affect B.C. adults and programs, and it's really a shame.

After reviewing some of the standing committee notes on Hansard, we find that some of the things we have to say have already been said by our colleagues in the lower mainland, but we would like to retell them a little bit with a more northern perspective. Again, you've heard them from people before us, and you'll hear it over and over, I'm sure.

In the north community colleges serve very, very large geographic areas which, as you've heard, create significant barriers for students trying to access ABE programs. That's mainly what we'll be talking about. In our region 50 percent of our population lives outside of Prince George, and it's considered rural. The north is also unique in terms of a high percentage of aboriginal peoples — 11 percent in our area compared to 2 percent from the lower mainland.

Many of the speakers talked about considering social issues when addressing literacy. In this region the average income is $6,000 a year lower than it is in other areas of the province. Not surprisingly, poor education outcomes are very significant. In the region the high school completion rate for 18-year-olds is only 61 percent, and for aboriginals the statistics are even worse. So we need unique and innovative approaches to adult literacy programming in our area.

Over the past 38 years the College of New Caledonia has tried to ensure that the literacy needs of our students in our various communities are met. Community colleges such as ours are well-placed to meet the needs of the challenges our learners face.

It's not always easy. Small communities face really difficult issues. They don't have the critical mass to offer various programs, so sometimes students are forced into a program with learners that have different needs. It's not always a bad thing, but it can be very confusing and frustrating for both the learners and the instructors.

My presentation, which I think you have, is divided into three areas: best practices, barriers and some recommendations. In the interests of time I'm just going to go through some of them, because you have them and I hope you will read them. I'll just highlight the ones that

Respect. You know, to be successful an adult literacy program really, really needs to walk the walk, talk the talk and respect their students. Respect their challenges, their strengths, their learning styles. I think this is something that I really feel strongly that our institution has been able to do.

You need to have a commitment to literacy. In some colleges in the lower mainland — I'm sure you've heard of this — there's a lot of pressure to get rid of some of the literacy-level classes, classes that only have 12 students in them, in favour of reallocating those dollars and putting them into a UT program where you can have 200 students in a class — you know, same dollars, way more FTEs. We haven't done that at CNC, and I'm really proud of that.

Often, literacy-level students are quiet learners. They don't make a lot of noise, and they can seem invisible. So they're easy to dismiss in the whole scheme of things. Well, who's making the most noise? That's where you put your money. We really feel strongly that literacy learners need to be heard and seen.

Faculty that are professionally trained. You've heard things about volunteers, and volunteers are the backbone of communities and are wonderful. But when you have individuals that have challenges, difficulties that are really complex, to expect that a volunteer can come in and work miracles is not going to happen. You need people who are trained, who understand what a learning disability is, who understand the needs of an adult learner. That's an important aspect of literacy, and with trained instructors we have that.

We also have a fully integrated adult environment, which is really important. You can't take strategies that you use in the K-to-12 system and then just put it into an adult environment and say: "Okay, let's just do it this way." You need to have classrooms, facilities and instructors who understand that and are willing to work in that integrated environment.

We don't want to marginalize literacy-level students. We make sure they're part of everything in our institution, whether it be karaoke night or other parts of the institution. We make sure students are participating. They get a chance to sit in the cafeteria and say: "Look at that. That's a culinary arts student. What do you need to be a culinary arts student? Hey, I could do that. That's a couple of years down the road for me. I never thought that was a possibility." That's what we have.

Our upgrading programs are tuition-free. With that comes textbooks, tutorial support, counselling and a library. We even have dental services for students. The gentleman earlier was talking about computer labs and Internet services. We have that available until midnight at our institution.

In Burns Lake — as you were talking about, Doug — they have occupational and physical therapists. They have speech and language pathologists and a family literacy program there too. They've done amazing things. There are so many opportunities for students, as well as learning.

Again, talking about community partners. Lakes District has had an amazing increase over the past four years in ABE students. It's all because they have partnerships. Most community colleges have a lot of partnerships, but Burns Lake has taken it to the nth degree. Their program is so successful because they have a philosophy that revolves around partnerships — with the local aboriginal band, the school district, the families in their community — and they usually have programs that are close to home for the student.

Rebecca was talking about transportation. Even in a small community like Burns Lake, there's Grande Isles, there's south something-or-other, and there's another community that are all very different and very difficult to get even into Burns Lake. So it's amazing.

We have a number of other services that I think really put us in a position to deal with learners effectively. But we face these barriers that we just…. Everyday I hear about these.

The funding rules for students. A student on social or employment assistance — it's just a struggle for them to even come to the college to get some training, whether it be literacy or any other trades training. Some workers won't let them come at all. They have to search for jobs that many of them are not able to do, are not well prepared for. Some allow them to come part-time, so it isn't consistent. Students are confused; we as advocates are confused. We've had students who've had to lie to their workers in order to come to school, and that makes for a very, very stressful learning environment.

The Ministry of Employment and Income Assistance has a two-year rule. You can only come to school for two years, and they'll fund you. If you're too low — the level of literacy — you can't do it. If you can't get upgraded and take a career program in two years, they won't fund you. So for a student who is at a literacy level, what are they going to do?

Indian and Northern Affairs Canada doesn't view adult literacy upgrading as recognized for funding, so students can't get funding in that way. Then some, whether it be their bands or whether it be the Ministry of Employment and Income Assistance, a lot of the groups say you have to attend school full-time. Well, for an individual who has a family or has some learning difficulties or is terrified to come to school, full-time is very, very difficult.

All these rules happen, and they're inconsistent, and students have a difficult time navigating through them.

Rebecca talked about insecure funding, especially for outreach kinds of programs. Boy, it is so difficult to get funding. It's a full-time job looking for funding for programs like that.

You have to cobble money together from different sources. You have to camouflage your program so it meets that funding need, because often they don't fund regular, long-term ongoing programs. You spend endless hours looking for partners that are going to look good on a proposal, and in the end, you may or may not get

the money. I have a colleague who likes to refer to this as: "We're pimping for literacy." That's what it makes us feel, and it's difficult.

We often have students who have disabilities, and they're put into programs where they have to go and find a job right away. They look for work, you know, six weeks or two months maximum, get those job skills and get out in the workplace. For individuals who are complex — have complex learning styles and complex learning needs — to expect that to happen is really, really unfair. Forcing them to attend programs doesn't benefit them in the long run. They just end up coming back and recycling through the system.

For English-as-a-second-language students, especially the higher-level students, they're not able to access ABESAP funds — I'm sure you've heard that term before: adult basic education student assistance funds. Many of them try to sneak around the back way because ESL courses do have tuitions. They try to go into an ABE course because those are tuition-free. ABE courses aren't appropriate for ESL students. They end up being not successful, and they don't fully participate in a program or in the workplace. It really is a frustrating situation.

We've made a couple of recommendations here. I won't go into them in the interest of saving time, because I would like to get to my learners here, but they all stem from our barriers. I'm sure you'll be able to get a look at that.

One of the other things that I wanted to talk about — we've had this debate at our institution a number of times — is that illiteracy is perceived as societal shame. Somehow, by God, we've got to fix that. You know, for some individuals we can fix it, but for others we can't. There are some individuals in our community who will never meet the levels of literacy that we think they need to meet in order to be successful. There are many reasons, too numerous to list here. We need to take the shame out of it. We need to uphold the respect we say we have for individuals and their abilities.

Other perceived disabilities such as hearing impairment, spinal injuries and mental health issues have really benefited from consistent, long-term campaigns for public awareness and acceptance. Campaigns for awareness and acceptance of literacy and numeracy issues, on the other hand, involve only encouragement to become more literate or numerate and do not address the public acceptance of these rich, complex people who live rich, complex lives.

In research that one of our colleagues has done in this project called Dancing in the Dark, sponsored by Lit B.C. — one of the projects that will probably be cut because of federal funding — we found that many students who did not have the basic literacy skills somehow found a way to have their needs met.

We need to really respect these industrious individuals and help to facilitate their literacy needs, rather than just simply pointing them to the nearest literacy program. We need to remove the judgmental attitudes many people have. There are a lot of ways we can support individuals. There just needs to be a will.

John, at one time you mentioned the fact that you were interested in our VALT program. I've included some information on that, that you could peruse, and I'd be happy to answer any questions.

I would like to get to Flora and Terry. They are nervous, to say the least, and they just have a number of things that they'd like to share with you.

F. Abraham: The roadblocks I faced when I tried to go to school were the funding, transportation and no support from my family. When I say transportation…. I walk to school every day. It takes me about an hour to get to school. And no support from my family — they don't understand why I'm trying to go back to school. They think that I am too old to be at this school.

Going to school…. It makes me feel good to be back in school and just be in class every day because I know I am doing something. I want to get up there like the rest of the people who are working. I don't have a job. I stay at home. I've been staying at home for 23 years, just being a mother.

What I'm trying to say is that I'm going to show my children and grandchildren that any time is a good time to learn, no matter how old you are. CNC has helped me. They made me feel welcome. After 23 years, my goal is to be an early childhood educator, and that's what I'm striving for. No matter how hard a time I have — whether it's transportation, walking through the winter — it doesn't matter because I did that last year.

The funding part is where…. The transportation could come in. We need more funding so that everything — like our transportation, our clothing, our books — could be taken care of and we won't have any problems. We'd have more people going back to school and looking back and saying: "Well, if she can do it, I can do it too."

There are some people behind me that are coming in after me, saying: "I want to be where you are." I'm telling them that it's not hard. All they have to do is ask the band and see if there's funding there, but most of them are getting turned away because there are no funds. They're saying there are not enough funds for half of these people who are lined up here, but they're funding these people who have already fought for about a year just to get in.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you very much, ladies. I'm sure we have some questions.

Your "pimping for lit" phrase…. I've heard a couple of phrases along those lines, in this age of social entrepreneurialism, of groups competing for funding sources. One woman was an executive director of…. Actually, it might have been in this place last year, on the homelessness tour we did. She said: "Each year I paint myself a different colour. This year I'm yellow. Last year I was green. Next year I'm going to be blue." Then she used a

phrase: mandate slippage. You start out doing one thing and end up doing another. That's coming out all right, so I congratulate you for identifying that for us.

I'm really interested in the shame issue and your references to dealing with the fact that some people won't achieve at that level. Look to Jacques Demers, that NHL coach who revealed that he was illiterate. I think it's wonderful that he did, because not only does it take away some of the shame, but it also points to the incredible skills he had to develop to cope. Maybe in some of those cases this group and the government, in directing funding to programs, should consider helping fund programs to help people cope with that disability or difference. I don't think it's a bad word here, disability — but difference.

M. Timbres: But you know, all you need sometimes is an area or place where a person feels respected, feels comfortable, feels safe. Maybe all they really want is for someone to read this note that they brought home from their child. "That's all I want for today. Don't make me want to learn how to read the whole thing. Read it to me so I understand it. And maybe next week I'll come back and do something else, or maybe down the road I'll try again. But right now this is all I need, thank you very much." And we need to respect that.

M. Polak: I'll get back to another form of the money question, because I think we think about it in terms of how that works in Victoria. Yet we're aware that out there on the ground, you have people who now have jobs and careers as grant writers. That's all they do. They actually get paid to do that for people because it's such a lengthy process.

As we look forward and make recommendations, based on your experience, who should make the determination as to where the money goes? How should they be applying for it? I mean, there has to be some system. And how should we get them to be accountable without them having to file three and four different reports with different agencies? What are you thinking around that?

M. Timbres: Well, we've had in the past programs that have been very successful. Institutional-based training was a program we had with envelopes of money that we could then utilize in different areas. That seemed to work really well. Students felt valued. They felt that they weren't begging for the money. I think a program like that could work.

The ABESAP funding is another program that's really wonderful, and there are very little funds in that.

M. Polak: Does that work as funding that follows the individual student? Is that how the ABESAP works?

M. Timbres: No, it's funding that the institution gets. Then through counselling, through instructors and through individual meetings, students identify their needs. We look at what moneys we have so that we can meet those needs. But for ABESAP, I think our institution gets $45,000. That's for the entire college region. That's nothing. But it's the kind of funds that students don't feel….

It's like a student loan, only it's a forgivable loan, so that has a bit of cachet to it. It's not someone giving me a handout. So it could be used for many things, if there were more money in it.

J. Nuraney (Chair): I would like to ask you a question, Marcia, on that VALT program. I just heard Radio North say it was suspended because of low numbers.

J. Nuraney (Chair): That seemed to me like a very good program, where you have an element of volunteerism and you have a custom-made program for the learner. That is perhaps the route that we should look closely at.

M. Timbres: I think it does need to be reinstated. I think it was an amazingly wonderful program. One of the things that I think we might want to do a little differently is open it up more to the community so that a VALT kind of program could be a centre where people could get other help without having to be forced to take literacy training or anything like that.

As I mentioned in the report, it's really hard. Students are having different issues now. As Pat Powell was saying, when you're dealing with people who have some developmental issues — FASD, other learning disabilities — it's very hard for a volunteer with a 30-hour course to be able to deal with those situations. And you don't want to be doing something that might have a long-term effect. There are so many things coming out of the woodwork that we don't know about.

When VALT first started, we were dealing with individuals who had the wherewithal to learn but didn't have the opportunity. You had to work on the farms, so you had to leave school — VALT started in the mid-'70s — or had to go to war. We had people who had to leave school and do things like that, or very rural communities where education wasn't really valued. Those were the individuals we were working with.

As time grew, we saw people with way more complex issues, and volunteers were having a hard time doing it because they just didn't have the experience or the training. For someone who has Asperger or autism, phonics mean nothing to them. Unless you're trained in that area, you don't know that. So it's really a complex one.

D. Routley: Earlier in the day in Prince Rupert, one of the presenters cautioned us not to amateurize the service. Maybe the VALT could be seen as an augmentation to

the professionalism that we need to support, which would maximize the effect of it.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, Marcia. Once again, nice to see you, and keep up the good work.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Oh, sorry. I beg your pardon. I've got one more person — John.

J. Rustad: Marcia, I want to thank you for being here and presenting today. I have one quick question that I'd like to ask for Flora and Terry, if you don't mind. Please feel comfortable in terms of answering this.

One of the routes that I'm hoping to get to with regards to the committee is the barriers to making the decision to go and learn some literacy to upgrade some skills. I'm wondering if you could share a little bit about the barriers that you had to upgrade some skills. I'm wondering if you could share a little bit about the barriers that you had to overcome, in terms of moving forward, and perhaps about some friends and some people you know that are maybe facing those barriers. What could be done to help them get over the hurdle and make the decision to move forward?

F. Abraham: It's like living on the reserve. When they move to Prince George, they have to go on social. When they're on social, it doesn't support them when they go to college. So before they even go to college, they have to make sure they're being supported by getting funds first of all. It's like moving. You have to move your whole family to Prince George in order to go to school because there's upgrading up there, but upgrading is looking at books. There's no teacher there. Who's going to tell you that you're doing this wrong or you're doing it right? They just hand you the books, and you're sitting there with no teacher.

My daughter did that for one year, and we thought this was the right thing to do, staying on the reserve and putting her in upgrading. When she sent her tests back, they said she had no grade because she didn't understand what she was doing. She was in grade 11 upgrading on the reserve. So we had to move out here, and when we moved out here, I had to go on social assistance. They put me through this program called the Bridges program at Elizabeth Fry. When I got to Elizabeth Fry, I chose a career, which was early childhood education. What I didn't know was that from there on, to be in this course…. I thought I was going to just get there.

When I went to CNC, I went through this EMAT test that they gave me. They told me what level I was on and that I needed upgrading because my English and math were low. I thought: well, I knew it was low, but would you guys accept me back after 23 years of not going to school or training or looking at any books? Once I got in, I was so excited that I just kept sitting along. I was about a month behind everyone, but most of the students and teachers there helped me, and I caught right up to them at the level they were on.

There are a lot of people out there who want to go back to school, but they don't know which road to take and how to get in there. How do you go about going back into school? I did it through a social program. I'm a social worker through this program and then through CNC. When you're not on social assistance and you're just coming out of the reserve, you don't know where to go and who to talk to. That's where all these other people are getting stuck. Where do you go, and who do you talk to? After that, they could figure out the funds and whatever, but most of them are stuck because of low funding and no idea where to go or how to get help.

Our next speaker is Teresa Saunders. My apologies that we are running a little behind, Teresa.

My name is Teresa Saunders. I'm the principal of the Centre for Learning Alternatives. We have a main building, which is about three blocks into town from this building. We sit beside the St. Vincent de Paul drop-in centre and food program. We are also situated beside Ketso Yoh, which is a native friendship centre transition home for federal parolees. We are well situated to serve the needs, I believe, of the people who perhaps most need us in the community. Our challenge, however, is to find ways to help them connect with us and for us to connect with them.

Our centre is an amalgamation, and the Centre for Learning Alternatives is only a three-year-old umbrella institution. We are continuing education, which is our adult learning program; a number of community alternative programs, two of them situated in this building and other off-school sites around the city of Prince George — nine of them; and the central interior distance education program, which is our distributed learning program for this school district.

One of the things that we've found has worked the best for us is partnering. Hence, our school district chose to create this Centre for Learning Alternatives umbrella organization so that we could better meet the needs of the students who come to us, because we have so many different kinds of services under one umbrella.

After three years we're beginning to experience the fruits of that amalgamated service. As teachers from all three of our programs start to work together, we're finding that students are served better. So we have a program in our centre at Second Avenue called GAP. It's called Go Anywhere Program. It was a program originally housed at CNC and funded through one of those grant programs that Barb Old at CNC annually had to go and seek funds for. The focus of that program had to change every year in order to fit the funding that she was going after — quite bizarre. The academic part of the program has stayed. It is now back in our

own building remaining as a piece of our work. It's a program for lower-ability students who are 17 to 19.

One of the remarkable things I'm beginning to see in my own institution and in my own programming is that our teachers are starting to work together. So she has a student who needs English 11. Over in our adult centre, just across the hall and up a couple of steps, is our adult learning centre. Rather than spending energies focused on that one course, the student just walks across the hall and works with our adult teachers doing English 11. He's able to move back and forth between programs.

Another student came to apply for ConceptEd, one of the two programs we have here at the native friendship centre. The determination was that maybe he didn't quite fit the criteria for that. Although we had some behavioral and social issues, which the school district mandated he work on before he came back to school, he needed a higher academic program. So we've been able to put some distance education programming — an on-line course — in place for him, to use our TA at our distance education classroom, and then to spend mornings here at this program. It's with that kind of partnership and the thinking that is quite typical in these northern communities that somehow we've found ways to make things work.

I wanted to come and just start by saying ditto to everything Marcia Timbres said. One of the other things I'm very happy about is the way that CNC and the school district partner in terms of adult literacy programming and issues.

There was quite a bit of fear in the province several years ago because the colleges were also granted the right to give the adult Dogwood diploma. There was a lot of concern about: "We'll lose all our students if the college can do it." The reality is that there are more than enough students to share. We've taken the approach of providing a slightly different kind of service that will meet the needs of more students in the city. With Marcia's program — I talk about it as Marcia's because I know how close to her heart that program is — students who are able to access a full-day or part-day program, and feel they need full teacher instruction, have that option at CNC.

At the same time there are people who can only study part-time, or there are people who need to start at a different time than the beginning of a semester, and that's the kind of program we offer. We have no tuition and no textbook fees. It is completely without cost, with the exception of a $10 student fee, which now may be illegal.

We will continue to try and partner with our community groups to provide the services that provide many opportunities for the students in this region. We've had discussions with several other potential partners who've come and asked us: "How can you help us? Can you help us?"

There was a lot of work done in my school by the school district several years ago when we were approached by the B.C. Métis association. They were interested in being housed in one of our closed elementary schools and drawing students from around the province who needed upgrading to the grade 12 level so that they could go into trades apprenticeship programs.

We did a lot of groundwork. We had a staff. We could identify people on staff who would be ideal for that kind of program, who were very culturally aware of the need to focus on the needs of Métis people. We have the expertise on my teaching staff to teach literacy skills and numeracy skills with a huge degree of success. It died. I don't know what happened. It never happened.

I spent a considerable amount of time last year working with PGNAETA here in Prince George. They had some federal funding for apprenticeship programs. The tradespeople around this community were begging them to provide them with people. They're part of an employment program that assists people into work. The barrier was that their clients didn't have the education they needed to get into a trade, even a low-level trade — meaning one that didn't require math principles 11 or English 12, but math essentials 11 and communications 12.

We were asked: could we provide staff that could help people reach graduation in three months? We said that if people were able to start the adult graduation diploma at the grade 11 level, which is what that program is — and if it is communications 12, math essentials 11 and three other grade 12 subjects that they need, and especially if they've got any kind of skills, experience and training behind them — we can give equivalency credit. We can do that in three months in a full-time program. I identified a teacher who I was confident could work with those students. We were ready to go.

They couldn't find enough people at that skill level. They said 15, and then they said maybe 12. When they couldn't find seven or eight, they cancelled the program. I had already deployed staff. That was a costly thing for me.

I met with a consultant from the Lheidli T'enneh band a year and a half ago. How could we partner with them? They identified huge educational issues in terms of them becoming self-functioning as a band. Education was an issue — the level of education of the people. Because of the isolation, even though it's very close to Prince George, they needed someone to come and be on site. I said: "I'd love to. I have staff who can do that." We have wonderful teachers, but I can't fund ahead of time, because my funding occurs retrospectively as a continuing education–adult education program. My count is in May, and that's what I'm funded on for the following year.

I said that if they could fund me up front, I'd give them back every dollar I garnered for a student, because I'm not in this to make money as a continuing education principal. I'm here to provide a service. So we need some upfront funding, and then we'll pay you back when we get our funding. That's gone nowhere. Maybe it's still in the works. I hope it is.

I think it's really important to know that there are many of us here…. I think you heard that from Marcia. You certainly are hearing it from me as a school district representative. We're here to provide the service. We will be as flexible as we possibly can be.

We're here. We want to partner. We will go out. We know we need to. We've tried the workplace literacy programs. They've been hugely successful, but then they seem to stop. Some of this is economically and politically based, of course.

Economically, I think it's really important that the government respond to the way it funds, based on what's happening in the economy. I was talking with John earlier, when the committee was supposed to come in the spring. I was talking about how important it was to take people to a place where they have enough financial and emotional security so they're ready to learn.

One of the issues, however, in Prince George right now is that our numbers of adult learners in our centres are down, because they're at work. Those people do have jobs, but they still don't have their grade 12 graduation diploma. So they're now the working poor, still eating at St. Vincent de Paul, and they're not in my building raising their literacy and numeracy skills.

I enjoyed the comment John made. What we need to do is work with employers to say: "Can you let those people free for two hours once a week, because that's our requirement if they're going to study with us, and/or can we set up a tutorial in your building so that those people can come, and we can support them in their learning?" There are lots of ways. It's about working together. It's one of the things I'm proud about as a northerner — that we work very hard to do that.

Another theme I want to talk about is the need to fund and support people when they are learning. There's a limit on adult funding in this province. It's $4,417, and it varies per year. It may be a little higher right now. It's the base funding and the only funding for adults in school districts. We don't get the money that school-age students get or that the district gets for school-age students — for students with learning disabilities, for ESL students, for students of aboriginal descent.

I know the Ministry of Education has a focus right now on considering that a student is a student is a student. I truly hope in this year of their review of adult education that they follow through with that thought. It's a very important one. A student who had a learning disability in grade 2 and no doubt had it from the beginning, and who perhaps quit and now wants to come back and try, hasn't lost the learning disability. We need the funding to be able to serve them well if we want to help them be successful.

J. Nuraney (Chair): I didn't want to interrupt, Teresa. Could you wrap up in one minute?

I think it's really important that we understand the need to transition people with respect — as Marcia said, those people who hit the wall in our learning centres.

I just came from a staff meeting with my staff, talking about a student who probably isn't ever going to be able to graduate. One of our biggest challenges is how we help that person, with great respect and care, transition into another place in our community, which can help them understand what they do have as gifts and talents and use those gifts and talents. We have those agencies here.

I think it also goes full circle. There's an important need to support learning at an early age, early intervention. One of my staff sent me over here to say: "Everything I ever learned, I learned in kindergarten." Let's not forget that. It seems to me that it does have to come down to that.

One of the greatest things the Ministries of Advanced Education and Education have done is the dual Dogwood. Both of our institutions are able to grant that. It is hugely helpful to a student who can move between a school district program of continuing education and the college, and wherever it works for them, they can get credit from us for them and credit from them with us. It's wonderful.

D. Routley: Thank you very much for that. The last time I was in this building, I was the housing and homelessness critic. This building inspired me, because it was the former courthouse and had been transferred to another social function and service to the community.

So I went back to the Legislature when it sat and put a motion, Motion 70, on the order paper. That motion was encouraging the government to do an inventory of closed public buildings, including schools, with the view of converting them to low-cost housing or homeless shelters. The motion was defeated by the government. In fact, Mr. Rustad was the speaker for the government on the motion but did say there was an effort to locate public buildings that were empty for use in this way.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Can you stay on the topic, Doug. Ask your question on the matter that you're talking about — literacy.

D. Routley: I do think it's a good idea. I mean, rather than a question, I'd make a commitment to you to renew that motion in a broader sense to serve other needs like this. But I won't be cheeky enough to direct the question I have to the panel itself.

J. Rustad: I just want to ask Teresa…. I know you and I, obviously, had many conversations over the years in terms of adult literacy and in terms of the work you do. I want to commend you on the work you do, because I very much enjoy going to the graduation ceremonies and hearing the stories of success that your facility and your staff actually work through. That is certainly to be commended.

As we heard earlier, some of the barriers around that, in particular for some of the individuals who are on reserves — the transportation issue, unable to come to the centre…. Have you been considering or trying to look at approaches for support for the people that are on reserve?

We heard from Joe that there really aren't any initiatives on reserves in terms of the adults. Have you looked at the opportunity or the possibility of branching out to provide some sort of work or support, or to perhaps work in partnership and provide some training for trainers, or for potential trainers, on-reserve so that they could dovetail or partner into what you're doing?

T. Saunders: I personally haven't gone seeking that outside the city of Prince George, with the exception that we've tried to provide service in our small communities of Valemount, McBride and Mackenzie until a funding crunch of this year. But I think the message is that we are here. Maybe what the message needs to be, because I'm very busy doing the day-to-day of what we do to make our work better for students…. It's that need for others to know that there are also services they can access.

I did refer to a consultant who came and talked about that very possibility a year and a half ago. Would we be willing to work with Lheidli T'enneh? I'm saying yes, we would. We would provide someone out there. We'd probably need a little transportation dollars for the teacher. If you can allow us to pay you back for the teacher time, we can make that happen. It's really quite simple, but we as an educational institution, as a school district, don't have the dollars to initiate that. I'd love to be able to, but I have no way to fund that.

J. Rustad: Could I just ask a follow-up along those lines, please? Are there some rules in place? For example, if the adult learner is on reserve and the school district tries to provide a program on reserve, is there a barrier there in terms of potential funding as to how the funding works?

As I know, at the beginning of May when you have students come in, that's your count for the following year for the funding. I'm actually thinking of places like Fort Ware and other places that are more remote than the Lheidli T'enneh reserve. But even on the Lheidli T'enneh, being able to provide that service directly on the reserve and those opportunities….

I'm sure there is a large pool of learners there that, quite frankly, would increase your numbers for future years' counts on the funding side. But is there a barrier in terms of how that funding is structured because of an on-reserve versus an off-reserve environment?

T. Saunders: No, it's more a barrier of "that's not my school district." That's actually territory that belongs to district 91 or some other district.

J. Rustad: That's what I meant in terms of the reserve, because that is now outside of the mandate of the school district in terms of that. But would you see a potential benefit if there was a partnership that would somehow work where — instead of those people having to go off reserve, then come to the school district to get the services — they'd be able to somehow incorporate that within the services being provided?

T. Saunders: Absolutely, and what I just read the other day is that INAC, Indian and Northern Affairs, will only provide supplements for schooling to families who are on reserves, so it makes even more sense right now. That is exactly where we need to be.

S. Cunningham: I just want to point out that I'm with Donna Jarvis, who is the manager of the operation that I represent today. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with the standing committee on Education. My name is Sarah Cunningham. I'm here in my capacity as president of the Learning Difficulties Centre of B.C., formerly the Prince George Dyslexic Support Society. We're located here in Prince George. The LDC is a registered non-profit charity, and we provide language and literacy tutoring to clients of all ages.

I'd love to ask if you've talked to anybody like me before, but anyway, at the Learning Difficulties Centre of B.C., we teach people affected by learning difficulties to read, write and do mathematics. Our mission is to provide comprehensive services in an emotionally supportive environment — what some people have been referring to — to children and to adults. Not in different environments — one environment.

Our definition of "learning difficulty" includes dyslexia, trouble with reading; dysgraphia, trouble with writing; and dyscalculia, trouble with mathematics. We don't go into broader diagnoses, partly because a diagnosis doesn't make a huge difference to our relatively straightforward approach. Also, diagnoses are very expensive; not $900. What we've heard, and had people pay, is $2,500 for a diagnosis.

S. Cunningham: Absolutely. They're ultimately the label; it ends up being a label. It doesn't actually help in the process of teaching the tutoring.

My presentation today will speak to your general mandate of addressing the specific challenges of adult literacy and to offer a successful strategy on the promotion of adult literacy. I'll give you a little history. The Prince George Dyslexic Support Society formed in 1987. It was formed out of desperation by parents who were unable to get the help needed for their children from the school system. The children these parents were trying to help are often deemed to be behaviour problems; you've probably heard this. These parents knew something needed to be done. One individual, a local social worker whose son was dyslexic, ultimately came across a method for teaching people with dyslexia: the Orton-Gillingham multisensory approach to language development. Have you heard of it? Okay.

She brought this method, which was different from the methods used in the school, to these parents and children affected with learning difficulties. We began by training people to become Orton-Gillingham tutors. These people worked then and work now for us as

contract tutors, and we have continued to train tutors almost every year for the past 20 years. That training right now costs $1,100, it's 13 days, and we fill up a course every summer.

The value of the Orton-Gillingham method as a tool is that it's an excellent tool to promote adult literacy, and it's the first of the four key points that I want to make today. This method is used all over the world, and it's very well-known to be effective. We've used the O-G multisensory approach exclusively for the last 20 years. I'd like to take the opportunity to describe it. Do I need to describe it?

S. Cunningham: I will. Recent scientific studies have found that reading originates and relies on brain systems that are used for the spoken language; it's neurological. In other words, the brain systems for spoken language are the basis for reading. These brain systems need to be accounted for, for people with learning difficulties. This ties to the Clyde Hertzman stuff on the early childhood development and the whole brain-growth thing. It's part of the same thing.

The O-G method uses a multisensory approach to teaching as it engages this multitude of brain systems at one time, so if you're weak in an area or areas, other modalities will work for you. The brain is engaged more fully by utilizing a range of sensory inputs. There are visual inputs, auditory inputs and kinaesthetic inputs — the touching, jumping and tapping.

The difference between a non–multisensory approach and an actually multisensory approach could be analogous to the difference between a 1950s black-and-white, mono TV that's about this big and the current full-colour, surround-sound, high-definition TV. So we're talking about a traditional system that's a very narrow band of input versus a very open and impactful input. The latter is far more engaging.

O-G explicitly teaches the structure of language. It does all the details of sound, syllables, words and sentences, and the rules of language are taught. We've also learned that in addition or further to using the Orton-Gillingham approach, the best way to deal with the particular idiosyncrasies of unique brains is to provide this learning in a one-on-one context. You can't meet the needs of a unique person in a collective setting.

The O-G method works great for adults, and it also can work in a full classroom. The multisensory approach can be brought to a classroom, although it won't have that one-on-one component.

Our agency has not had the capacity, the funds, to undertake a formal evaluation ever in the 20 years of our existence, but we remain convinced that this method is highly successful. Our perception is based on continuing attendance of learners to our facility, success stories we hear from adult learners and the attitude shifts and great improvements reported to us by and about our young learners.

Let me tell you a little bit about what people are actually willing to pay in order to work through their learning difficulties. It's not cheap. We are a non-profit charity, just to be clear. We charge $30 an hour for one hour of tutoring. All learners typically come twice a week, and a child will come for ten months. The cost to the parent is $2,400. Needless to say, it's extremely expensive. We've tried to mitigate the cost. We've created a subsidy program that we provide to low-income people. One of our slogans is: cost should never be a barrier to learning.

To put it in perspective: in 2005-2006 we provided over 3,000 hours of tutoring with a gross cost of just under $100,000. Over $80,000 was contributed, mostly by parents for their children's learning. We subsidized 800 hours of tutoring at a cost of just under $14,000.

There's clear evidence that there are children whose needs are not being met by the school system, and I'll talk about that a little further along.

Our second key point is that the unmet needs of children result in adults who, needing the service, are generally the people who can least afford it. They needed it when they were young. They didn't get it; they can't work and so on. In the 1990s more than 90 percent of our clients were adults. The reason we had all those adults is they were funded through HRDC. It was the Purchase of Training program. Maybe some of you have stumbled across that. It was a brilliant use of the program. There were some local people who made it work.

The adults could go to tutoring a couple of days a week. Sometimes they got their diagnosis paid, and it was wonderful. They generally participated for a year. This addressed their confidence issues, which were shattered by their previous learning experience. It enabled them to acquire strategies. Often, for an adult, they can acquire strategies to overcome learning difficulty and succeed independently.

The formal diagnosis allowed them to access financial supports in the public school system, in the secondary school system. They could get tutors or learning aides because they had a formal diagnosis. Without the formal diagnosis you cannot access supports as a disabled person. The funding source ended and so with it ended the adults. There are adults still out there who need this service.

One adult who came was Shawna Montpellier. She has encouraged us to use her story to help people understand the reality for her. She was directed to the LDC as an adult in 2002, because she couldn't fill out her EI form when she was laid off work. Her story includes dropping out of high school after being told in grade 9 that she had reached her potential and should not hope to graduate.

At that point, as a young adult, she was diagnosed with severe dyslexia. She came into our place. We gave her an $80 assessment and put her at a grade 5 reading level. She did tutoring for three years. We subsidized her. She collected pop cans for the $10 an hour amount that she had to subsidize, and in 2004 she received the Learner Achievement Award from Gordon Campbell. She then went on to attain her adult Dogwood in 2005. She's working full-time now. She's worked through a couple of jobs. She's working full-time.

Shawna's situation, unknowingly suffering from a remediable learning difficulty, is of course not an anomaly. The Canadian Dyslexia Association states that one in six Canadians have dyslexia, which is defined as a reading difficulty that's neurological in origin. One in six who is struggling can overcome their difficulties with the right remediation and can become successful readers and successful citizens.

This brings me to the third and extremely important point I would like to make, and it is about the children we tutor. Unlike the 1990s, our client base today is 95 percent children. The youngest child we've tutored is five years old. Last year we served 79 children and four adults. We currently have 21 children on a wait-list. We know the children we see are only some of those whose needs are not being met by the public school system. They are the ones whose very-likely-employed parents have the wherewithal to find us and who can afford us.

Some children come for several years as the parents discover that this supports ongoing success in school. These are children who most likely will not have adult literacy issues. It is the children who are struggling and who are not getting remediation or tutoring support outside or inside of the school who are at high risk of having adult literacy issues. The parents of these children may not have the means to identify a difficulty, to seek assistance, to have the financial means to pay and, because of genetic and generational effects of LDs, may be illiterate themselves.

It is now known that dyslexia has a genetic and therefore hereditary component. There is a plethora of research to support the connection between early reading struggles, academic failure, absolutely crushed self-esteem, school dropout, adult illiteracy, unemployment, criminal behaviour — right? That's the flow that you hear. We had a board member who has a wonderful story about that happening to him. I wish he was coming here today to tell you his story.

It is understandable that there's this process. Some adults who've gone through this cycle are thoroughly beaten down after the continued failure on tests, the experience of being "stupid," the criticism and accusations from teachers and parents that they aren't trying, and the total confusion that results inside these people because they are trying extremely hard, and nothing they try works because they have an unrecognized and unacknowledged disability.

This brings me to my fourth point. There are a number of problems within the school system for children with learning difficulties. Based on our experience, it is our understanding that children are allowed to fall behind for a number of years before they are targeted for diagnostic services or supports — two-year wait. So if you go in as a five-year-old, six-year-old, you will not be helped at least until you're in grade 3 and very likely not until later. It is a two-year wait around here for a diagnosis within the school system.

Many teachers are wonderful and dedicated people. That is not questioned. However, we are aware of teachers who actually don't believe in learning difficulties. Other teachers in the public school system are not aware of the particular kinds of behaviours that are evidence in the classroom that is indicative of a learning difficulty. They experience the child with a learning difficulty as a behaviour problem who eventually becomes a social problem.

Raising awareness on this front may help, but teachers are also unaware of multisensory methods of teaching. They're sometimes seen as something you use for a disabled person, but they can be fully integrated into the classroom. There's no reason it can't be integrated. Raising awareness on this front might also help. These methods can be used for the betterment of all students and would reach those students who have a need for a broader array of sensory input. Teachers who may be aware of these methods, though, currently also lack the opportunity to provide one-on-one support or individual learning. Sorry, we all know that.

It's my own opinion that the heavy, institutionalized, closed-system atmosphere of schools creates the biggest barrier of all. If a child does not learn to read, somebody has to be blamed. School is very political, and they need to protect themselves. So if they can't blame the child, what we see is that the next people they try to blame are the parents. If they can't get away with blaming the parents, someone may suggest it's the school system. That is not a burden the school system is willing or able to take up. If they accept that some children aren't learning to read, the political consequences are huge.

For our part, we are actually implementing a workshop this month for parents. One of the three sessions is how to advocate and negotiate for your child in the school system. It's unfortunate that such a course is needed, and it's because the parents…. We coach the parents to be really strong, because they are really knocked down when they go in there and look for help.

Finally, we — the Learning Difficulties Centre of B.C. — would rather, in fact, not exist. Our hope is that changes in the public education system will be made, that the needs of these children will be addressed there and that we won't have to do the things that we are currently doing.

What are we suggesting is the best way to promote adult literacy? It's to promote childhood literacy. Our best practice is literacy services for all ages and all levels of learning. Our innovative program is Orton-Gillingham, and the effective strategy is early intervention and parent and teacher awareness. That's my presentation.

N. Macdonald: I take your point around the adult literacy, of course, being tied directly to what you do with the school system and with literacy programs for children.

The point that you make around diagnosis is an important one. To have to wait two years is something that shouldn't be acceptable. That's an area that, if we're going to deal with adult literacy, we need to look at and put resources towards. Pretty clearly, that's an area that you think needs to be worked at as a priority.

S. Cunningham: Yeah. Even more important is that genetic element. There's no reason not to look at a child who's five years old or in preschool — a four-year-old. If the parents have some sense that they have trouble reading, that's when the particular tutoring should start for that four-year-old.

S. Cunningham: Immediately. And you know that if a parent or an older sibling has struggled, there is very likely going to be a problem — or there may be a problem — in the child. So you could narrow in on that population somewhat. You don't have to test everybody.

N. Macdonald: The other point that you made is around the need for trained personnel within the school, so that special ed support having….

The other point you made is the integration and the need to have legitimate integration, which means that you have trained, supported, teaching assistants in the class with that student.

N. Macdonald: As a former principal, I just love all of the things that you said there, and I think you're right on.

M. Polak: I'm glad to hear my colleague saying that he's glad to hear it, because I know that Orton-Gillingham in the public school system, when you start talking about it, is often met with quite a lot of antagonism and resistance, in particular from some of the union leaders in the teaching profession. Not all, but it's certainly a controversial area. I am familiar with it through Kenneth Gordon — schools of that nature.

I want to ask you two questions that relate to some of the specific things that, I guess, give us a different view, something we haven't heard. You mentioned earlier in your presentation that the type of testing you do is geared towards what you want to achieve. You take a look at perhaps not a full battery of psychoeducational testing, because you're saying: "We don't need to know that much information in order to deal with your specific problem."

M. Polak: How do you defend that position against those who say that's just not good enough — that you need to have the full psychoeducational testing, therefore you need to wait for the person with that extensive training, and we can't get on with it till then?

S. Cunningham: Necessity is the mother of invention. We don't need it, because we're able to teach people to read without it.

M. Polak: Do you use a Woodcock Johnson, a WISC? Is there one of those standardized ones that you use?

D. Jarvis: The diagnostics that we do have been taken in bits and pieces from…. Johns testing, I know, is one. I can't remember the names of the others, but they take little bits of everything. The purpose of the tests that we do really is to see first of all if the program will work for them and second of all, where to start. It's our starting point for our tutoring.

D. Jarvis: So we can start. It is important, too, that the testing be done through the schools, because if these children need help later on…. It's really important that they get the help in the school as well.

M. Polak: Lastly, is there any response of late…? I'm not familiar with where this has gone in the last few years. It's been a while since I've dealt with it. In the universities, with respect to teacher training around literacy and the use of Orton-Gillingham programming, have we made any advancement there yet?

D. Jarvis: We did invite them to come to our workshops, and we have had some of the education students who are taking the education program at UNBC come and visit our centre. We try to contact them and invite them as often as we can.

S. Cunningham: But you commented to me that recently one of the students mentioned to you that the professor said there's no such thing as a…

F. Siegrist: First off, I'd like to thank the committee very much for returning to Prince George after having had to cancel in the spring. I would particularly like to thank you for your understanding in our delaying getting you in here this afternoon because of the events that happened over the weekend that have quite badly affected our friendship centre community.

I'll hope you'll forgive me. I've got a Prince George cold, and my voice has gone out a few times today.

Prince George has very high levels of illiteracy within the aboriginal community. A lot of this is due to the changing dynamics of the aboriginal community in Prince George. We're a traditional stopping point on the migration routes of aboriginal people, and today we've become a focus because of the poverty and high unemployment rates in a lot of the small, remote communities.

They come to Prince George looking for a better life, education and employment. A lot of them, unfortunately, are faced with the barrier of illiteracy. That comes from a variety of causes. Many of the elders and older adults are victims of the residential school system, which failed them in the most basic academic outcomes.

A lot of the male adults left school early, from as early as grade 5, to take work in mills. They were high-paying jobs, sort of a guaranteed-for-life type of thing that didn't quite work out. A lot of the females didn't have the opportunity. They needed to work in the homes and the communities.

As a result of the generational carryover from the residential schools, there's an inherent distrust of the mainstream school system that carries over to the upcoming generations. Therefore, there's not that push by parents for the youth to go to school, continue on and get that, which is resulting in minimum participation and early dropout.

Today these people are finding that they can't find employment, despite the experience and knowledge. That's due to illiteracy and the demands of employers for a minimum of secondary graduation. We serve many clients here that worked in mills for 20, 25 years. When the downturn in forestry happened, they were laid off. They got their package. Now it's going up, but they don't have grade 12. Some of them were foremen. They've done multiple jobs in the mills, and they can't get back on.

This has resulted, for the participants and the clients that we work with, in far higher levels of poverty and dependence on the social safety net far greater than the mainstream population of the city. It also results in greater levels of alcohol and drug abuse and dependency, lack of housing options, food and health care issues. Illiteracy often results in the misuse of prescription drugs as the patients can't read the instructions, and they're either over- or under-medicating themselves, creating further strain on our medical system.

Transportation, as you've heard from other presenters, continues to be an issue. Prince George, while not a large community like Vancouver or Victoria, is very spread out. Our public transportation system here is not as efficient as larger centres.

There are also exponentially higher rates of involvement within the criminal justice system due to the poverty and the drug addiction. It's often exacerbated by not being able to fill out legal forms, not comprehending what their probation orders are reading or their undertakings are reading. We work with a lot of those people that have got themselves into further trouble because they didn't understand they weren't supposed to do a certain thing.

They're also faced with multiple barriers to becoming literate and gaining education and training: the lack of transportation to the various learning centres; lack of food equates to constant hunger, and hungry people just can't learn; a lack of day care — the single-parent families, and there are a lot of them in Prince George; and a lack of resources that represent the diversity of aboriginal cultures in our community. We've found it's very important to be inclusive about aboriginal culture, to some extent even some of the languages — to help them translate that into English. It makes the comprehension easier. It makes the meaning of it and the reality of it easier.

There is a lack of assistance in the community to help complete the medical and legal forms and offer the explanations of what they are; and a shortage of qualified therapists and programs to assess and assist individuals with learning disabilities, particularly in our client group — folks with FASD and brain injuries.

While the economy in Prince George and the area has improved and along with it the employment rates, the jobs that are opening up require some level of skills and training. The training is inaccessible to these people because they don't meet the educational requirements to get into the training programs, such as CNC or other colleges. Those who are fortunate enough to find an employer that will take them on as an apprentice — and there are some — run into the roadblock when, at the end of their first year of practical, they have to go down to one of the colleges to do the theoretical part for six weeks, and they simply can't comprehend. So they end up failing the course, and usually at that point, the employer is going to replace them.

The learning circle literacy program here at PGNFC has been working with this group for the past five years in a number of areas. We use one-on-one tutoring, the Lobov method. We train volunteers to be tutors and work with individual learners over the course of a school year. They'll do an assessment with a learner and start them at an appropriate level. The number of sessions can range from bi-weekly to twice a week, depending on the learner and the tutor.

At this point I know there has been some talk about the volunteer tutor thing. The majority of our volunteer tutors are retired teachers and other professional people that are not ready to just hit the golf course all year. They want to still contribute something meaningful.

We've also been very, very fortunate in the partnerships that we've had with continuing education and CNC, to a large extent, but particularly continuing ed. We work with a lot of our participants to get them up to a level where they will be successful at continuing ed, and the staff over there has been absolutely incredible. We've had a lot of successes with moving them up through that as long as we can get them to at least a grade 6 level.

The other program that we use here is a program called Reading Horizons. The Prince George Native Friendship Centre was a pilot site for the…. It's a very innovative computer literacy program, and the company that designed it was looking for an aboriginal pilot site, and we were fortunate to be chosen for that one. The program uses both visual and audio prompts to guide the learner through assessment of current levels to just about a level 3 literacy level.

Learners can work at their own pace, but they do it in a class environment. Our program coordinator is in the class with them to offer assistance in whatever area they need. The program continually does assessments as they progress along. If they're grasping something, they can skip ahead.

Our coordinator also works with elders and others in the community to assist them with completing a variety of forms and applications — many of the ones I spoke of earlier: elders that are applying for pensions, folks who are applying for disability. We've worked with folks that are trying to get a driver's licence and working through the book. Our program methodology has provided success for many of our learners over the years.

Two of the examples. We have a client that came to us four years ago. He had no education and a learning disability. We did a lot of intensive, one-on-one work with him over the years, and he has now successfully completed his GED and is in the second year of the automotive technician apprenticeship program and is doing extremely well. We continue to work with him and keep tabs on him.

The other client that I'd like to talk about started here as a learner four years ago with a grade 5 education. Within a year he was combining the Reading Horizons with one-on-one tutoring. He transitioned to continuing education to work on his adult Dogwood. Last year he returned to our program as a tutor, completed his adult Dogwood and this year is taking the criminology program at the College of New Caledonia. His long-term goal is to enter law school.

Literacy makes a difference between individuals and families enjoying a healthy lifestyle, contributing to family and community, or continuing the generational poverty and unhealthy lifestyles while being dependent on the social safety nets of the community, the province and, at the end of the day, the whole country. This is borne out not only by service agencies and educators but by a majority of economists in North America.

I had the privilege of attending the Canadian Ministers of Education conference held here at UNBC last June. There were at least five economists who all made the case. T. Scott Murray has shown that a 1-percent rise in average literacy will precipitate a 1.5 permanent increase in the GDP of the country. These folks will contribute to the family, the community and the country as a whole. It's not something we can afford to let slide.

N. Macdonald: Thank you very much for the presentation. Basically, you're saying that, like many communities in the interior, it's a community that has been in transition and will continue to be in transition for quite a long time. That really reinforces the need for people to be literate, as the new economy that's coming in really requires, more than ever, somebody who is literate and has those skills.

F. Siegrist: It does. One of the most striking features is that right at the moment, we are facing an incredible tradesperson shortage in this area. I have spoken with I don't know how many other agencies and organizations and been approached by people who are looking to bring in immigrant tradespeople.

The big problem with that, ladies and gentlemen, is that the fastest-growing workforce population in this area is the aboriginal population. If we don't do something to help them now, in five or ten years when the forestry bites the dust here again — once that beetle-kill wood is gone — we're going to be sitting with the exact same population.

These tradespeople that come in are going to leave, because they've got no stake in this area. The aboriginal people will stay. They will build. The partnerships that we've formed in the community and with some of the bands…. Fort Ware is one that you mentioned, John. We're doing some life-skills training for the Fort Ware band, on site up there. We need to bring this population up to the standards of living that everyone else has.

N. Macdonald: I'm from the Kootenays, so community transition is of really, really tremendous interest to me as well. I think the other point that you're making is that to break the cycle of continued poverty and poor self-esteem and also dependence upon programs, you really need to get rid of those barriers.

You're actually investing in social programs, to do it really properly. If you do that properly, in the long term you have not only helped those people, but if your main concern is around the cost, you've actually invested in an intelligent way so that you have that permanent trained workforce that's going to be there when you need it.

F. Siegrist: The cost to do it now is far cheaper than it'll be in ten years. If we do it now, in ten years that money will be coming back into the community and into the province and can be reinvested in the social safety nets for whatever we may need it for then.

D. Routley: You mentioned that the history of this place has an intersection point of peoples, economies and transportation routes. I've heard in my own community

about so many students having difficulty, because on the coast many of our Coast Salish peoples migrate up and down the coast between Washington, Oregon and B.C.

A lack of flexibility in the expectations of completion rates and the time that it takes to get through programs, and a lack of flexibility in the framing of the time frame of those programs causes a lot of those students to drop out of school.

Do you find that to be the case here? And if that is the case, are your programs attempting to address that flexibility? What could this committee do to help that happen?

F. Siegrist: The flexibility is a big issue. We used to find that we lost a lot of clients that we had worked with that were prepared to go back to school. I hate to say it but prior to Teresa Saunders becoming the principal at continuing education, the only alternative that we had was CNC, and they run on the semester schedule.

So if we didn't catch them close enough to the start that we could get them in, they would find some kind of seasonal work — mushroom picking or whatever — and we'd lose them again, and we might not get them back for three years at that stage.

The changes that Teresa made within continuing ed and the school board allowed them to come in at any point. If we had someone that we were working with in our literacy program, got them up to that level, or if they were at a level where they could do well, we could walk them over and stay with them, and we knew that the staff over there would take care of them.

We had an issue at one point where the aboriginal clients that we were seeing were not comfortable, because it was a school thing. Continuing ed put a classroom in this building specifically for adults so they could be in their comfort level.

They need the flexibility, because some of them are still working in the forest, and it's a seasonal thing. They will do it when they come back into town. When they're in town they want to learn, but they also want to feed their families. Those are the folks that are not a drain on the social safety net.

There are a lot of them that are and, as you've heard before, they're told by the Ministry of Employment and Income Assistance: "No, you have to look for work. You can't be doing this." The same thing happens through HRDC. If they're on employment insurance — if they were lucky enough to get enough time in — it's: "No, you need to look for work."

Through the flexibility of our program, because we have tutors that will come in here in the evening…. Our tutors are prepared to meet with them in a restaurant or a coffee shop somewhere, so it's a public place.

There's a safety issue in the evening. We can send them to continuing ed, because they can go in the morning, the afternoon or all day. That flexibility is what helps them to carry on.

Again, funding is, unfortunately, an issue. Our program is staffed by one person and volunteers. A lot of our staff and outside volunteers have helped with it. But we only have two sources of funding, which is just enough to keep one staff person on. With the federal cuts that have been announced to literacy, we're really fearful about what's going to happen next year.

Members, before we invite our next presenter, the committee will take a two-minute break.

S. Lakusta: Hi. I feel quite strongly about this. That's why I'm here. I'm a teacher's aide at Carney Hill. For those of you who aren't from Prince George, Carney Hill is 76 percent aboriginal. It's an elementary school. I've been in the district for between 14 and 15 years now.

This is my second year at Carney Hill, and I feel the aboriginal children are really being shortchanged. When you think of education as…. Fair is not equal. When the funding comes out, and it's allotted so much per student, Carney Hill is getting more than the allotted amount. That's what I've been told by the assistant superintendent and by trustees — that we are getting more money. But the students need more help. They're not getting it.

From this meeting here, everybody is trying to help the aboriginal children. They're saying that they could have an aboriginal school. We have an aboriginal school right here. It's 76 percent aboriginal. And there is no extra help coming from the education system or from the government to come and say what is needed. They are getting more help. That's what I've been told, but much more is needed.

The parents trust in our system that when their kids go to school, their children are being educated in a proper manner. When children come to the school, the school is like a black box to many parents because parents don't know what goes on in that school during the daytime. So that's why it's like a black box. When the students come out of the school at the end of the day, they're with the parents again, and many parents don't know what's happening.

I think in some of the aboriginal…. I know in our school, we are not supplying what is necessary. I think as a group….

You know, if you were to come and spend a day in our school without your suit, unannounced, you would see what life is like, and it would be an eye-opener. Every picture you see is worth a thousand words. I think, you know, if you really want to help aboriginal students, some of that might be an option at some point for some of you — to come in and see what it's really like. Some of these children are coming from reserves, coming into town, and the transition and the obstacles that they face are not what the ordinary child is facing.

If these children were to get more help, it would help motivate them and help them get their self-esteem to go on to high school with some self-confidence, which in turn would help them go on to higher education. Many of them just aren't getting that self-esteem. The help is not there. Lots of them need one-on-one, which they're not getting. Some of the people today have been saying that fair is not equal because lots of these children need different interventions to help them get where they need to be, and it's just not happening.

Our school, even to use Carney Hill as an example…. If you were to look at the provincial statistics, we are way at the bottom in everything. Yet I can't believe, with all the educators and all the people in the system with degrees and everything, that nobody has come and said: "What can we do?" That's where you could have a committee. Send somebody in.

Within the system, everything is driven by money. It starts at the top and works down, and the student is usually the last consideration. You have so much money, so many teachers and so much for the building. Then there's the class size at the end of the day. Instead, whenever you go to workshops, the student is supposed to be the first consideration. What do we need to do to help that student? Meet them where they're at — what do they need? — and work backwards from the student, back through the funding system the other way, instead of the student being the last consideration.

From what I've heard today, it almost sounds like in the colleges and the high schools it's very similar. The student is not the first consideration. I know that funding, too, is a big issue. I don't have all the answers. I'm just bringing some things here for you to think about.

There's reassessing going on. When somebody said it takes two years to get someone reassessed…. There are wait-lists for children to be assessed to start with. Every year when they come back to school, many of these children have to be reassessed. The child that was in the paper today that sat for a month — it's probably not uncommon because many of them have to be reassessed before they get TAs or help. It could be a whole month before there's actually help in place for them.

If we were able to help them, the children in turn would probably motivate their parents. As children learn and are excited about learning, that brings their parents into the school, especially when we're looking at aboriginal children. That helps bring their parents into the school and motivates them, and it gives them self-esteem too. They feel good that their children are doing well. We're all like that. I think we just need to do more. You need to, maybe, address some of the poverty and the aboriginal schools, and our school would be a good example for somewhere to start. That's about it.

N. Macdonald: I think the point, obviously, that you're making again is that if we're going to deal successfully with adult literacy, part of the answer is starting with children and making sure that that is a system that works for them.

You've asked if we would be able to visit the school. I think there's nothing like being in a school setting to get a sense of what is needed. I guess one of the questions I would have is…. It seems sensible to me, and perhaps you've already done this, to extend the invitation to the Minister of Education, of course, who is most able of all of us to make changes to the funding formula.

The funding formula is complicated, but how we fund makes a big difference to what is available to a school. I think the point that you made — about year after year not seeing the improvements that we would want if we are serious about literacy — points to the fact that something different has to be done. So I guess the question is: have you extended the invitation to the Minister of Education to visit the school? I don't know if it's in her riding or not but certainly….

S. Lakusta: Actually, she has been in the school — not while I've been there, but she has been in the school previously. So how much she knows about the school, I'm not sure.

N. Macdonald: Maybe that's something I would suggest to you. I think it's only more recently that she's become the minister, but certainly, her ability to make a difference is greater than any other individual MLA here.

D. Routley: I would also underline the funding formula as a big piece of this, from what you've said. It used to be that there were targeted funds for disabled children or transportation or any number of functions of a school district. Now it's based on a per-student formula. So in our smaller communities — I represent many smaller communities myself — if we lose ten students, they don't just take the funding for their teacher; they take the funding for the heating and the transportation and the administration. To recover that….

Those costs continue. In fact, they increase quite a bit. So much funding had to be pulled out from the classroom to cover those…. In fact, in our school district, Cowichan, three years ago we identified special needs that we didn't think we had to the tune of $950,000. But the board voted to remove $450,000 of that and put it into a general fund to overcome the funding shortfall in those other areas.

As a result, barely half of the money that was generated by the identification of those needs went to actual services for the kids. That, I think, may explain some of what you've seen. It doesn't appear that money is there when it finally reaches the child. I agree with you that that has to be our number-one goal, but it will require a lot of pressure from people to make that happen.

S. Lakusta: Can I just make a quick comment? That's one thing too. In many schools the parent advisories….

In more affluent places parents have more time to lobby governments, make changes and have stronger parent advisories. In a lower-economic area where you have…. It's not just poverty; it's, kind of, the whole ball of wax there. You don't have the strength of a good parent advisory to lobby for all this stuff. So it's up to the community to help them because it's not in their hands.

D. Routley: This is very true. In our community some of our small schools closed, so parents who didn't have the income couldn't travel to be part of the PAC and their kids' experience in school in the larger community. I agree that we need to face these problems as a community.

J. Rustad: I wanted to talk a little bit about…. Being from here and being a former trustee, of course, I'm well aware of the socioeconomic challenges that Carney Hill School has. In particular, one of the greatest challenges is the fact that we have the rotational people moving, and it's really moving between a number of schools on a regular basis throughout the year. The turnover of the children in those schools can be very challenging.

I'm getting a little bit away from our mandate here, but I do know that one of the programs that's implemented by this school district as part of the overall envelope of funding…. Because they had flexibility in terms of the overall funding, they were able to implement smaller class sizes, particularly for grades 1 through 3. Within those schools that rotate through, they went with the early literacy project around that, with the smaller class sizes specifically targeting those groups of individuals.

This was on a research basis as well. I'm looking forward to hearing those results as they track those students through a number of years. I know the school district has done a lot of work locally with those particular schools that have those challenges, and that was because they had flexibility around the funding envelope that was given to them.

Just before I get to the question, I need to clear up one more thing, because it was asked whether or not the minister had visited the school. I just needed to state that the minister's children actually went to that school. She was a PAC member of that school for many years, and she's well aware of that school. She lives in that neighbourhood, and I know that she talks about the achievements that have happened in that school on a regular basis when I speak with her.

However, what I'm wondering, I guess, is more around the outreach. Part of the challenge when students are in the school is really: did they get to the school ready to learn? Were they at the level that we would want to see in that? I know we've got some programs, and we're looking at early literacy. There will be some changes and some evolution that's going to be happening. But how much are you aware of outreach that's happening within the community centre, within the Carney Hill area, and how much is the school actually being involved in that? Or are there some plans in the works along those lines?

S. Lakusta: There is some outreach. But you have to take the students there — what they are experiencing in their lives. They've probably seen more than lots of us at the table in their young lives, and it's not positive. For someone to help them deal with that before they come to school…. I don't think there are enough counsellors or help in place for these children.

For some of them to show up at school, we have the meals program, which is really healthy. There are many hungry children in the area, and they do get the programs. We have longer breaks and stuff, and it affects them within their homes, too, because then they're not getting meals.

It's not simple. It's a great challenge for you guys, too, just to figure it all out. But I just think we need to do more. They are doing some, but it's just…. As a newcomer, I'm looking at it through new eyes, and I'm living it every day. I just think the children are wonderful. I mean, they're surviving. But to flourish, they need more help.

M. Polak: I'm interested to hear your opinion on two different things. The reason I'm so interested is, in part, because I've been spending significant amounts of time talking to parents who are in schools where there's a high at-risk population, so at schools where you have a lot of need walking in the door. There are two things that I hear a lot of comments on, and I'd be interested in your opinion on them.

The first is that many of them feel there isn't enough focus on intensive work on the basics when students first come to school. That's not across the piece; some people disagree. But it's something I hear commonly.

The second thing is people talking about…. You've been patiently sitting here all day. You've heard a lot of people talk about assessment, catching things early and — also, from the other end — students who haven't quite completed graduation. How do you connect them to college? So the second question is: what do you think about having preschool, K-to-12 and adult all sort of under one roof, all under one idea, instead of separate little groups that try to deal with it?

S. Lakusta: I do believe in that. I went to a Crossing Boundaries conference some years ago when I was just involved as a parent. I actually have been involved in the system — my son is 31 — for many years as a parent first. I've been the parent in all the different things, parent advisory.

They had Crossing Boundaries from elementary school to high school. The interaction between elementary school and high school was that the teachers in elementary school don't always necessarily know what the teachers in high school require and vice versa, and I'm sure it goes right up to the college.

I was sitting in the sauna at the pool once, and I had a math teacher from the college and a math teacher from the university arguing over who was getting the worst students. Once you got them going….

I think crossing the boundaries, kind of, in all of that…. They need that. One grade needs to know what the previous grade has taught. When some of the kids get to grade 8 — it's more my experience with the younger grades — if they haven't got all of the grade 7 curriculum because the teacher ran out of time or could only get through so many sections, then they're missing a vital piece of their information. Then the teacher in grade 8 would have to take and reteach that. When you listen to teachers, that follows right through. Some of those really important components are missed one year, for whatever reason.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, Susan. Thank you for coming and sharing your time.

M. Saunders: Good evening. My name is Marc Saunders. I'm the public service manager at the Prince George Public Library. I am pleased to speak to you about adult literacy on behalf of the library. Promoting literacy within our community has always been an emphasis for us, and we are happy to make whatever contribution we can to the positive dialogue that this committee represents.

This evening my comments will focus on a theme. That theme is our need to take a holistic approach to adult literacy. I'm going to make a variety of suggestions that will illustrate this approach. I will argue that we cannot approach services and programs in a piecemeal fashion. Rather, if we are to meet the literacy needs of the individual, we need to see learners within the context of his or her community, workplace and home.

I need to begin by making an observation. When people speak of meeting literacy needs, they typically think about teaching young children. The notion that adults might struggle with reading, writing and basic arithmetic comes as a genuine surprise to many. The fact is that many individuals are falling through the cracks of our education system. I know that this is a theme that has been repeated to this committee on many, many occasions.

We have too many semi-literate and, at times, completely illiterate people leaving school to enter the workforce, and the consequences of low-literacy skills are obvious. We live in an information-rich and knowledge-based society that requires special skills to perform at the workplace and in the home. It is not just a matter of whether people know how to read and write. Rather, it is a matter of whether people can read and write well enough to meet the every day demands of life at work, home and out in the community.

My first suggestion to illustrate a holistic approach is that we integrate services from a variety of different agencies, individuals and community groups and bring them where people live. These services would include not only literacy in education but also medical and social services, life skills training, job skills training as well as parenting skills training.

Other services that could be included here would touch on aboriginal culture, the arts, recreation, computer skills and — what is near and dear to my heart — access to library resources.

How do I see this integration of services realized in practical terms? I would like to give you one example. Allan Wilson, our chief librarian, has been involved with the Prince George Urban Aboriginal Strategy. Broadly speaking, the objective of the Urban Aboriginal Strategy has been to find ways to address the socioeconomic issues of the urban aboriginal population. A vision was formulated and a feasibility study was conducted to explore a neighbourhood-based project that we like to call the Magic Bus. I just want to show that, in fact, I've brought a copy with me here today.

The vision for the Magic Bus is to bring programs and information from many community services to where people live. The Magic Bus would actively engage individuals and groups for whom existing models of service delivery have proven to be ineffective by going directly to underserviced neighbourhoods in Prince George. While it is not the exclusive aim of this project, the primary focus of the Magic Bus would be to provide service to neighbourhoods with a high aboriginal population.

The Magic Bus would probably be a large trailer pulled by a truck that would be moved around the city. The trailer would be configured to have a reading area, programming space, bookshelves, laptop computers with wireless Internet access, work tables and carpeting.

We envision this as a place where programs and services can be combined. For example, children might be able to go with their parents for story time and have the opportunity afterward to attend an immunization clinic or even perhaps get a healthy meal to eat.

The feasibility study for the Magic Bus has been finished, and it has just been submitted for review and consideration by the Prince George urban aboriginal strategy.

When I speak of a holistic approach, this is what I'm referring to. We need to be able to integrate services in order to have a maximum effect on those in need. Low literacy skills or illiteracy is not a problem that stands in isolation. It has connections with poverty, unemployment and other social maladies.

My second suggestion to illustrate a holistic approach is that programs be designed to reach whole families.

I have a concrete example for you. We have a grandma-and-grandpa reading time at the library. This is an opportunity for our seniors to read to little ones and, hopefully, to do a little bit of teaching. Many parents do not leave their little ones unattended during this time, and they stay for the session.

Our grandma and grandpa volunteers do not just read to the child, but they often read to the parents. Many of these parents struggle with reading themselves, often because they're recent immigrants and English is a second language. Real learning takes place in this context, and it does not treat a person in isolation but allows for the whole family to be involved.

Third, a holistic approach to literacy would mean treating public libraries as full partners in the fight to

improve literacy. Public libraries provide reading material, programming for people of all ages as well as public space where learning can take place. Libraries are an important place where literacy skills develop and strengthen.

I do not want to sound overly negative on this point because I feel the situation has improved. Even so, public libraries do tend to be overlooked as full partners in the effort to improve literacy. One colleague recently made the observation — just this week, in fact — that the connection between libraries and literacy seems counterintuitive because many assume that libraries are for those who can already read.

What would it look like in practical terms to treat public libraries as full partners? It would mean that public libraries would receive money for more than just literacy materials. We would receive additional funding so that we could build and maintain study space within the library, so that learners could meet with tutors in a safe public area. It would mean that public libraries would receive additional funding for the shelving and display of literacy materials.

Even more importantly, it would mean that public libraries would work collaboratively with volunteers and service providers as a reference point within the community. By this I mean that public libraries serve as an index to the services within our community. Not only should the library be able to refer learners to services, but the library should be referred to as a valuable resource by tutors.

Fourth, a holistic approach would promote collaboration for the identification and selection of quality literacy material. Libraries and other institutions should be working together to purchase high-interest, low-vocabulary books.

In my experience, many libraries have difficulty in identifying good literacy materials, and libraries are not alone in this. I recently had a meeting with a chaplain at a youth correctional facility, and I asked him: "What can the library do to help you?" He stated that they had a budget to buy books. Their real challenge was in finding level-appropriate material for their clients.

There are several reasons why it is difficult to identify quality literacy materials. Most publishers do not label their books as literacy-related or indicate what level of reading they are at. In fact, publishers who deal in literacy materials often operate at a very small scale and can be hard to find. Finding this material is not easy, and it often requires a level of specialization that most librarians in fact do not have.

You can imagine the challenge when you have somebody in a small library, say in McBride. They struggle to be able to find appropriate material for a small library in isolation in a small community. You ask them to purchase literacy material. They have no real skill in selecting that material. We estimate that it takes at least three times longer for a librarian to find and order quality literacy material when you compare it with a regular type of book.

What I think we need is a web-based resource that is maintained by a qualified specialist in collaboration with librarians and vendors. This resource would assist in identifying current literacy materials and indicate what reading level the material is at with a common standard. This Web resource would not be for ordering purposes alone. Tutors and teachers could use it to identify appropriate materials for the learners they are assisting.

I would like to thank this committee for the opportunity to speak about literacy. I hope that my suggestions illustrate what a holistic approach to literacy would involve. For the library, it is about integrated service delivery, program design, being full partners and collaboration. Today I want to affirm our commitment to this cause and our willingness to stand shoulder to shoulder with those who stand on the front lines as parents, tutors and teachers.

M. Polak: I want to cut right to the chase and ask you to provide some thoughts about a rather politically incorrect suggestion that I'm going to make, only subtly. It goes like this.

It begins back with my own experience. We all do that. We all relate it back. When I was in elementary school, our school did not have a library. It just didn't. We were all heavy-duty readers, though, because every week we had library day. We would take, when we were six years old, our little buddy, and the teacher would walk us down the block, and we'd go to the public library. We'd get our books and take them back and read them.

When I lived in Belgium briefly and my daughter was starting school, they also did not have a library at their school. Their community was designed around a hub, a community-type centre that offered a variety of services, among which was a library. Again, the students would travel weekly to the library, and it would be a reading day. That's what they would do.

Extending that, when my daughter was a teenager, anytime she had a school project in high school — and I do think maybe there's a difference here in terms of elementary and secondary, but I'll leave it out as a question — I don't think she once used the library at her school to do a project.

If she had a project, the first thing she did when she got home was call her friends and say: "We have this project. Let's go down to the library." They would go down to the library and talk to the librarian. The librarian would help them get materials, and they would do their project.

Of course, what I'm sort of moving toward is a question that wasn't originally thought of by me but by many of my constituents, who have come to me and said: "Okay, we have budget constraints in government. Why do we have a set of encyclopedia at the public library and at the school? And we have this set of materials at the library and at the school, and we…."

Essentially, what they are saying is that there is a doubling of service. Maybe the more positive way to look at it is: is there a way in which we can coordinate what, I think you've aptly pointed out, is really an underutilized resource?

We don't tend to think of schools complementing public libraries. We tend to think of them as two very isolated circumstances. Yet we're talking here about combining and integration.

There you go. I've put a bunch of loaded stuff out there, but it's the kind of thing that everyday people talk about. I'd be interested to hear what you think.

M. Saunders: It's an interesting question. In fact, it's a model that has been pursued in a variety of jurisdictions within the United States — combining the public library with a school library.

In fact, that model has not served very well. The reason why is that when you combine a public library with a school library, the public tends to stop coming. I'm very sympathetic to the idea, but it doesn't really work well in practical terms, unfortunately.

In some respects we're at the advantage because we have the benefit of somebody else's experience in trying to experiment with it. It's not to say that it doesn't work in all cases. I'm sure that there are some examples. I don't want to make overgeneralizations.

M. Polak: Are there ways in which, though, we could combine the efforts of both? It just seems as though we've got these two systems operating that don't partner very often.

M. Saunders: The distribution of materials within the schools is actually quite different than how you do it within a public library as well. You're really adding a level of exponential complexity to trying to manage an automated system that actually checks material in and out if you're trying to combine two different ways of handling materials. There are a lot of logistical reasons why you don't really favour that type of model.

I think, really, that the answer is to better fund school libraries, not just funding for materials but also providing good funding for teacher-librarians. I think that's what's really needed.

I don't think that taking from one and giving to the other is necessarily a good and very efficient use of resources. I think that in the long term the infrastructure we have within our schools will become degraded and that we would regret it and that we would be backstepping from that.

R. Fleming: I wish your organization well on the funding application for the Magic Bus program, because from what we've heard this afternoon from a variety of presenters, serving the aboriginal community, both parents and children, and taking it to where they live and to where their communities are is one way to increase usage and, therefore, success. I wish you well there.

I wanted to ask you about some of the other things that you suggest in terms of making the library more active in the literacy needs in our communities. One of them that you talked about in your concluding paragraph about the web-based resources in collaboration with the librarians was almost like literacy labs.

In terms of funding sources for that kind of thing, I'm just wondering…. I know there's very little provincial funding for libraries. You rely mainly on your property tax base and your library board, which I guess goes and faces down city hall every year. How would you propose to move in this new direction and get more active and engaged in literacy programming?

Some of those are probably physical changes to your library space, I would think.

M. Saunders: Currently at the Prince George Public Library we are looking at a building expansion. We are exploring that. We have architects in looking at space planning. This is a window of opportunity for the library to really reassess the services we provide and our role within the community.

Literacy has been identified as one of the key components of what we want to do, not just well; we want to do it excellently within this community. The need to provide public space for tutors to meet with learners is absolutely critical. A safe place where two people can meet anonymously — how many places within the community do we have that? It's one of the things that's an absolute priority for us.

That particular idea will have to be addressed within our current funding structure from the municipality. Hopefully, we can have some corporate support and other types of support.

The suggestion that I have for developing a collaborative web-based resource that is shared by librarians and vendors — I don't think that would cost a whole lot of money. I think that is the sort of idea that might only mean a halftime position for somebody who would be based, say, in a library somewhere in B.C. It doesn't matter where.

Quite honestly, it doesn't matter to me personally who would house this person. But say it's a halftime position that would be a literacy specialist librarian who would coordinate information they'd be receiving from other librarians and from vendors. And just a small website with lists of material, where they can be purchased, what the amounts are…. Maybe even start a literacy collection. A lot of librarians struggle with this thing.

In my role as public service manager, I deal with the practical, day-to-day implementation of these things, and it's a very real problem. I think it's a suggestion that I'm going to continue to raise in a variety of contexts to see what opportunities we do have for funding in the future.

D. Routley: I think you actually did point us towards how the public library can function as a support for teachers and tutors without the goal being to reduce the cost but to maximize the effectiveness, which I think always should be the goal — to maximize the impact of what is spent.

Already there is a huge public investment in community colleges. The ideas around outreach that we've heard…. There's a huge public investment in our public

library system, and making it more impactful for people would be a great outcome.

You mentioned that teachers and tutors could receive support. Do you mean support in terms of accessing materials, using space? Just what exactly did you…?

M. Saunders: Absolutely. I would like to position the library so that on the one side we provide materials, yes. But I would also like it to be an index to all these different services within the community.

If we do have a service provider of any sort, be it volunteer or paid, they would be able, in effect, to use the library as a touchstone — "yes, I'm out here in the community" — and be able — through the library's website, for example, or one of the reference desks — to provide people with the information that they need and where they need to go for different services.

D. Routley: Sort of a hub joining the many spokes of the wheel of this literacy package?

J. Rustad: One thing I wanted to ask you about. We were talking about the Magic Bus program. In Prince George we set up, a number of years ago now, a family resource centre in South Fort George, in a community that is very needy.

Actually, I want to ask you two questions. The first one is around that resource centre and the concept of resource centres in communities that are needed. Have you thought about space within a resource centre in terms of being able to perhaps provide some material that would go in on a rotational basis, so that people could come in and have access locally within an area, like you say, of a high need, which is similar to what you're trying to do with the Magic Bus program?

The second question is around what Teresa had talked about earlier, when I talked with her around the reserves and trying to get, perhaps, the idea of the school system in terms of the learning centre servicing within a reserve. Have you thought about the idea of a travelling library, a rotational library–type service that could potentially go in to various communities on some sort of basis — once a month, once a quarter, however that would be — for a period of time, which would then allow people within there to access the books and that kind of material? Have you looked at either of those two options?

M. Saunders: Absolutely. I'm just so pleased that you asked both of those questions. With respect to having…. How should I refer to it? I prefer to use the term "access point" for library material. I'm sure many librarians would be cringing at that expression, but various access points throughout the community…. We've looked at the possibility of what we could do in terms of community centres and such. We've asked ourselves the question: could we in fact open branches that would be small branches that would be closer to people?

Economically and building-wise, with our main branch downtown, we cannot support a branch structure. We are not at that point. With a renovation we would be able to support a branch structure, but right now we cannot.

The best option, it seemed to us, is…. What we've done is move to the creation of what we call Reading without Rules sites. What we do is provide material for all ages and varying, different levels of reading ability. We've distributed them to five or six different centres within Prince George right now — to different women's shelters, seniors homes and, I believe, the Fort George Resource Centre. We have an area there.

What we've done is actually had these blocks built. We call them letter blocks, literacy blocks. So we bring out a certain amount of material, we make sure they fill up the box, and people are able to come and, without their library card, bring that material home with them. We just ask that they return it. That's Reading without Rules. They can have that book for as long as they want.

Our hope is to reach those people, particularly those people who are underprivileged and in times of real poverty. They have a lot of late charges on their cards, and they're no longer able to access library services because of that. Because of the Reading without Rules sites, we don't place any requirements on people whatsoever. That material is there for those people. They can come, they can take it, and they can go home for as long as….

We try our best to restock that material on a regular basis. We are actually in the first year of experimenting with this. I'm really quite excited and proud that our library has taken this step, because it really does step out of the traditional role that the public libraries play. I think that just the opportunity to reach the poor is phenomenal.

The idea of mobile library services within and about Prince George and the regional district is a very exciting idea to me. This could be realized possibly within the Magic Bus concept, and in a manner of speaking, I would say that we would kind of prefer it to be within the Magic Bus concept, especially if it's going to be reaching to some of the reserves, because it's really like an aboriginal…. It would be strongly identified with the aboriginal community.

It could be realized within the Magic Bus concept, but it also could be realized as a bookmobile, which is a much more traditional type of service that exists throughout the world. The Magic Bus usually tends to be a vehicle. You can conceive of almost any type of vehicle, right from a van up to the size of a Greyhound bus that is modified so that you can either have just some books that are available and that are all you provide — some circulation services. Or as I said, it could be a bus where you have maybe up to 30,000 volumes of material. A person could browse the stacks in the bus and have, in essence, like a regular library on wheels.

That really moves to creating a branch structure, and as I mentioned, right now the library does not have the infrastructure in terms of our current building configuration to be able to manage a branch structure.

That is something that we know is somewhere down the future. Right now we're trying to lay the groundwork so that when the day comes, we will be able to move in that direction. So we have two different possibilities to realize that.

As our final presenters for today we have Rhonda Henry and Charlene McLean. Stephanie Lindstrom and Gloria Olafson will also be joining us.

G. Olafson: Good evening, and thank you very much for allowing us to be part of this and do a presentation today.

My name is Gloria Olafson, and all of us here are from Fraser Lake, which is a small community two hours west. We do have an adult centre in Fraser Lake, which is always struggling to keep its doors open. We also have in this province a very high percentage of adults with literacy problems.

I'm a teacher, and I have worked at the adult centre. Tonight what I'd like to specifically talk about is a program that we have used there that has been very successful. This is the Orton-Gillingham program.

I started first as a parent. My daughter is sitting in the audience tonight as well. In grade 3, at age eight, she came to a full stop. She couldn't read and wasn't learning through school. Fortunately, I got hold of this program, took the training for it and taught my daughter to read, or she would be one of the percentage of people I know out there who would be having problems reading. After that I worked at the Adult Learning Centre for ten years and worked with many adults, teaching them how to read.

This program is very effective. I think that one of the problems we have is that we need a very specific program to use. I also worked with many English-as-a-second-language adults and used this program.

When you come from a small town, you don't have access to going and taking an English-as-a-second-language program or going here. This is the program I had, so this is the program I tried and used. Many of the adults would say to me: "When I first came over here, why didn't I get this right at the beginning? It makes sense to me. I'm learning from it, and I wish I'd had that at the beginning."

I now teach at Fort Fraser Elementary School, which is a needy school with a high percentage of native children there as well. We're using the program there, hoping that we can address this issue right at the beginning and not have people continue to graduate without a high level of literacy.

In your pamphlet you have a sheet like this, which has on it "March 11, '97." One of the students that I taught would be here tonight, except that she's in Vancouver and couldn't come. I think it's important that you talk to the people who are directly involved in this.

This was the first day that I worked with her: March 11, '97. This is her first day. This lady came to me, could not write a cheque, could not watch Wheel of Fortune, could not write out a grocery list and had gone to programs before. She said that on one day she would feel like she knew the program and was really successful, and then she would come back a few days later, and everything would be gone. I think a problem that many adults have is retaining the information.

The next page starts: "A story that she wrote November 20, '97." This was about six and a half months later. July and August were a time when we didn't have school, and she didn't come. She was very worried about retaining it but was really pleased when she came back in September and 100 percent of what she had learned was still there. In November she wrote this story on her own, with no help at all. It was the difference for her.

I'd like to say that what I think we really need are the programs which are successful with the adults too. This program works for all ages and is very successful with adults. They learn very quickly with it. I think that where our focus has to be is getting a program that works and getting people trained and going from there.

R. Henry: My name is Rhonda Henry. I'm a classroom assistant at the Fraser Lake Learning Centre. I've worked with Gloria for ten years, and as she said, she left me. When she left, we lost the program. We lost the adults. They said: "There's no resource." We've had different teachers come and go, but they don't have the training that Gloria had to work with the adults teaching them how to read.

Gloria also worked with at-risk youth — aboriginal youth that were kicked out of the normal school and brought to the learning centre because there was nowhere else in our community to put them. They were coming to school wanting to be there, wanting Gloria's help, saying: "Where's that program? It's working for me." When Gloria left, we lost some of those kids.

This program really works. We've seen it work with a whole bunch of adults. Like Gloria said, this lady couldn't even write a cheque. We empowered her through this program to be able to go to the grocery store and write a cheque. That's just amazing.

Like Gloria said, it's the program. Literacy is wonderful, but if you can't even read the numbers or letters on the page, you need to start with the basics. Sometimes we overlook it and think that if tutors just give them a book, they can read it. It doesn't work that way.

Adults come to the learning centres with baggage. There's a reason why they didn't succeed in the schools. We have to make it available for them — how they can succeed. We've seen this work so well.

C. McLean: Good evening, everyone. My name is Charlene McLean, and I am an aboriginal from Tsimshian territory. I understand you were close to my home territory.

I met Gloria about four years ago. Along with her full-time job, she was a private tutor in her own home. She actually had tutored my son, who was having difficulties in learning at school. She tutored him once a week, every week, for an hour. He started getting confidence in his ability in school, and he was very successful with Gloria.

My son is taught by one of our teacher's assistants at the school he is presently in, in Fraser Lake. He's a very fluent reader, and he's much more successful in school with the Orton-Gillingham program that is taught to him every day in the classroom.

This is my second year working with Mrs. Lindstrom in the classroom. I'm an aboriginal support worker. Gloria and Stephanie had trained me to tutor in the Orton-Gillingham program last fall, when I began utilizing the extra pair of hands and eyes and ears in the school where I work with them in Fort Fraser.

Being aboriginal, I know our people are very tactile people. It's a multi-sensory program. It gives them that much more learning ability. It leads them on the pathway that they need to learn and understand to be successful in school.

This year I've noticed with my Orton-Gillingham training that the students…. We have a multigrade level that we work with, 1 and 2. I see the students that we had in grade 1 last year. They're a lot more successful this year. You can really pick up the students we had worked with in the classroom last year, who are now in grade 2. You can really see the difference in their learning ability from the students that didn't receive the Orton-Gillingham training, whether they came in new to the district or moved up from the kindergarten level.

We do a multigrouping ability in math and reading, and we rotate our math and reading groups. They're receiving a lot of multi-sensory learning where they're not just sitting in the classroom five hours a day reading a textbook or writing on paper. They're learning in the different pathways.

I think the Orton-Gillingham program is a program that delivers — to help any ages, as Gloria said, with basic fundamentals in math and reading. It helps that learner to be more successful. Their percentage of retention is a lot higher, and they're more successful a lot quicker.

I really feel it's an excellent program experience, being a person tutoring Orton-Gillingham. For myself, it made me a lot more confident in the classroom as an assistant helping with the students. Personally, with experience with my son, with the success in the Orton-Gillingham that he receives in the high school now and from the tutoring from Gloria, I think it's an excellent program. It has to be more utilized and maximized.

S. Lindstrom: My name is Stephanie Lindstrom, and I teach the grade 1-2 classroom at Fort Fraser Elementary School. I used to teach the older grades but have been able to move down to the younger grades.

We're finding that when we get children in the older grades, grade 3 is where they really do make a full stop. Grades 1 and 2 are where they can kind of get by. It's buddy reading, and it's listening to stories in the classroom. As they get to grade 3, they're more accountable for what they have to know and learn.

I have a quote in my classroom that says: "Children have the first three years to learn to read; after that they need to read to learn." That's reality for all of us. If we don't read to learn by grade 3, grade 4, we have young adults who drop out because they can't make it in high school, and then those young adults become parents. They're illiterate, and they can't help their own children.

I wanted to stop that cycle sooner. I wanted to get into the younger grades and use this program. I was trained ten years ago by Gloria, and then after the training we actually started to be able to work together and team-teach.

We realized that it was a one-on-one tutoring program designed in 1935. It's old. It's been around for a very long time, but it wasn't ever in the classroom, because it's a one-on-one tutoring program and we don't have one-on-one numbers in the classroom. So what we wanted to do was adapt it so that we could fit it into the classroom, because that's where it really needs to be. It needs to hit as many children every year.

What we did was adapt the Orton-Gillingham program into a classroom program. As classroom teachers we know we don't have time to reinvent the wheel and create lesson plans every day for our children, so what we did was create the lesson plans for the teachers. When you open up the book, you have the visual for the child, and then you have a lesson plan that goes with it. It took us a lot of time, but it sure saves us a lot of energy in the classroom.

It also maintains the integrity of the program. Everything that's there is maintained, because as you follow that lesson plan, you're doing all of the tactile, and the multi-sensory information goes in for every child. It's involved in every single lesson. An Orton-Gillingham lesson has the tactiles. It has visual, it has auditory, and it has kinesthetic — which is the taste and the large movements — in every single lesson.

I've just finished my master's degree, and my thesis was on the Orton-Gillingham program. I did a two-year study of my classroom using it, and the results were wonderful. I was even more amazed because in the day-to-day, you have a gut feeling that it's working. You know. You see it in your children's eyes. The lights in their eyes are coming on, and they're confident. Even though they're in there sounding out words, they're readers, and they know they're readers.

Looking at the data at the end of the two-year study, I was so pleased to see all of my children at the end of year 1 were reading at grade level. This is an at-risk school. All the children at the end of year 2 were reading above grade level. It was so exciting to see. We knew it, but we needed that data.

This is a proven course. We really feel that with the results of the ten years that Gloria has used it for adults, seen it with adults. She's taught from ages five to 80. That's the range it works in.

We hear so much about literacy. Of our adults, 46 percent can read at minimal levels. They can't read pill bottles. They can't read their forklift manuals when they're at work. They can't read the safety memos that go out. This is a really serious problem that we have, and we think we have a solution for much of it. We have tutors that are trained. We do training of tutors.

People that are interested in friendship centres or adult learning centres can be trained to be tutors. Then have those people come in and do one-on-one tutoring, if that's how they feel comfortable. It works in small groups, and it works in whole classrooms, so it's very flexible to the needs of the learners. That's the most important thing — to reach those needs.

We brought our materials along just so you would get a chance to see them — the course guide and all the lesson plans and then all the multi-sensory aids that we use, which come along with the course. In your packet you will see examples of the writing from one of the students, my thesis and a written proposal that we were hoping to send in, but we were happy to come and speak to you. It's also in there as well as some information on how the course can be taught to as many teachers, aides, adults and high school students that want to make a difference. The education needs to be put first into the people that are going to do the educating. I believe this course really needs to be part of teacher-training in universities.

I didn't come out of university with this knowledge. I went to Gloria's course ten years ago and went: why didn't I know this? I was a trained elementary teacher. I didn't know how reading was taught until I took the course. Like Charlene said, it gives that person the confidence to go back in and say: this is how we're doing it, and this is why we're doing it. I think that's really important, because we know what we want to do. But in the classrooms and in the adult learning centres, we don't know how to do it.

N. Macdonald: Congratulations, Stephanie, on your master's. Well done. That's a big commitment.

So how widespread is the program? Do you have an idea of how many places, how many schools, have picked up on it and are using it in this district or across the province? Do you have a sense?

G. Olafson: Our district. I've been there for 30 years, starting with my daughter. We have a lot of people trained in the program. There's the International Dyslexia Association, American, and they talk about it. There is some training in Vancouver too, but it's very limited. It's a grassroots program, but I really support it because I've seen it work. I started with my daughter and then at the learning centre and now with these young children. It isn't widespread, and I guess that's why we're here. I want to get it widespread.

S. Lindstrom: We have been very well supported in our district to get it into communities. So far there are teachers and assistants that have been trained in Burns Lake, Fraser Lake, Vanderhoof and Fort St. James. We are actually just doing a training session right now where we have Tatshay, which is one of the band-run schools out of Fort St. James.

We had two of their assistants come down in the springtime. We had the principal come down to a training session in the summer, and she has now sent three more of her teaching assistants for this session. She has almost a whole school. She's really struggling. She just thinks it's wonderful. It's becoming more widespread.

We're saying that our teaching assistants are better than gold because what we can do now with their knowledge is send two children who might need that extra skill reinforcement to them and say: "Please, can you do the…?" They know what we're talking about; they know how to do it. Those children get two-on-one attention not by asking for extra money but by finding the time in the classroom to do it. I think that's what can happen in the adult learning centres and friendship halls — anywhere there's literacy that needs to be taught.

N. Macdonald: Well, can I just say that the job you do — I think it's one of the most important jobs that's out there to be done. I just love the passion that you have to come in the evening and share with us something that you obviously think everybody should know about. I commend your passion and the work that you do. Thank you for taking the time.

J. Rustad: I also want to echo those comments, in particular as I'm getting to know school district 91 and discovering more and more how innovative they are and some of the great work they're doing. I remember visiting the school in Fort Fraser and walking through.

I have to admit that somehow — and I don't know what the barriers are — we need to find a way to be able to take that enthusiasm and success that you have captured, and that you have had, and describe that. I do believe, when you're talking about that kind of success for your master's and this thesis that you've done in terms of the reading levels, and when you look at some of the challenges — particularly, as you say, in an area that has a lot of at-risk children — that speaks for itself. It speaks volumes. Thank you so much for sharing with us tonight.

M. Polak: I want to, first of all, thank you so much. This was an encouraging day for me, because you're the second presenters to talk about Orton-Gillingham. I had a very close friend whose son was severely dyslexic, and my introduction to Orton-Gillingham was watching her go through the struggle of not having him learn in the regular system. She eventually ended up spending a fortune to have him go to Kenneth Gordon, but his life turned around.

There are so many things I'd love to ask you about getting this into the classroom, and I'm excited to hear that you have. But as our focus is adult literacy, listening

to your description of how you've more or less taken that three years in the system and planted little seeds, do you think there is an application for Orton-Gillingham such that one could create a train-the-trainer model? Would that work? Is it applicable?

G. Olafson: That's kind of our vision. Where we'd like to go with it is to have that. As Stephanie pointed out, as a teacher, unless you're given the tools, it's really hard to help. When you're dealing with people who have trouble, learning disabilities are usually behind the fact that you've gone through school and don't know how to read. You need a very specific program.

In Prince George there is the Learning Difficulties Centre, which does a two-week program in the summer, as well, with training for it. I think what we need is to have exactly what you said — get it started.

S. Lindstrom: I think we also have to be very careful, because training the trainer sometimes exponentially becomes…. The integrity of the program disappears.

S. Lindstrom: So I think that's where we want to be very careful with the integrity and the importance of using all the modalities in the program. If, for example, you're saying to train and send people out to train, I think it would be very important to make sure they maintain that mission statement of training for all, and individual education is the key. This goes to every child's need, and if you lose that, then you lose the integrity of the program.

S. Lindstrom: Not that we know of, but we've used it for ESL. There are components of it, like syllabication, affixes — the prefixes, suffixes, roots. Those kinds of lessons need to be pulled out of the program to teach for ESL, because it's actually teaching the structure of the language. It's not just vocabulary you need to teach, and not just speaking vocabulary for ESL. It's actually learning the structure of the English language. Taking the components out and teaching those reinforces everything else they have learned for ESL. So not that we know of, but we'd like to see it being used for ESL.

S. Lindstrom: No, there's not really a need for any adaptation. It's understanding what your learners already do know and then giving them what they need. It would be basically taking the components of the program of what they don't know and filling in the holes. That's for adult learners too.

The reason they learn so quickly is because they have so much already. It's just that it hasn't tied together yet for them, so filling in those holes and knowing what the holes are to begin with — at the education of the teacher — then makes that job so much easier, because you know where to start and where you're going.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Have you had an opportunity to speak to the deputy minister about this?

J. Nuraney (Chair): Yes, because it seems to me, like John was just explaining to me, it's not the curriculum. It's the methodology. That's the difference.

J. Nuraney (Chair): We have never talked about the method of teaching. We've always talked about the curriculum. So maybe you should make a conscious effort….

S. Lindstrom: I think we see, too, that our textbooks get larger every year, because we have to continue to re-teach what we've already taught, and that should never happen.

J. Rustad: I was just going to say that I know that the minister has visited your classroom. I plan to have a good chat with her about what you have just presented tonight. If possible, we should be in contact. I would like that opportunity to perhaps talk to the deputy about the success you're having.

S. Lindstrom: She put her to work. She had her start to do a lesson, so she might remember.

J. Rustad: She will remember some of that. I know she will, because of her passion that she has in education. But I will have a chat with her about it as well.

I'd like to close by saying thank you once again for driving in. If you're driving back tonight, please drive carefully.

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1)	Lheidli T’enneh Band	Joe Gosnell, Jr.
2)	Literacy BC	Rebecca Beuschel
3)	College of New Caledonia	Marcia Timbres
		Flora Abraham
		Terry Neilson
4)	Centre for Learning Alternatives	Teresa Saunders
5)	Learning Difficulties Centre of BC	Sarah Cunningham
		Donna Jarvis
6)	Prince George Native Friendship Centre Learning Circle Literacy Program	Frank Siegrist

7)	Susan Lakusta
8)	Prince George Public Library	Marc Saunders
9)	Support for Dyslexia and Learning Differences	Gloria Olafson
		Rhonda Henry
		Charlene McLean
		Stephanie Lindstrom

Committee Staff:	Josie Schofield (Committee Research Analyst)

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
EDUCATION