First Nations schools vulnerable to teacher impersonators, educator says

A Manitoba indigenous educator says some northern First Nations schools are vulnerable to people who claim to be teachers but don't have the proper qualifications.

Treaty commissioner Jamie Wilson, who is also a former education director for the Opaskwayak Cree Nation, says some community schools lack the resources they need to look into applicants' backgrounds.

Wilson said the recent firing of a teacher in Oxford House, Man., after it was revealed that the person had lied on their resume, is not an isolated case.

"It even happened to me when I was education director," he said, recalling one case involving a woman who had been hired for a teaching position.

"We sent her her stuff to Virden, which is the certification branch of Manitoba [Education], and they phoned us right away and they said this woman doesn't have a teaching certification number. The number she gave us was fake, actually," he told CBC's Up to Speed program on Wednesday.

"We called her into the office, the principal and I, and asked her and … she admitted it. She said, 'Yeah, I needed a job, so I just made up the number.'"

Wilson said he and the principal escorted the woman out of the school, but she resurfaced — in a way — several months later.

"Strangely enough, about three months later I get a phone call from a friend of mine who's a principal in Saskatchewan and he said, 'Do you know this woman? She's using you as a reference.'"

In the Oxford House case, the fired teacher was also able to find work at a school in Ontario.

'Operating in crisis mode'

Wilson stressed that "there's some phenomenal teachers in the north" and cases of people claiming to be teachers are not common. He added that it is a crime to impersonate a teacher.

But with an 80 to 100 per cent turnover of staff in some reserve schools, local education officials can't always perform due diligence on applications, he said.

"Sometimes they're basically operating in crisis mode, so they don't have the capacity or the resources to do all the due diligence with, you know, full background checks and criminal record checks and child abuse registry, all of that stuff," he said.

"That's really hard when you're in a community … and a school system that's severely in crisis, significantly underfunded, overcrowded — all of those issues that we've been facing in First Nations education for years."

Wilson said there are 56 independently operated schools in Manitoba First Nations communities, but he would like to see an amalgamated First Nations school division that could pool resources together.