St. Mary's First Nation aims to make children kindergarten-ready

St. Mary's First Nation is taking steps to make young children from the community kindergarten-ready.

A new education centre for three and four-year-olds is open as an annex to Chief Harold Sappier School in the community, featuring two large, colourful rooms packed with everything from miniature kitchens to climbing areas and dress-up corners.

"Now this is like a teacher's dream classroom," said early years co-ordinator Heather Currie. "It's like we won a lottery, really, with this space, and the natural lighting, and the retractable wall."

The 1:5 ratio of teachers to students is also a dream, for both teachers and parents. Ten instructors help out, including two women from the community. The children already know a handful of words in Maliseet and start their day singing to a traditional drum song.

First Nations communities across Canada have lower high school graduation rates than non-aboriginal youth. In New Brunswick, the graduation rate for on-reserve students is approximately 70 per cent of those who make it to Grade 12. That rate has stayed about the same for the past decade. That's compared to 83 per cent for non-indigenous students.

Prevention before intervention

"We have the opportunity to, I guess, [do] prevention before intervention," said Currie. "We do screening for their oral language, and receptive language, and expressive language, so we start there. We do hearing, and so if we do find something we're able to start working with the parent and the child at an earlier age."

The $5-million centre was financed out of the band's resources, according to principal Allison Brooks.

It opened, along with a daycare, in September. Brooks says they were seeing children arrive unprepared for kindergarten.

"Some of the issues we do have, when kids come in, are usually low speech, and low language," Brooks said, "So in terms of vocabulary, what they know, some of them might have speech impediments."

"Statistics show that anytime you're in a low socio-economic area, they tend to be much lower versus a high socio-economic area."

The centre is already holding classes for parents in the evening, with plans to expand its offerings depending on the needs of parents.