FNEAA National Town Hall Presentations Now Available

Posted on February 3, 2021

Akwesasne, ON

Thanks to everyone who participated in the First Nations Education Administrators Association (FNEAA) Gathering Place National Town Hall on Wednesday, January 27, 2021.

Education administrators and directors from across the country heard presentations from other First Nations Education Administrators on how they are successfully working through the challenges of COVID-19 at local levels with  First Nations education, staff, teachers, students, parents, and community members.

Sheldon Couillonneur, Principal of Morley Community School and member of the Stoney Education Authority in Alberta, shared how the 3G Education Model brought new meaning to student engagement and how the Google platform worked to deliver online learning, concepts, content, and performance tasks for their students.

Maureen Johns of Pasqua First Nation, Saskatchewan, eloquently spoke about the importance of culture and ceremony. She used a sabre tooth tiger as a metaphor to describe how COVID-19 is affecting First Nations people and that the answer on how to deal with the tiger would become the philosophy for the return to school for First Nations students.

Denis Gros-Louis and his team at the First Nations Education Council (FNEC) in Quebec spoke about how FNEC developed its Broadband Strategy to deploy fiber optic infrastructure to all member communities. They have improved their technology and internet connection to bring cost-effective and manageable broadband solutions capable of meeting the needs of any school and the operational requirements to sustain it.

In 2020, FNEAA staff conducted two national surveys and held five regional town halls to gain insight about how COVID-19 impacted First Nations, specifically the challenges, concerns, and innovative practices happening at local levels as schools prepared to return to the classroom and once they had returned to school. Dr. Paulette Tremblay, FNEAA President and CEO and Manon Lamontagne, Senior Project Manager spoke to the results of the surveys and town halls.

Survey Results and Videos can be found here.