Partnership tutoring helps students learn

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Funding from a utility corporation is helping the Peigan Nation tackle the problem of illiteracy both in the school and in the community.

Last November, the Peigan School Committee received $15,000 from UtiliCorp to purchase the literacy program that their Napi Playground Elementary School had been borrowing for five years, and to hire a co-ordinator.

Being able to purchase the Partnership Approach to Learning program has allowed new co-ordinator Henrietta Yellow Horn to adapt it to meet the needs of her learners.

"The goal is to have our own Aboriginal reading program," she said, "to have our own Aboriginal content books."

"The goal is to adapt it to work within our own environment," said Hazel Big Smoke, who is a member of the advisory committee that was instrumental in obtaining funding and purchasing the program.

PAL, a literacy program that has been operating successfully for years in the neighboring town of Pincher Creek, is based on tutors working within the school system to help students who are having difficulty reading.

Yellow Horn already has 21 tutors in place and has upper grade elementary students helping the younger elementary children at their school. This year tutoring will be expanded into the junior and senior high school levels.

As well, a Literacy and Parenting Skills program will be launched.

"This is geared towards parents of students being tutored," said Yellow Horn. "It's a support group to help them encourage their children more, to work with their children."

"Our plans and intentions," said Big Smoke, "are also to help the adults. There is a great need for our community members."

Big Smoke said they hope that in the fall of 2002 the literacy program will be ready to be taken out into the community.

In the meantime, Yellow Horn is making some practical changes in order to make the program more appealing to the Peigan membership.

Cruising the internet, she found a literacy site where a teacher from Saskatchewan listed her reading resources for the program she ran for another First Nations group. While Yellow Horn holds that young children aren't as discriminating about what they read, she believes that older readers want to read about things and people they can identify with.

While the program has received only enough money to carry it through to the end of March, Big Smoke is confident that UtiliCorp will continue funding it. Before the funding came through, she said, the advisory committee met with UtiliCorp officials five times. Project planning took nearly a year.

Both the elementary school and Piikani Nation Secondary School principals were fully in support of the program, said Big Smoke, who noted that both principals and a number of teachers served on the advisory committee.

"This project is huge," she said. "We have to redesign it. It's a slow process, but with all of us working together, I'm sure we'll redevelop it with the needs of our community."