BY HEIDI ULRICHSEN
Seventeen years ago, Lisa Feltmate left her home in Nova Scotia and went to work in Kashechewan as an elementary school teacher. She loved it so much that she never returned to work in the city.
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Kashechewan teacher John Wesley conducts an art class with Grade 1 students at St. Anthony?s School. |
But earlier this fall, the Grade 6 teacher was evacuated to Sudbury with her two children after E. coli was found in the town's water supply.
Feltmate is now teaching Grades 4, 5 and 6 to fellow Kashechewan evacuees at the former St. Anthony's Catholic School site in Gatchell along with six other teachers from that community.
About 112 evacuees started school there about a week and a half ago. They are getting instruction in all their regular subjects - art, gym, reading and writing, math, science and Cree language.
The children have missed about a month of school, says Feltmate. She's glad to be helping them catch up again.
St. Andrew's Elementary School in Kashechewan was shut down about a week before the evacuations began at the end of October.
The Sudbury experience has been life-altering for the children, says Feltmate.
Most of them had never seen the city before, and are realizing for the first time their living conditions are drastically different from those of most Canadians.
But Feltmate hopes her students will take something positive out of the experience, and decide to go to college or university one day.
"I think a whole lot of doors are opening for them because there are things they wouldn't have thought of before that are possibilities," she says.
"In Kashechewan, there aren't that many jobs, so there are very few examples to look to. But now, from all people they've seen, even paramedics and
the fire department, they are seeing that university is a possibility."
It's good to get the kids back in school, because some of them were getting pretty restless, says Elijah Wesley, the vice-principal of St. Andrew's school in Kashechewan.
Wesley is acting as the principal of the temporary school. He visited three abandoned school sites in the city before deciding on St. Anthony's because of its central location.
Wesley doesn't know when the evacuees will return to Kashechewan, but he hopes it is before Christmas. "A lot of people are saying different things, so I don't know which one to believe. Some people are saying there's still E. coli in the system, and some people are saying the school is still not safe," he says. "I hope we're home before Christmas, but I'm not sure we will be."
In the meantime, the kids are adjusting to life at St. Anthony's. At their old school, they were with children their own age, but now three grades are being taught together.
They are also learning out of unfamiliar books, says Feltmate. The teacher is making do with what she has, but says it would be great to have more
classroom resources.
