 Well, good afternoon everyone. My name is Darren Fox. I have the absolute honor and privilege of being the principal at Eastland High School. I've been in the principal for 18 years, four different schools. I really thrive on the challenges that we have and opportunities that lay in front of us and Eastland's an incredible place, but it's gone through a lot of challenges. We're a relatively small high school in the city. We're 750 students. About one-fifth of our population, our first nation's made to an Inuit self-identified students. So when we entered into the school two years ago, you know, we really embarked upon a wonderful journey and there's a lot of things that we have done to really enhance what's happening in the school. I have Jade Brown, who's our first nation's made to an Inuit liaison here, and she's going to be leading us through most of our presentation as well as Scott Poon, one of my assistant principals. So thank you for this opportunity, and I'm just going to turn it over to them. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Jade Brown Tatussis. I come from the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, located on Treaty 6 territory. My grandparents are Verna Denny and Victor Denny, as well as Shy Brown and Georgina Smith. My parents are Tony Brown and Christine Baptiste. And the reason why I introduced myself this way is it was something that I was always taught, that we are connected from our generations behind us, our ancestors. And I share that because I might have a cuckoom, a muschum, or a cousin in the room, because as a community, we're always connected, but by knowing our family and where we're from, we're able to make that. So I am the eldest of four, and I am the first in my family to graduate from high school. I'm also the first in my generation of my cousins to graduate from post-secondary, in which I achieved a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Faculty of Native Studies at the University of Alberta. With my family and life, I was very blessed to have both of my parents, and like I said, they brought me up on the pow-wow trail. But I also suffered a lot from the intergenerational effects of residential schools that my grandparents attended. So there was a lot of substance abuse. There was a lot of violence. There was a lot of hardships at home, and going to school was kind of my escape. It was the way that I was, it was something that I had in control of, something that I controlled. So going to school was my place of healing. It was my place to be with my friends, and it was a place to connect with the community, and that's why I think I did so well. But in my short time, I've been blessed to be the Aboriginal Liaison at East Glen for the past five years. And being at East Glen, I'm the first Aboriginal Liaison at East Glen. Just being at East Glen as I got into my position, I tried to think what helped me to get through high school, what helped me to achieve that degree, and what could I have needed to be more successful, to feel more confident in what I was doing. And so as I entered my position, that's something I bring forth to my students. And one of those big things was my culture and my connection to my community, and just my social network, having that support within my school and within my peers. So as I, um, my five years at East Glen, I like to present a lot of cultural opportunities, whether it's Beating Club on Thursdays, Wednesday morning smudge, going to cultural camps, attending ceremony. I do a lot of academic planning. I'm able to advocate for the students and go to their teachers and let them know when there's something difficult going on in their life, and to make arrangements with their homework. Post-secondary and career planning, letting them know that what they're doing is totally achievable. A lot of them are the first in their family, and that's something that I can relate to. So just letting them know that there are role models and that this is a path that you definitely can take as difficult as it is, and as much as hard work as you have to put in, is definitely achievable. And then just social. Once again, community is huge. It takes a community to raise a child, and that is still very true today. So at East Glen, we have such a strong community with our teachers, with our various support staff, with our administrators. And that's something I take a lot of pride in, because about 75% of my job is crisis intervention. Every day, I have almost one or two students that come to my room in the school and just kind of break down crying. And at first I thought maybe I'm doing a really terrible job, because I have on a constant influx students that come forward with hardships, and just are overwhelmed and emotional. But then I reflected back on it that they had somebody that they could connect with. They had a connection. They would come into the school, even though they carried so much already on their shoulders and on their plate, and they would come to an adult and they would ask for help. And that gave me pride in knowing that they had somebody that they were connected with and able to reach out to. And I don't have all the answers. I definitely tell them that. I can relate to a lot of the things that they're going through, but just having that person is what means the most to children. And I'm not the only person within Eastland that they reach out to, but they have teachers, they have other support. And as much as I can speak to the work that I do or that my staff does, I like to empower the student voice. They're the ones who tell us what's working and what's not working, what they're interested in and what they want to do. So it is along the similar vein as our last speakers. And it's about that intentionality of where we go. So when we take a look, we really want to know that in order to reduce that achievement gap, we needed to raise those expectations for staff and for students. The improvements that we are undertaking, the alignment, it's completely connected to eminent public schools, four cornerstone values of accountability, collaboration, equity and integrity. So when we try and take a look at these items, we want to set that culture of the high expectation. We start looking at how can you enter into a new situation, you want to be able to watch, you want to be able to listen, and then hopefully that's where you'll start to learn. And when we hear the stories from our students, we want to have that knowledge first. It was about identifying key personnel on staff. It was about listening to what staff and students had to say. And as we collected more information from our school and from our catchment, that's how we were able to better align the resources and how best to address student needs. Creating meaningful relationships. The stories that, the story that Jade had walked you through and the stories of, those are just some of our students. We actually had to cut back that visual. It was probably about 10 minutes long. And that didn't even encompass the students that wanted, the other students that wanted to participate. But what we were able to do was that we were able to find those meaningful relationships. You couldn't just artificially place something and hope that that would work. We were listening, we were providing the academic and extracurricular opportunities. Very, very important. We feel we're fortunate to have Jade Brown-Tutusis working on our staff. But it's about her having that dedicated space where students felt that they were safe and they were welcome. Jade conducts entry surveys to kind of solicit information from students and that's to gain, again, that information and allow the students to feel that empowerment. And it drives a lot of the work and the direction that they take. This also was involved, sorry, evolved to include a First Nation Métis Inuit graduation coach. And Matthew's new to us this year, but his collection and monitoring of data helps us decide where and when to best intervene if intervention is required. We also have an eight-person student services team. There were three assistant principals over the last couple of years. And I'd like to think that we worked hard, we tried hard and I think for sure our intentions were there. But sheer resource and time just couldn't match the needs that were necessary. So that's evolved itself into including what's called an all-in-for-use. We have a mental health therapist, two success coaches. We've got an on-site after hours critical hours coach. There's an in-school mentor, roots and wings worker that then actually go into the homes. And I don't want to forget our school resource officer who is not only just a school resource officer, it's a connection to something greater and that goes beyond the walls of your school. Those have been really, really important. Establishing those systems and processes and then you can't have anything that's haphazard and you can't have anything that's a band-aid that'll perhaps address the situation but won't actually support something longer term. We had a flex block and if you're in the high schools, you'll know through high school redesign a lot of high schools took that approach of allowing a lot of students to direct themselves. But direction without structure leads to a lot of misdirection. So we were able to fine-tune that and have academic focus and that's the priority. We had to have a mechanism to collect missing and incomplete work and a really small stat to that was we were able to collect over a thousand pieces of incomplete or unfinished data in the first couple weeks of the system that we had put into place. Our student services team, we meet regularly. We have an all-in-for-use huddle and that's why I was a little bit late because we meet every single Thursday and it's students that are on the radar you want to make sure that they're at the forefront because it's really easy for them to fall behind and it's easy for us to not pay the attention that they deserve. As well, we look at student achievement. Your teacher awarded marks, we have monthly in terms report cards. You need to take that data and you need to use it to direct your interventions. If we, again, simply leave it for accidental interventions, accidents are going to happen. Our principal, Mr. Fox, was able to institute that Student Advisory Council and that's another process and a structure that allowed for student voice. Jade has Spirit Wolves and that particular leadership group has spoken to at the Esquio Awards and assisted with that. They have developed that personal skill and that confidence to go speak to an audience such as yourselves and share their stories and confidently share their ideas. We also have an academic support center that's in place. We made sure that there was an assistance, a structure to go along with the expectation and that is high school completion. That's high expectations the way it works. We also accessed our district and community partners. So when we have Orange Shirt Day, when we attend fall, winter, spring, feasts, it's with partnerships. We're not in isolation. And when Jade runs the average Indigenous games that we had last year, and I think we're on scheduled for another one, it's about involving the elementaries, not just in our immediate area. It goes beyond that and it's inviting elders from the community it needed to be a greater wraparound approach. We were very fortunate at the first time in its inception. Empton Public Schools has a career pathways sort of division and in concert with our first nation Métis in UNIT downtown. We worked together and we had a spring sort of boot camp. Students were earning credits. They were learning skills such as soccer refereeing, volleyball refereeing, First Aid. That is all, you're earning credits, you're learning a skill that's transferable to work outside as well as cultural opportunities. That's success. And that's where we found some positive motions and we're still working on it because whenever you're refining a process and whenever you're refining your whatever your approach is going to be, you can't be complacent and settle for where you're at. We love what's happened and we love our building because our kids are fantastic but we know there's more work to do. There's the incorporating exit surveys to find out did we, and so this is for some more information, did we actually hit what we were looking for? We want to have more family nights. We had a very successful one about three weeks ago. We need more because if we're trying to overcome some of the barriers for families that maybe school wasn't the greatest place, we need to extend that invitation and we need to have more opportunities for those to happen. We're moving, I think in our building, we like where our direction is but it's not good enough. We need to go beyond that into our catchment. We need to go beyond that into our entire school district and division and that's where we're going to have some actual leverage and because if you keep it in isolation, why keep a great thing to yourself? You want to be able to share that. The last slide here, it's really about trends and we could inundate you with specific numbers but we know that within the three and five years, we're seeing increases in high school completion. We're seeing increases whether it's three, whether it's four, we're seeing dropout rates start to continually drop. We're watching those exam acceptability rates increase and even better, the last student, Tyra Cardinal, she's going to university in September. I don't know how loud we yelled but that was so fantastic. More and more students are making their way to post-secondary because now it's not a dream, it's their reality. So we know we have work to do but it's some great work that we're doing and we're proud of it. Thank you.