The numbers are heading in the right direction for aboriginal students achieving success in School District 57 classrooms.
In 2005-06, just 38.2 per cent had finished high school within six years of entering Grade 8. Fast forward to 2009-10 and the rate had improved dramatically, to 52 per cent.
There's still room for improvement -- the completion rate for the district's population as a whole stood at 72.4 per cent -- but the increase was the most significant in the province, noted assistant superintendent Sharon Cairns.
"It's not as if everything was bad and now everything is good," she said. "It's some things were working, many weren't and I think we are closer to what's going to make a difference now than we ever were."
Another more controversial measure of performance is the Fraser Institute's annual rankings of 63 B.C. high schools and 52 elementary schools on the performance of their aboriginal students in the foundation skills assessments.
Prince George schools were scattered throughout the most recent rankings, from close to the top to near the bottom, but that was not enough to dissuade Marlene Erickson, chair of the school district's Aboriginal education board, from questioning the validity of the findings.
She had much the same criticisms that teachers and school board trustees have held for the rankings of schools the Fraser Institute issues for the general population.
"They don't really drill down into the data to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the learners and I'd rather see the funding spent on having those kinds of assessments because our kids are obviously struggling but we don't exactly know what the problem is," Erickson said.
Perhaps the most-acknowledged hurdle educators have had to overcome is the long, unhappy relationship between Aboriginal communities and the state-run school system. The impact, in particular, of the residential schools has been well documented and has created an air of mistrust.
"In this area, three to four generations of children were put into residential schools," Erickson said. "First of all, there was the disconnect from community and culture and then also the disconnect from family and from parenting skills ... just the most basic things they didn't learn in residential schools."
That history has not been lost on Kathy Richardson, principal of the Aboriginal Choice School now up and running at the former Carney Hill elementary school.
"A big part of this school is to reconnect parents with their childrens' education and I think that's one thing we've been incrementally successful with," she said. "We have a lot more parents in the hallways here after school and we can call them and ask them to help us when there is a problem."
