Catherine Monias, the Garden Hill First Nation education director, said that because of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it has affected the community, both schools have been closed to in-person learning since early March of 2020, and remote learning has been a real struggle. “We just don’t have the Internet services out here and a lot of homes just don’t have the technology like they do in a lot of other communities,” Monias said. “We simply do not have the resources for large-scale remote learning.” The schools have sent homework packages to students since in-person learning was shut down, but Monias said because of strict lockdowns, even getting those packages to homes has been a challenge.
Pandemic drives do over for Garden Hill First Nation students theturtleislandnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theturtleislandnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Published Thursday, May 27, 2021 6:14AM EDT Catherine Monias can t wait for the day she sees the buses pull up outside her office and the kids from her remote Manitoba First Nation stream back into the hallways following months of their schools being forced closed by COVID-19. But it will be slightly different for the children from the Garden Hill First Nation, a fly-in community about 600 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg. Monias said education leaders have had to make one of the toughest decisions since the pandemic began: all students will be repeating their grade in the coming school year. “It s been rough,” said Monias, the Indigenous community s education director.
Catherine Monias can t wait for the day she sees the buses pull up outside her office and the kids from her remote Manitoba First Nation stream back into the hallways following months of their . . .
Garden Hill. (Timkal, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
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A Manitoba First Nation has decided that all students will be repeating their grade in the coming school year.
School closures affected the Garden Hill First Nation a fly-in community about 600 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg because many students did not have laptops, tablets or smartphones for online learning.
Catherine Monias, the Indigenous community s education director, says even for children who did have the technology, the internet bandwidth in the community is too weak to broadcast classes successfully.
As educators across the country are making plans to have kids return to classes full time in the fall, experts say patience is needed for academic achievements, and the focus should be on students social and emotional well-being.