“It’s such a different experience from normal school. I think really just connecting with people, and having a class where you can be friends with everyone in it.”
“It regains my faith in humanity a little bit, seeing everyone be so supportive.”
“A lesson that I’ll be taking with me, is that I can learn from everybody who I meet.”
Those were some of the student comments from the Cortes Island Academy website. The 2022/2023 semester is now over and the academy is preparing for a Forest Ecology Semester in 2023/2024.
“We have now officially taken this program from pilot to an actual ongoing program All of this could only happen at this speed, where we went from idea to actually having a pilot program in a year because of our amazing partnership with School District 72, the leadership of Dr. Jeremy Morrow, the superintendent and our awesome partnership with the school teacher, Jeff Lontayao, who was there for the whole process last year,” said Manda Aufochs Gillespie.
MAG: “ This first semester or half a year of the Cortes Island Academy just blew us away. Both blew away our expectations and also presented way more challenges than people on the ground could even begin to imagine, because largely this has been started and came out of the hopes and dreams of Cortes Island, not necessarily professional educators who knew all the things that we were going to be facing.”
“It has been so touching to experience 20 students saying things like, ‘I have been transformed by this educational experience.’ Students across the board saying things like ‘they have never had an educational experience that felt so relevant to their lives.’ We see students who in many cases had not been in school before, or had dropped out of school, or who had been in school for a long time and had begun to think that school was not made for them. So that was really powerful.”
“The other thing that’s been powerful, and it’s been happening more recently, are young adults who’ve come to me and said, ‘Hey, I have to tell you how amazing it is that this is happening because I grew up on the island and when I got to middle school or high school age, I felt like the world was telling me that I didn’t belong on Cortes anymore, that I didn’t belong in my home community, that I was wrong to want to be there, that it wasn’t the place for me.’ They felt sent away and it had repercussions that lasted into their adulthood. Feeling like they were sent away from their homes and had to find a way to come back, or be relevant, or get back into a community that had been so powerful to them.”
“I really hope that people listening to this story will take a moment to go to the Cortes Island Academy.ca website because there’s a couple of things there that are just incredible. If you go to the 2022/ 2023 program part of the website, which is under the ‘About’ section, you can experience the podcasts that the students did. All the students in the program participated in personal podcasts as well as journalistic podcasts as part of a series that the students named ‘Ripple Effect.’ That’s really incredible to listen to. They all participated in the making of three videos in partnership with Reel Youth, our locally based film project, and those videos are also amazing. It’s both an opportunity to see the world through the perspective of young people today, but also to see in many cases another side of Cortes and the people who live there. Really powerful stuff. I hope everyone will take a moment to experience that.”
“The other place I would encourage people to go visit is the Change Makers part of the website, where you can start looking at the impact that our first year program had. So this program in our first year, we had a mix of local students that were coming from other rural and remote communities. The rural remote community part of who came is by far the largest number. Then we had some students who came from as far away as Germany and Indonesia, or just the more urbanized places such as Vancouver as well, but the vast majority were these rural and remote students.”
According to a breakdown from the Academy:
- 80% of the 20 students were from rural or remote communities.
- 40% were from Cortes Island
- There were also two students from Quadra, one from Read and another from Sonora Island.
- 10% of the students were Indigenous.
- 30% of the students had learning designations like autism, ADHD and chronic health issues.
- 25% were either drop-outs returning to the education system, or had never been in a formal education system before.
MAG: “Some of the research about what rural and remote students in Canada face has been really shocking. We are in the middle of what I would say is nothing less than a crisis in education for our rural and remote students, who year after year in Canada are dropping out almost twice the rate of their urban counterparts. They are underperforming in every measurable outcome from English to Math, etc, and represent – once they enter the workforce – the largest gap in education of any developed country.”
“So when you go to the Change Makers section of the website, you can see some of the information about this rural education gap that’s happening in Canada, but you can also then see our impact. The amazing students that came and got to be part of a transformational educational option that is rarely offered for rural and remote students and it was offered right here on Cortes.”
“Much of the world right now, in education, is looking for ways to provide education that is more transformative and relevant feeling to students.”
CC: What have you learned from this year that you’re taking into next year and what’s new for 2023/24?
MAG: “We’ve learned a lot and so part of it has been trying to figure out how to take what we’ve learned and implement it quickly.”
“This is a powerful model that seems to be really reaching the students that we have attracted. This year we are doing an application process because it’s popular and we want to make sure that we continue to be able to first and foremost serve the students within SD 72s catchment area.”
“That includes Cortes, but some of the surrounding areas too. Students who do not have access to high schools in their communities, those are our priority. As are Klahoose students, wherever they live, and providing this option to bring them home.”
“The other thing that’s different this year that’s pretty big is that we are charging an academy fee. It’s a pretty hefty one for a lot of students. So in order to make sure that we continue to be absolutely accessible to students in rural and remote communities, often who have fewer financial resources, we have, thanks to our partnership with the Cortes Island Community Foundation, been able to promise to meet a hundred percent of the need for the cost of the program of every student who gets in this year.”
“Those are two big changes in the application process.”
Another thing that we’re doing slightly differently this year is our theme. Last year, our overarching theme was in marine ecology and the things that happened within that: The journalism, podcasting, video production, science, leadership and outdoor education. The lives of people living in the marine environments and the marine environments themselves.
Next year we are really lucky to have two university teams joining us.
One headed by Dr. Suzanne Simard of the Mother Tree Project and her Mother Tree Network who are going to help us bring home this forest ecology theme.
We also have a partnership that we’ve begun with SFU, led by Maya Gislason who grew up on Cortes and is bringing her local understanding about what it takes for rural and remote students to be able to get through a system and become a scientist. She’s helping us begin to look at the Cortes Island Academy as a model of transformative curriculum delivery and how that can begin to shape and change the rural remote education experience.
Hopefully our fundraising this year will be successful again, like it was last year, thanks to our grant from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. We were able to pay local people to come in and be guest lecturers and to be the quintessential knowledge holders.
The Cortes Island Academy is designed so that local people are able to share their knowledge with students because that’s the people who are passionate and want to share what they know.
We’re hoping we’ll be able to raise the money to pay people well for that process, but one way or another, we are welcoming our local knowledge holders into this program.
One of the other things that’s different is Kai Harvey, who was one of the facilitators last year, is coming back as a facilitator and she’ll be with the students the entire semester.
So last year we relied entirely on a block system. It was completely local facilitators for each five week block. This coming year, we’re having a little bit more of a through line for the students and playing out a little bit more on the semester model. So that’ll be different and we’ll see how that goes.
The hardest thing to come up with in our local community is housing for our students. A little over half the students that came for the program needed housing last year, and we expect it to be the same this year. That’s 10 to 12 students that we need to come up with housing for. Last year, all the students went into group houses, and local people provided those home stays. You do get reimbursed for having hungry teenagers in your house and the cost of what it means to give them a room. We just need great people who want to have one, two or three teenagers living with them.
My family took some teenagers into our house. I have a teenager, so maybe that was less scary for me, but it was incredible. I feel like I made lifelong connections with the young people. It’s really neat to see the young people these days and what they’re dealing with and the kind of amazing growth that they’re going through.
We are really looking for homestay families and we encourage people to reach out to us, if they would like to participate in that way.
The next semester starts September, about the same time that everybody else goes back to school. I think that’s going to be around the 5th of September and it’ll go into January.
They’ll be studying much like they did this year, English, and their English will be delivered through a new media platform. So they will learn journalism and podcasting much like they did this year, and some video techniques. They will also be studying socials and again, there will be a strong First People’s element, as well as a very strong local forest ecology theme for this and everything.
They will be studying leadership careers, outdoor education and also science. So it’ll be a life sciences based course with the theme, again, being forest ecology and with a strong mentorship program with Dr. Suzanne Simard’s team.
They learn how to create great podcasts. They are available through the Cortes Island Academy.ca website if you go to the 2022/2023 program, and they’re available on our Cortes Radio.ca under the team takeover section. They’ve also all been played on CKTZ and if you tune in during the Folk U time slot, which is 1 to 3 on Fridays, Mondays and Wednesdays. They have all been played there, and they will replay there.
Next year we have the same partnership with the Cortes Community Radio station. This is just one of many partners that have made this program not just possible, but made it relevant because they’re not doing paperwork, they’re not doing tests in the usual way, they produce things that are meaningful in our community. They are learning to use the radio station. They produce podcasts, they put the podcasts on the radio where people get to listen.
They learn about video making. They produce videos. The videos are on the Reel Youth website as well as on the Cortes Island Academy.ca website under the projects.
The students are creating and they’re being able to create because we have these partnerships such as with the Cortes Radio, Reel Youth, the Hackai Institute and FOCI.
I’m really excited. I’m both overwhelmed and scared and also excited by the fact that now we have a new program that the community, the students, the young people of Cortes are depending on us to keep alive so that they can have an option to stay home, to study in their own community, to rise and shine and be part of our future, of tomorrow in this way.
The students were asked, ‘Who should come to the Cortes Island Academy?’
One said, “Anyone who’s creative, outdoorsy, always looking for an adventure and just is able to connect with people really well.”
Another added, “ Anyone, literally everybody.”
Top image credit: Homestay hosts are paid $750 – $900 per student a month, depending on whether your students needs a partial or full boarding program. Contact rhonda.teramura@sd72.bc.ca to learn more.
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