After months of hard work, the Roots of Resilience Charter School has officially been given the green light and will start next September.

The announcement was shared on June 20 alongside the Town, who announced the name change of the CETC from the Clean Energy Technology Centre to the Community Education and Training Centre.

Families whose children will attend the school joined in the celebrations for the new school, which has been spearheaded by Charlene Bearhead. Bearhead previously formed the first Indigenous Charter School in Alberta, the Mother Earth’s Children’s Charter School in Wabamun, along with several local Elders.

Nic Durant, the mother of an 11-year-old who will attend Roots of Resilience, says they are an indigenous family who moved to Drayton Valley from Dawson City, Yukon. Durant says she likes that the school plans to focus on the whole child.

This past year, her daughter has gone to a local school and has experienced bullying. She says she felt that there wasn’t much done about the situation, whether it was because the staff didn’t know what to do or there wasn’t any follow through.

“I really like the opportunity for Abby to be in a much smaller school where she can be more of a leader and immersed in her culture,” says Durant.

She says having Elders and the Grandmothers and Grandfathers Circles will help students to learn how to deal with conflict appropriately.

“We all work together as a family. We’re very inclusive in our culture,” she says.

Durant attended an indigenous school in the Yukon, and she says she’s excited for her daughter.

“We went out hunting, and we would do lots of stuff out on the land and I’d love that for my child,” says Durant. “She doesn’t even know what she’s missing.”

Jocelyn Whaley, the CAO of the Town, says providing space for Roots of Resilience inside the CETC is a proud achievement.

She says the original intent was to have physical programming on site. However, Whaley says the effects of the pandemic and the different government funding available have made it clear that Drayton Valley will not be able to provide a satellite campus for a post-secondary institute (PSI) at the CETC.

By being an education and training centre, the Town can now partner with several PSIs to provide schooling that students can do in the community. She said the transition began when the Town revamped the Zero Fee Tuition program into a bursary program called the Tuition Assistance Bursary.

“At the same time that all of this was happening, the school was looking for a home and thought the space was beautiful,” says Whaley. “Currently we have some classrooms available for them that we can offer.”

Whaley says Roots of Resilience having space in the centre works with council’s vision of education in the community.

“Council’s mission has always been that we have a complete wrap-around education for the residents of this region,” she says. “The nice thing about the integration of this school is that they can start at kindergarten and as they literally wrap around the building, they can get into the post-secondary programming.”

She says it will allow the school to offer joint programming to students, similar to the Registered Apprenticeship Program other schools offer.

Whaley says one of the goals the Town has is getting students to either stay in the community or return to the community later on. Bearhead used to live in Drayton Valley, but moved away when she was younger. Now that she has come back to Drayton Valley, Bearhead herself is an example of what the Town is hoping to achieve with the CETC.

“This is somebody who wanted to pick Drayton Valley,” says Whaley. “Someone who [used to] live in Drayton Valley, left, and then came home.”

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