Q&A: Closing Aurora College’s community learning centres

How is Aurora College justifying closing its 19 community learning centres across the NWT? And what do the people who work in those centres think?

Last week, the college said the community learning centres will close at the end of June.

That’ll leave the college with just its three main campuses in Yellowknife, Inuvik and Fort Smith. For the time being, at least, it will have no physical presence in other NWT communities.

The closure has been criticized by some MLAs and organizations like the NWT Literacy Council, which said on Friday it was “shocked.”

“This makes education less accessible to many NWT adult learners, particularly Indigenous people who are more likely to live in a small community and to have not graduated from secondary school,” literacy council executive director Kathryn Barry Paddock was quoted as saying in a Friday news release.

On the same day, Cabin Radio spent just under an hour interviewing the chair of the college’s board of governors, Joe Handley, and the college’s president, Angela James, about the decision.

We also spoke with three people who have experience working at community learning centres across the territory to understand the decision from their perspective. They requested anonymity to discuss sensitive details about a job two of them still hold, while the third person remains connected to the northern education sector.

Cabin Radio asked the territorial government on Thursday for its response to Aurora College’s decision. (Aurora College has had an arm’s-length board of governors since 2023 and, since that point, has possessed the power to make decisions independently of the GNWT.)

The GNWT said it was “examining alternative ways in which adult learners within communities can continue to access opportunities for learning.”

Here’s our guide to what we know so far about the justification for closing the community learning centres – said to affect 47 unionized positions – and how people inside the system feel about it.

What do the community learning centres do?

Community learning centres are essentially there to help people in small communities access academic upgrading.

Some of that can be at high school level. A lot of it is aimed at a level lower than high school, so adult residents of small communities can get help with the basics of math and English.

That kind of upgrading can help people meet requirements for higher-level academic courses, instruction in the trades, or careers in other lines of work.

What reasons did Aurora College give for closing the centres?

This can be summed up in one sentence from college president Angela James: “The numbers were low, the costs were high.”

The college says far too few people attended the community learning centres to justify the cost of keeping each centre open and staffed.

“Enrolment and completion rates at the CLCs were continually declining,” said James, using an initialism for the centres.

“NWT learners were no longer choosing the CLCs for their upgrading needs. CLCs were not meeting the needs of communities and learners. The staffing numbers were high, the mode of delivery was outdated and effective.”

Joe Handley, the former NWT premier who now chairs Aurora College’s board of governors, said the college had spent “around $6.7 million” for 22 students to attend the 19 CLCs in the 2023-24 academic year.

“Do we need 20 or 30 people in each classroom to operate? No, I don’t think we need quite that many,” he said. “But we do need more than an average of one student per centre. It’s just too expensive.”

Wait, just 22 students across all of the CLCs put together?

Twenty-two full-time students, according to college vice-president of communities and extensions Heather McCagg-Nystrom.

McCagg-Nystrom said there were also 30 part-time students at the CLCs during 2023-24, so the total number of individuals was 52.

But you guys ran a graph last week showing hundreds of students.

We sure did – here’s a link to it. The graph uses data from Aurora College annual reports that devote about a page, each year, to the “number of students” at the college. (Want an example? Open the 2022-23 annual report and scroll to numbered page five.)

In 2022-23, under the heading “number of students by campus,” the college reported 48 full-time students in communities outside its three main campuses, alongside 441 part-time students.

This, it turns out, vastly overestimates the actual number of students. Rather than “number of students,” what the college seems to have actually reported was “number of times students appeared in certain settings.”

“The perception is it looks like there’s hundreds of individuals using those services but, when we look at our two semesters, those are ongoing enrolments,” said McCagg-Nystrom, asked about this.

“So you may see those students captured in term one and then they’re replicated again in term two, if they’re continuing.”

In other words, the same person can be counted multiple times in “number of students” for any given year. James, the college president, conceded that the data presented in these reports is therefore “skewed.” (The college changed how it reported its data for 2023-24, although that change made understanding how many people studied at community learning centres no easier for anyone outside the college.)

The college didn’t provide corrected 2022-23 figures for the number of students at community learning centres, but instead said the figure of “full-time equivalent students” was a better gauge. That figure for CLCs was 99 in 2022-23, 58 in 2021-22 and 101 in 2020-21.

What would be a sustainable number of students at CLCs?

“Anywhere from 30 to 40 full-time students attending regularly” at each CLC, said James.

In other words, about 30 times the number of full-time CLC students in 2023-24.

“The number that is of most concern to us is the full-time students, because those are the ones who are using the facilities in each community,” said Handley.

“As for the part-time students who are learning virtually and online and so on, they can be connected to anywhere – Yellowknife, Fort Smith. We don’t need to have a facility for virtual learning in each community.”

One person with significant experience working at CLCs took issue with this.

They said Aurora College appeared to be excluding from its data anyone who was served by a CLC through a means other than Adult Literacy and Basic Education, the upgrading program at the heart of the learning centres.

For example, some CLCs run all kinds of programming for the community like computer literacy courses and cooking classes. People attending those kinds of initiative don’t seem to be a factor in the college’s thinking.

Was the GNWT involved in this decision?

As far as we can tell, no.

The college has portrayed the decision as one made by its governors, who form a board that is supposed to be free of GNWT control. It’s been that way since 2023, when the board took over from a GNWT-appointed administrator.

The GNWT has also said it had no hand in the decision.

“Under the Aurora College Act, the Aurora College board of governors is responsible for operational decisions of the college. This includes legislative direction to the Minister around ‘non-interference’ that underscores the arm’s-length relationship between the college and GNWT,” the territorial government stated in an email to Cabin Radio.

“As a result of this decision, the GNWT will be examining alternative ways in which adult learners within communities can continue to access opportunities for learning. Some additional time will be needed to determine what alternative delivery may best support communities and ensure that the needs of adult students and learners in the territory are being met,” the statement continued.

“This includes seeking clarity from Aurora College on the programming they intend to deliver at campuses and online, as well as engaging with other post-secondary partners and stakeholders around the ways in which adult learners can be supported.”

How do people at CLCs feel about this?

We spoke with two current employees. Each of them said they broadly agreed that the CLCs were not achieving much (though they attributed that to a series of missed opportunities that we’ll look at shortly).

“I’ve always thought the learning centres were inefficient. When I started I was like, ‘How is this possible that I’m getting paid this much and we don’t have that many students?’ And their programs aren’t that great. I don’t think [the governors] were off the mark in a lot of the things that they said, but there’s way more to it than that,” said one of the two.

The second said the real surprise last week was that Aurora College had spent years publicly stating the opposite of the conclusion it just announced.

“They had talked about how the CLCs would be a part of the polytechnic,” they said, referring to the college’s eventual ambition to become a polytechnic university.

“We kept being told that the CLCs were a part of that picture.”

“There was a lot of reassurance that this wasn’t going to happen,” said the first person about the closures, “even though if you look at it from a fiscal perspective, they cost a hell of a lot.”

Why aren’t the CLCs more successful and popular?

The three people with experience working at CLCs said the centres had existed without much of a vision, lacked resources, and did a poor job of fitting in with the lives of the people they were supposed to help.

As an example, one of the three said the CLCs virtually never ended up actually giving someone a high school credit.

While many people attending CLCs were working on courses at a lower level, high school credits were important for some students – but the college curriculum wasn’t set up to readily offer them.

That meant many students ended up being referred to online learning at colleges in the south that did offer high school credits, the person said.

Meanwhile, all three people we spoke with who worked inside the centres said there was no meaningful standard for many courses. In other words, there was no agreed-upon way to deliver a course so that taking a CLC math course in the Beaufort Delta would feel identical to taking it in the Dehcho.

“The infighting over trying to come up with a standard of how to deliver these courses, it just blew my mind,” one person said.

“There should have been one math course for each level, one English course that everyone in every region was doing, so there was a standard. The standards were a gong show. Everyone just created their own course.”

Two people said the biggest failing was the college’s inability to be flexible with students who had plenty to deal with in their lives outside the walls of the CLC.

“They set up the courses to be a full year long for someone to work through three grade levels when they can barely read and write. You’re setting them up for failure. Chop it into smaller bits, modularize it,” one person said.

“In communities, some people are living crisis to crisis. Give people a chance to come in, complete something in the tiny bit that they can come in for, and then they’re going to be gone and dealing with their lives. When they come back, let them come back and start again wherever they need to pick up.

“It’s not rocket science. Why punish them and have them restart again? If they get through a module, they get through it. When they come back, give them a review on that module. If they remember it, they can keep moving on.”

James, the Aurora College president, said discussing who was to blame for the CLCs’ failure was a “deficit model” of thinking that wouldn’t help.

“I think this is just a sign of the times in terms of what’s happening with in-person learning in communities,” she said.

“We don’t care whose fault it was in the past,” said board chair Handley, “but we want to fix it going forward.”

When was the decision made and when was the GNWT informed?

One MLA has already suggested online that the CLCs’ closure “is not OK” and that the territorial government was as surprised as anyone.

Handley and James said this had been discussed for the past year and a half, and the board reached a final decision in November last year.

Handley said the GNWT “was certainly told through the education department and we’ve had these discussions with the minister,” Caitlin Cleveland, before last week’s announcement.

“She knew it was likely coming,” he said of Cleveland.

There is uncertainty around what happens to the GNWT funding given to the college to run the CLCs.

MLAs have suggested the GNWT will get that money back. The college wants to keep it and use it on other programs.

Overall, the college says closing down the CLCs and finding another way to deliver academic upgrading could save an estimated $4 million a year.

What’s a better way to offer this kind of education in small communities?

“Just because Aurora College is giving up on adult basic education doesn’t mean the rest of us have to,” Yellowknife North MLA Shauna Morgan said last week. “Maybe someone else can do it better?”

Aurora College’s CLCs are not the only option for academic upgrading in some NWT communities.

There are communities in which high schools offer similar courses. James said friendship centres and band offices sometimes do the same. She said the college would study which of those other programs appeared to be working as it plans how to offer upgrading in future.

For now, the college has said its plan is likely to involve offering in-person upgrading at its three campuses and an online version.

“From the board’s perspective, adult upgrading and preparation for trades and certificate programs is really something the high schools should be doing,” said Handley.

James said the college will “engage with communities and business services and governments” on its next steps. She said the college “will definitely have a presence in communities to meet the upgrading and learning needs of the NWT learners, but it will look different.”

Asked what that meant, she said: “I’m not at liberty to share the whole plan yet, because we’re still in the process of working on it.”

One of the three CLC educators we spoke with said moving to an online-only option for people in smaller communities could be challenging.

“For students at a lower level, it takes the face-to-face and some instruction,” they said.

“I don’t know if they’ll have the computer background and the ability to get through it on their own without direction.”

What happens next?

The college is obliged to consult with the Union of Northern Workers about the positions that are set to be cut through the closures.

The union has already filed a formal grievance over a failure to consult. The college says that isn’t fair as the closure is still almost half a year away, allowing plenty of time to consult, but the union says that consultation is effectively meaningless given the college has announced the closures as a done deal.

Beyond that, Handley said the college doesn’t “want to get too deep into adult upgrading” even when it comes out with a new approach later this year, “because every dollar we spend there is a dollar we can’t spend in our college programs.”

“We need to work with the department of education, whose responsibility it is to bring students through where a Grade 12 is a Grade 12 and the amount of upgrading that’s necessary is minimal,” he said.

“We’ll do the fine-tuning so that they can enter into trades and certification and degree programs.”

Handley added the college is still pursuing its transformation into a polytechnic university, albeit with no fixed timeline in place after an earlier deadline of 2025 was dropped.

The two educators we spoke with who remain part of the CLC system said they were unsure what their futures hold beyond June.

Reflecting on their time working in CLCs, one educator said they had concluded they were “working in a broken system.”

“But at the end of the day,” they said, “there were some people that came out of that a little bit better because we were there to help. I feel good about that.”