The Southeast College is starting a new program aimed at Indigenous action, which is set to start in the fall. They'll be putting forward Indigenous equity seats in full-time post-secondary programs.
Vice President of Communications & Strategic Enrollment Sheena Onrait discusses the new program and why it is being proposed.
"We've been thinking about this for a while now and it really came to the forefront when we released our new Indigenous action plan a few weeks back when we had our grand opening of our Reconciliation Education Centre. It's really important for us to be able to provide designated Indigenous seats in all of our full-time programs and we think this is a really great step forward."
The seats will be open to those who self-identify as Indigenous, with Onrait saying that may change.
"We have it as self-identification for the students. So they self-declare and on their application, we automatically slot them into the Indigenous equity seats. That may be changing slightly as we go forward and as we build out this a little bit more, but yeah, it's on all Indigenous students. All Canadian Indigenous students are applicable for these Indigenous equity seats."
In the case of a program not receiving any Indigenous applications, Onrait says they have solutions for that.
"So we've got a bit of a procedure around it. We've designated a certain number of seats per program and if those seats are not awarded to Indigenous seats by April 30th, then we go back into our regular seat pool to be awarded to non-Indigenous students. So we kind of really work to make sure that we're covering it off and we're still maximizing our enrollment in all of our programs."
Onrait says she's excited to get this program going to help out the Indigenous community.
"We are really, really excited to release this and really think that it's a great step forward to providing this access to education for Indigenous students in Southeast Saskatchewan."