A year ago this month, citing concerns over poor student performance and financial mismanagement, Education Minister David Hancock fired the entire board of the Northland School Division, appointed one super trustee to head the district and commissioned a public inquiry to investigate Northland's woes.

The three-man board of inquiry, headed by educational consultant Dr. David van Tamelen, had a big job to do. Northland is a unique school district, which serves 23 scattered, largely aboriginal, communities across northern Alberta.

The district has traditionally had some of the poorest academic results, highest absentee rates and lowest high school completion rates in the province.

It's also been plagued by serious administrative problems: the district serves just under 3,000 students, but had more than 100 elected officials, who had a terrible tendency to micromanage the district's 23 schools, frequently interfering with personnel matters to a crippling degree.

On Monday, the province finally released the report of the van Tamelen inquiry. It is a thorough, thoughtful, honest and inspiring document, full of many excellent common-sense recommendations.

The report recommends that the district institute preschool Head Start programs and mandatory all-day kindergartens, that it provide literacy programs for parents, that it improve libraries and provide much better English and Cree language education, even if that means training Cree teachers itself. It recommends that teachers be provided with safe, comfortable and properly administered housing. It recommends that the board be reduced from 23 trustees to a more manageable group of nine, that term limits be imposed on trustees to keep people from empire-building, and that trustees and school councils not be involved directly with management duties such as hiring and firing.

The report also recommends that progress be evaluated every three years -- and that if educational results don't improve, the province consider disbanding the school division completely.

There are 48 recommendations in all, many of which suggest a blueprint for a much-improved system of education for Metis and First Nations children in Alberta's north.

How many of those recommendations is the Alberta government formally accepting this week?

One.

Just one.

Let me quote it word for word -- with the hope that you can translate the dense bureaucratese in which it is written:

"Recommendation #48: That Alberta Education create a multi-stakeholder implementation team including representation from all branches involved with NSD (Northland School Division) operations; NSD leadership; and the external agencies and organizations involved with NSD to engage in developing and delivering strategies, including those for community engagement with this report's recommendation, which are necessary to bring about positive change in NSD."

Yes, that's right. The main result of the government's one-year commission of inquiry into the crisis in the Northland School Division is that the government will now be launching a new round of stakeholder consultations to consider the recommendations in the report.

Hancock said Monday the only recommendation he can accept so far -- because it would be "paternalistic and offensive" for him, as a white politician from Edmonton, to tell the people who make their homes in small communities served by Northland how to fix their schools. No meaningful change can happen, he said, unless and until parents, elders and community leaders agree with the plan, and agree to support it.

"It's not going to work for an old white guy to go into a community and say, 'This is what's going to be good for them.' "

As for things like Head Start programs, all-day kindergarten and new libraries?

"Those are wonderful things, but if the kids don't come, they won't work."

To a certain extent, I accept Hancock's premise. There is such distrust of the "white" education system among many in northern aboriginal communities, a profound belief among some that getting an education, especially in English, leads to assimilation and a loss of native identity. Simply imposing a solution from the capital, without local buy-in, won't work.

But this is also a chicken-and-egg argument. Local parents and grandparents won't be convinced to send their children to school unless the schools have better programs, teachers and social-support programs. And great teachers won't be convinced to move to such challenging communities unless they have decent living and working conditions.

We can consult with "stakeholders" forever, we can work on "community engagement" indefinitely. But unless the government sets some deadlines or benchmarks to determine whether all this consultation is getting kids in desks, and grades up, when will it ever end? Many of the small, sensible recommendations in the van Tamelen inquiry report will cost money -- not lots of money, but money the struggling district doesn't currently have.

Hancock had no answers Monday on when or whether such funds would be forthcoming.

"I can't give you a timeline or a money line on that," he told reporters.

Now it's true, of course, that Hancock has already shown profound and decisive leadership in firing the board of trustees and imposing central control in the first place. But it would be a criminal shame to waste the work of the van Tamelen inquiry by letting this report moulder on the shelves, alongside its predecessors.

"Alberta cannot afford to lose another generation of aboriginal students to inaction, infighting and indifference," Hancock said on Monday. Truer words were never spoken -- at least not by a cabinet minister. Hancock launched his revolution in aboriginal education 12 months ago. Now, it's up to him to demonstrate the leadership, courage and commitment to see the process he started through.

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psimons@edmontonjournal.com