“They ignore me all the time and when I try to phone them, they just hang up on me.”
So explained Chelsea Marois, speaking of her experiences with North Bay’s Native Education and Training College. BayToday recently wrote about the private career college, which has been locked out of its McIntyre Street office due to unpaid rent, and detailed allegations from a student and former instructor.
See: Allegations mount against Native Education and Training College
Marois has had similar experiences – after paying tuition for an online PSW program, she could not access the course. When she reaches out to the school’s owners and administrators, Larry, Waylon and Lee Stewart, she receives no solutions, if she receives an answer at all.
In January, Marois enrolled in the program. Her and her mother drove to North Bay from Deep River to pay the tuition fee – the office was open at that time – and soon after the issues began. The first red flag appeared when her credit card was charged twice for tuition.
“They charged us when we originally went and then charged us again and denied it,” she said. “They’ve taken $10,000 from us and there’s no course for me to do.”
Indeed, the college told her the course would begin on February 5th, “Then February 5th comes and nothing happens,” she recalled. “I messaged them and they said oh, we forgot about you. Oh, that’s great,” she said, “You take my money and you forget about me.”
She asked for a refund of the overcharge. When administrators did get back to her, “He said to us he can’t pay us our money because he has no money left.” A refund never came, and Marois “officially went to the fraud department of the credit card company, so hopefully we’ll get that back.”
Marois has also filed complaints against the college with Ontario’s Ombudsman, the Ministry of University of Colleges, and plans to inform the North Bay Police as well.
With her pockets $10,000 lighter, Marois couldn’t access the online course, and when she did gain access – after many email requests – “they finally have another course going, but it’s not the full course, they gave you enough to make it seem legit, but when you go to answer a question it tells you to refer to the book, which they don’t give you and every time you ask them for it, they make up an excuse.”
This online course was “completely shut down until April 23, which is when they finally got something going, but it’s nothing, there’s really nothing there.”
“They’ve started a course with no instructor and no textbook,” she said.
BayToday has reached out multiple times to the Native Education and Training College (NETC) and received no reply. Calls went straight to voicemail.
Marois’ experiences with the college are familiar to Skylar Sayers-Southwood. Last May he enrolled in an Environmental Technician Course offered online at NETC. The course was divided into three sections, and “was going well.”
He completed the final exam for one section on January 4th, and waited for his final marks from the college, “but no communication came from the school.” Eventually, Lee Stewart responded, “She told me she was just waiting on an access code and would extend my course by a month to accommodate the lost time as this was closing into February.”
“However, no access code came,” he recalled.
Sayers-Southwind then detailed how he reached out to Mississaugi First Nation, who had funded the course for him, to pressure the school for answers. This is late February. The First Nation “had succeeded in getting in contact with Larry Stewart, and he gave them the reasoning that we have heard several times over the last month: their system had been hacked and they were in the process of getting their material onto a new platform.”
NETC did not inform Sayers-Southwind of this directly, “and I have still heard nothing from them. I have been waiting four months to hear anything from this school, which is supposedly shut down now.”
He explained how this has pushed back his education and eventual career by a year. However, he still plans to enter the environmental field, with plans to attend another college shortly. He’s sounding the alarm with hopes “that no other student has to go through what Amanda and I, along with other students, have.”
He’s referring to Amanda Weichel, who shared her college experiences with BayToday in our first story on the NETC.
As for Chelsea Marois, she’s also warning others about her experiences with the college. She and her mom recently saw a poster for the school at the Service Ontario in Deep River, and she told them about her recent trials.
She will keep reaching out to the school for a resolution, regardless of how many messages go unanswered by the Stewarts.
“I don’t let them forget who I am.”
David Briggs is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of BayToday, a publication of Village Media. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.
