Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement
The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) is an agreement between the Government of Canada and approximately 86,000 Native Canadians who at some point were enrolled as children in the Canadian Indian residential school system, a system which was in place between 1879 and 1996. The IRSSA recognized the damage inflicted by the residential schools and established a $2 billion compensation package for all former IRS students and, in particular, those who had been abused or otherwise harmed. The agreement, announced in 2006, was the largest class action settlement in Canadian history. As of December 2012 a total of $1.62 billion has been paid to 78,750 former students.
Protectory
Secular protectories or reform schools, or euphemestically termed "training schools", were instituted in America during the initial quarter of the nineteenth century. On 1 January 1825, the House of Refuge was opened with appropriate exercises on what is now Madison Square, New York City. Nine children, just gathered from the streets, were present and formed the nucleus of the new establishment that later grew to vast proportions on Randalls Island. Boston followed with a similar institution in 1826; Philadelphia in 1828; and in 1855 a girls' reformatory was founded at Lancaster, Massachusetts on the family or cottage plan, dividing the institution into three separate houses of thirty girls each, with their three matrons, all under the general supervision of a superintendent.
In 1904, according to the U.S. Census Reports, there were thirty-nine states and territories with institutions for juvenile delinquents, and these had ninety-three institutions exclusively for such children, reporting a population; between seven and twenty-one years of age, of 23,034 as against 14,846 population in such institutions on 1 June 1890. These figures did not include children placed in these institutions by parents or guardians without the sanction or order of a magistrate or other lawful committing authority, nor persons under twenty-one years of age committed to institutions that are not exclusively for juveniles, e.g. jails and workhouses. Inquiry at the Census Office in Washington showed there were one hundred and three institutions for juvenile delinquents in 1910; eighty-seven of these institutions reported 22,096 inmates on 1 January 1910.