Residential school survivors have little more than a week to decide whether they want to opt in or out of the proposed settlement package for survivors across the country.

Aug. 20 marks the deadline for survivors to opt out of the settlement which would see survivors receive $10,000 for the first year they were in the system and another $3,000 for each year following under the Common Experience Payment.

A separate Individual Assessment Process would be available for those who suffered further abuse at the schools.

The settlement also deals with healing, researching and documenting the history of the system.

Judges across the country agreed to the deal proposed by the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), the federal government, which funded the schools, and the churches which ran the schools.

Since then, the AFN has hired 15 regional coordinators to information meetings across the country for former survivors. Among those coordinators is Bob Charlie a former student of the Whitehorse Baptist Mission, former broadcaster and former chief of the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations.

For the past few months, Charlie has been visiting communities throughout the Yukon and Northern B.C. to speak about the package.

'People overall seemed really pleased to get all the up-to-date information,' he said Wednesday.

The meetings were well-attended with Charlie running into a number of people he knew from his former school.

While no one at the meetings told Charlie they would be opting out of the settlement, he said there were a number who took issue with parts of the settlement, such as the provision that family members of deceased school members were not entitled to funding if the person had died before May 30, 2005.

While not everyone is happy with parts of the settlement, Charlie said, there's also a realization among a lot of residential school survivors that if 5,000 opt out, it could be a longer drawn-out process for something many people want to start closure on.

Joining Charlie on his tour was the Council of Yukon First Nations' resolution health support worker, Sandra Johnson, to assist anyone who needed help dealing with anything that came up for the former students.

There were a couple of times when survivors needed that assistance at meetings, he said.

RCMP and financial workers such as bankers have also been involved to help survivors, including many elders, spot con artists who may be trying to scam their funds and to help them manage, for many, what will likely be the most amount of money they have seen at one time, Charlie said.

Communities are also starting to hire resource workers to help out former students, many of whom are starting to deal with the issues that have come up from their residential school experience, he said.

'There's an absolute need for counselling,' he said, noting many descendants of residential school survivors may also need such assistance.

Many people who went to residential school don't have the parenting skills they likely would have had otherwise, which has impacted their own children, Charlie explained.

With similar meetings wrapped up across the country, Charlie said the regional coordinators are set to meet for about two days towards the end of the month, though the dates and place haven't been firmly set.

The debriefing will allow the regional coordinators to deal with issues which may have come up for them during the meetings about the settlement.