Alfred Moses

With the consultation that we've had with residents of the Northwest Territories as well as our school boards, we have made those changes to ensure that early childhood educators can be part of instructors within the JK system and doesn't necessarily have to have a degree. It's the flexibility of the school boards to determine whether the JK instructors can be an early childhood educator or have to have that degree in education.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. With the report that we tabled last year, of course, we go out and we speak with all our stakeholders. As Minister responsible for Education, it is my duty to ensure that all families, all children, have access to the same quality of education and the best start at life when they start their education careers. Currently there are 11 communities in the Northwest Territories that do not have any licenced early childhood programs. As a government, we have to make sure that we provide services that give every family, every child, the equal opportunity to have the best start...

As I mentioned, we fund education authorities on enrolments. We've seen low enrolments. The funding that we usually give on the previous year's budget, they've been lower, so that funding that we usually get, we're using that, and reprofiling it in junior kindergarten. It's because of low enrolment rates.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As I mentioned in answering these questions previously, the $5.1 million that's going to be needed to implement junior kindergarten is a commitment for this government, and we are meeting with the superintendents and the education authorities to see how we're going to be rolling out this funding, and the numbers are correct. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mr. Speaker, junior kindergarten is going to be optional to families, and secondly I also mentioned that we enhanced our early childhood programming to daycares and day homes. We see that there's a lot of waiting lists across the Northwest Territories for daycares and day homes that offer programming for zero to five, and the infants we've increased the funding. So I think that those messages need to be put out there for daycares and day homes and that it is optional for families.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The difference is junior kindergarten will be a free play-based program that's offered to all communities across the Northwest Territories. Currently, there are 11 communities that don’t have any licensed daycare programming, and we want to fix that. Daycares and day homes, they do their own programming; we also work with them to provide some programs, but junior kindergarten will be one that's offered throughout the whole Northwest Territories. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

As I mentioned, the program historically has had low admission as well as low graduation rates. The mandate that we provided as a government is focused on Aurora College's focus and looking at our mandate when they develop their strategic plan.

I've got to remind the Member that we do have a great student financial assistance program, that we continue to support our students who want to go and get an education in other institutions, and we'll continue to provide that support. We've made great enhancements to that support. Any student who is concerned about this program, we will work with them...

Early on in my position in the role of Minister of Education, Culture and Employment, we had given our board of governors a mandated letter on how we roll out programs within the Aurora College system, and we met with the board chair and the president to make sure that it's reflective of our strategic plan moving forward and the mandate that we, as 19 Members, have mandated our priorities in this government, and that that was the direction going forward.

With the strategic plan, we did make reference to our labour market information report as well as our Skills 4 Success document to make sure...

As I mentioned yesterday when the question came up again, junior kindergarten will be implemented in the 2017-2018 school year. All education authorities will be required to offer junior kindergarten in 2017-2018, and education authorities have that option to offer it half day or full day.

Currently we run junior kindergarten in 20 of our 33 communities. We did go out and do that inventory stock. We did the discussions with all the schools to look at what was needed. A lot of our schools have the utilization available; space, classroom space, that's available. Hay River is one that we do have low utilization rates in some of the schools. There are some infrastructure costs that are associated with implementing junior kindergarten. The number that we've looked at allocating is over $3 million, and that's for infrastructure needs as well as looking at resource materials that are...