Jackson Lafferty

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. I move, seconded by the honourable Member for Tu Nedhe, that Bill 24, An Act to Amend the Student Financial Assistance Act, be read for the third time. Mahsi.

When we talk about a 10 to 1, it could be upwards of $10 million to $20 million that we could be faced with our fiscal constraints at this point. The fiscal reality is that I don’t have access to $20 million available to me, so we have to be creative and innovative with our existing programming and our existing funding. That’s what we’ve done. We’ve reached out and this is an area that we feel that we can move forward on. We’re still under the PTR 16 to 1 ratio, and if it’s anything beyond that, I committed in the House that there will be funding provided to those individual school board...

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. We introduced junior kindergarten through the work of the Aboriginal Student Achievement Initiative and a lot of research has been done. This is an area that has been earmarked as a success, focusing on early childhood at age four. Based on the feedback that we received, even just as late as a week ago, out of the 29 communities we have 22 that registered to enter into the establishment of junior kindergarten in the Northwest Territories. In fact, one just came in just the other day from Aklavik. Aklavik wants to join as member 23 out of 29. It’s over 70 percent that are...

Mr. Speaker, for the record, on May 14th there was an e-mail from my office to @email. There was a request for a meeting, as Mr. Bromley alluded to, and I did commit that my department would meet. Unfortunately, at that time I wasn’t available.

I did commit that my department would meet with the organization, of which they did. They provided all kinds of information to us, and we are working with that information that has been provided to us.

Next week I am travelling to the Deh Cho region. My commitment is to meet with Joyce McLeod, who is affiliated with the organization, and we’re...

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. We need to be on top of all the experts in the field of early childhood development. We’ve done our research. We’ve done our engagement with the general public and working with the early childhood educators as well. Through the Aboriginal Student Achievement Forum, we’ve reached out to all regions, the educators, grandparents, parents. So with their input, we talk about early childhood programming in the communities. Based on that, introducing Junior Kindergarten and others was their feedback and we are moving forward on wage subsidy, as well, for early childhood educators...

In fact, we’ve been doing that since we started talking about the JK and other early childhood development areas. There has been some funding issues because of enrollment. It’s not just JK. We need to focus on how we can improve the enrollment issues and challenges that we’re facing within the communities. My department is committed, through the education renewal, that we need to talk about formula funding for the student enrollment in our education as part of a contribution, so this is an area that we will continue to push forward.

We will be continuing to contribute to the school boards to establish this type of programming in the communities. As I stated in this House, I did commit that if it’s beyond 16 to 1 ratio on the teacher ratio basis, then obviously there will be a difference of a new funding formula towards those organizations and towards the school boards. These are the commitments that I have made in the House and I will continue to live up to it. It’s 16 to 1, and anything beyond that we will provide additional funding to the school boards.

Mr. Speaker, I do not want to dismiss those individuals who are in the education system at this point. There are some individuals who have 20 or 30 years of experience working with early childhood programs for all these years. I certainly do not want to shut the door on them. They should have the opportunity. That’s the reason why we’re providing all this training over this summer and also in the fall, so they can be prepared to roll out the Junior Kindergarten in 22 of the 29 communities that we’re establishing this fall. In fact, one additional community wanted to deliver that on top of the...

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. This whole education renewal and innovation, as you know, I did a statement on that. We are going through the various stages of engagement with the general public. We have delivered the overall framework. Now we have to develop an action plan based on the feedback from the stakeholders, the educators, the school boards, the superintendents and MLAs and others. Other individuals are interested to providing their input. Based on that, we are going to have a cost factor where the new money is going to be approached. Those are some of the discussions we are going to have with...

As I stated in this House, I did meet with both YK 1 and the Catholic School Board just a couple days ago, and we’re compiling all the numbers now. We want to have the true facts and the true numbers. That will be before us early next week and we will be releasing that to the public.