Jackson Lafferty

I believe it was in my Minister’s statement, as well, that if we delay junior kindergarten in those communities, obviously it will be detrimental to those individuals, whether they are four-year-olds in the communities.

Aboriginal Head Start has been very successful, but we have to keep in mind that I represent the whole Northwest Territories and I represent the population of the Northwest Territories. That’s the reason why we’re going forward as part of the option to deliver those programs into the communities that will benefit this JK. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. I tabled the fact sheets. I made a statement on the fact sheets, all the information that we received by the school boards. There are always numbers changing. Sometimes it’s out of my hands. At the same time, the latest information that I received, I shared that with the general public through the Legislative Assembly and…(inaudible)…we are working with.

Mr. Speaker, the number of educators used to calculate the PTR includes regular classroom teachers, principals, assistant principals and program support staff. It’s important to know that Aboriginal language and culture specialists are excluded from this PTR. Those are just some of the highlights. The principals are covered. Mahsi.

I think the real challenge is with the federal government because I believe they are a year or two behind. We provide funding, again, based on their reporting mechanism. That’s an area that we are working out with the management of the NCS.

At the end of the day, there is a challenge before us, but we are working very closely with the CEO to resolve that issue. My department met with the CEO just last week to identify some of the options. Once the information is available to me, I can definitely be sharing with the standing committee just an update of the situation with NCS. We want that...

Mr. Speaker, I did commit to providing additional new money to those educational authorities that exceed 16 to 1. Those are areas that we’ll look at. Then again, we have to keep in mind the Education Act. It’s territorial-wide PTR and it is 16 to 1.

Yellowknife came at us with additional potential students projected, so we looked at that. Other community schools, other regions, those are discussions that we’ve had with them as well. Mahsi.

Mr. Speaker, last week I informed the Assembly that officials from the Department of Education, Culture and Employment would be meeting with officials from the two Yellowknife education authorities to compare financial numbers about junior kindergarten. I would like to advise the Assembly of the results of those meetings because I think they confirmed that there is a lot of incorrect information floating around about junior kindergarten.

Mr. Speaker, there seems to be too much opinion and not enough facts about junior kindergarten, which is why I tabled a detailed fact package in the Assembly...

We are re-profiling; we aren’t cutting the budget. So the $7.4 million, as indicated, it is being rolled out to all the school boards to implement junior kindergarten. Those are the areas we have been working with the school boards and we will continue to make that a success. The junior kindergarten has been under discussion through the Aboriginal Student Achievement Initiative, Early Childhood Development. This is where we’re at today. We’ve done a lot of research, and research is telling us this is the best way to go. The 16 to 1, at this point we are at 13.8 to 1. When we start implementing...

Again, the fact package does cover that detailed information. In 2014-15 for YCS, $277,000 will be deducted from YCS budget out of the $7.4 million that we’ve been talking about re-profiling through PTR. In 2015-16 another $467,000 is meant to be deducted from their budget. In 2016-17 another $393,000 estimated to be deducted. So it’s a total of $1.137 million. This reduction will be offset with an increase of $960,000 funding from ECE through formula funding to support implementation of JK, resulting in an overall reduction over three years of $177,000. Mahsi, Mr. Speaker.

Since we’ve been dealing with NCS the last few years now on the reporting mechanism with the federal government, we’ve been talking about evaluating and reviewing of their proposals, as well, and the annual reports that are coming in. I completely agree, because we are a public government, and the way that the money is spent is essential to be a responsible government. This is an area that we’re primarily focusing on.

My department also recently discussed the 2014-15 contributions with NCS, which included an enhanced review of the outcome. This was done with NCS agreement, so they’ve also...

The CanNor funding has got its own sources and they deal directly with NCS, but I can speak to the areas of meeting with the federal Minister, the former Minister and the current Minister of Canadian Heritage, on a number of occasions to lobby the federal government for additional funds on Aboriginal language in general. This work, obviously, is ongoing work that we’re doing between the two parties. This year we’ve entered into negotiations, as well, with the federal government on the Canada-NWT Languages Agreement. We are on the verge of negotiations with the federal government and it will be...