Alfred Moses

Thank you, Mr. Chair. As I mentioned with questions in the House regarding this, students who are entering junior kindergarten will have access to all the supports and resources in the school setting. So at this time, we're just going to continue with the funding for inclusive schooling the way it is, but junior kindergarten students who are in the school system will have access to more resources, more teachers, moving forward. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Just to clarify this, the funding to the libraries is not affected. It is something that some of the operations within our own department, we made those reductions. You can rest assured that the public libraries did not see any funding affected.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. We don't know what the full guidelines are on this new pot of funding that we did get that was announced in the Budget Address and we're still working on that as it's a significant increase to the Small Community Employment Program. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. That $100,000 was targeted specifically to small communities for wage subsidies. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

As I mentioned, I know the Aurora College does have a good support staff to help their students graduate in whatever program that they are currently enrolled in. We can take a look and see why students weren't graduating from the social work program or the TEP program as well, and what the successes we have down south are in terms of the 19 students who are going to school down south. We can take a look into it, and definitely with the Aurora College strategic plan and review coming into place, or the strategic plan, hopefully we'll have some good outcomes of that and get better supports for...

Thank you. Our legislated PTR for across the territories is 16:1. When we did the 12:1 ratio, it was on funding, but it was also on a school-to-school basis. We do feel that it is sufficient to roll out junior kindergarten as we have in 20 of our communities already. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yes, with the new Canada Child Benefit, it is not looked as income anymore, so like I mentioned earlier we have more families that are on income assistance that are receiving considerably a lot more dollars. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and this was work that was done collaboratively between the department and Aurora College to look at where they were going to get their reductions from. As I mentioned, we are seeing very low graduation rates out of both programs and decided to go ahead with these reductions and the program. I know we have had full debates on this, both here in Committee of the Whole as well as on the floor, and this is where we had that healthy discussion. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. That is correct.

Thank you. From my understanding Alberta is not removing them; they're still using them as tests, and we are going to be doing the same as well. Thank you, Mr. Chair.