Alfred Moses

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and we did see the concerns in the press earlier this week. I can inform the Member that we do have two schools that fall under the Yellowknife Catholic School Boards that offer programs from kindergarten to Grade eight. The school in particular that he's mentioning does have a utilization rate of 79 per cent and at 85 per cent then we start looking at extensions as well as renovations. Now, the other school that they have has a capacity rate of 58 per cent.

We will have conversations with the superintendent how to address those concerns from the Yellowknife Catholic...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I wish to table the following 11 documents entitled "Aurora College Operating Budget 2016/17;" " Yellowknife Catholic Schools (Yellowknife Public Denominational District Education Authority) Budget, June 30, 2017;" "Yellowknife Education District No. 1 2016-2017 Approved Budget;" "2016-2017 Operating Budget - Commission scolaire francophone TNO"; "2016-2017 Operating Budget Dettah District Education Authority"; "Tlicho Community Services Agency Operating Budget 2016-2017"; "Sahtu Divisional Education Council Operating Budget 2016-2017;" "South Slave...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I have a motion to amend Motion 26-18(2).

I MOVE, seconded by the honourable Member for Yellowknife Centre that Motion 26-18(2), Junior Kindergarten, be amended by deleting the words:

"AND WHEREAS implementation of Junior Kindergarten will jeopardize existing programs by removing four-year-olds from their programs.'"

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Later on we're going to be hearing a motion here in the House, but as we mentioned, one of the recommendations that came out of the report earlier this year is we're doing surveys, we're seeing what's needed in the communities, what resources are needed, and as we continue to hear those updates and talk to all the schools through that survey we will be coming with a plan, implementation plan and any other needed funds. We're going through our capital business plan and in there we did have some funds that were allocated to the communities for capital expenses, and we'll continue to look at...

We have had some concerns from the Aboriginal Head Start program, specifically in Fort McPherson. We received letters addressing some of the concerns that were raised at a meeting with the Aboriginal Head Start staff. Our Director of Early Childhood Programs and the program coordinator went in, we met with the school. The junior kindergarten being offered in McPherson was an option and the school decided to opt in this year. We didn't ask them to, but it was an option for them, they decided to do that. We've informed Aboriginal Head Start staff throughout the whole Northwest Territories that -...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to thank the Members for bringing this motion forward as amended. I appreciate all the Members who spoke to the motion and all the comments, concerns from the small communities, communities that have Aboriginal Head Start, and the regional centres here in Yellowknife as well.

Mr. Speaker, the government believes that we owe it to the children of the Northwest Territories to give them the best start in life. To achieve this, it's going to take some changes from all of us. The early development instrument shows that the status quo isn't working, and junior...

One of our mandates is to do early childhood programming throughout the NWT in partnership with existing childhood programs. We do support Aboriginal Head Start, we do fund them, I believe the Community of Fort McPherson is going to get around somewhere over $25,000 this year.

Part of the department is we do promote Aboriginal culture, traditions and values into our programming, right from JK to grade 12; you can see that directly in our Northern Studies programming, and moving forward in Northern Studies 20 and 30 as well. So it's very important for us and we continue to support Aboriginal...

We have had some training courses for people in the junior kindergarten program; we're also doing web seminars to update our staff in that area. In the Member's riding we currently hold junior kindergarten in all three communities and we also have 28 families in Aklavik, McPherson, and Tsiigehtchic that currently have their children enrolled in a program in one of the three communities.

So in terms of the training, we're continually doing the training for the staff to address those issues. As I mentioned, on October 4th we had some of our staff, regional staff, go in and speak with the...

Any concerns that were brought to the attention of the office, we clarified the situation. As I mentioned, we've taken out the Canada Child Benefit that was introduced on July 1st, so we wouldn't count them in the assessments, meaning that all children and all families, in fact, got the full amount of the Canada Child Benefit and we just clarified anything that came up. Since that, we haven't heard any concerns since then.

Yes, thank you. I believe the business case in the proposal that Dechinta was asking from the specific fund was in the amount of $5 million.