Jackson Lafferty

Mahsi, Mr. Chair. I’m pleased to present the 2014-2015 Main Estimates for the Department of Education, Culture and Employment.

The department’s fiscal summary proposes an overall ECE budget of $305.6 million, an increase of $6 million, or 2 percent, over the 2013-2014 Main Estimates. There is $154.9 million of the budget allocated to schools and school contributions for all programs, which represents close to 51 percent of our budget, and $33.5 million is allocated to Aurora College, which represents almost 11 percent of our budget.

The department has a key role to play in furthering this...

Mr. Chair, obviously that is our overall goal and objective, to have qualified people to look after our most vulnerable children under their care. Currently, we work with the college. Obviously, Members have stated that we should be delivering a high-class early childhood development certification diploma or degree program. That is an area we are currently focusing on as a long-term plan. Currently, we have some stats on number of individuals that are working within the early childhood programming that have either certification, diploma, degrees, even teacher degrees. Mind you, some of them do...

Those are some of the areas I wanted to share about from the front-line workers and I did hear about them last week. I’m going to be meeting with my senior staff in the department on income support and start implementing some of the key areas such as professional development and what kind of training is required to deal with critical situations.

So, what the Member is addressing here is very important to our client service officers and clientele. We are going to make sure that the training programs are in place. There are some training programs we are currently conducting. I want us to enhance...

Mahsi, Mr. Chair. We have been talking about rolling out the program, phase one, two and three approach. We are at around $7 million over a three-year period. Mahsi.

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. I did raise cutting some red tape in this House. That is one of the areas we’ve initiated with income support, the reporting mechanism on a monthly basis like we have on a quarterly basis or every six months type of deal. So those with disabilities, we highly recognize them. We want them to have an easier life than all these different reporting mechanisms. Some can’t walk to the office and we recognize that as well. We’ve made some changes in that respect.

We have client service officers working diligently with those clientele that have the disability. Most times the CSO...

Mr. Chair, we’re talking about the junior kindergarten that’s going to be rolled out this particular school year in the fall. It will be a three-year phased-in approach. There will be 29 communities this fall and the following year will be four in regional centres and then the following year, ’16-17 I believe, will be into Yellowknife centres, so seven schools in Yellowknife. It will be a phased-in approach over three years and we’re going to be hovering around the 16 to 1 ratio that we’ve been using for the level of PTR. Once the junior kindergarten is rolled out, anything above and beyond...

Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. The bullying has been the highlight of the day today and throughout all schools across the Northwest Territories it’s a special day for us. We talk about the suspension for those bullies that are bullying the students, and we’ve been dealing with the school boards on how we can develop a plan of action. There is a draft Safe Schools Plan by this department in early June of 2014, working in collaboration with all the school boards to deal with those matters that Member Groenewegen is alluding to, where if there’s going to be a suspension it’s considered as a vacation. We...

Mr. Chair, as indicated earlier, we do have to develop an action plan. Based on that, it will give us a figure of how much it is going to cost us over the long run without the action plan going to be developed. It will be carried forward with next year’s business planning process. For ERI, it’s not in this 2014-15 budget. Mahsi.

Mahsi, Mr. Chairman. Part of the process is, obviously, to develop the action plan and put it towards the next main estimates for the upcoming year. There are a couple of areas that we should be able to move forward on, but the overall theme of the action plan, once it has developed the cost factor, then we need to put it into the mains and I guess we will request our approval from there from the Legislative Assembly. That’s the process that we’re going through. Mahsi.

Mahsi, Mr. Chairman. I would like to thank the Members for highlighting this as one of the priorities of this government.

These 10 communities that the Member is referring to, the one that that has been highlighted, this will obviously provide child care programming into these 10 communities that we currently don’t have any licenced programming, licenced early childhood programming. So we are capturing those 10 communities.

Part of the discussion I’m hearing is that we’re not providing or supporting these daycares in the communities. We are currently providing subsidies to these daycare...