Wendy Bisaro

Mr. Chairman, thanks to the Minister. I appreciate that there is lots of work to be done. I appreciate that there are different priorities. I am just having trouble understanding how the establishment of libraries in communities is going to assist our students in school to achieve success. Can I have an explanation from the Minister as to how that is going to happen? Thank you.

I guess I would like to ask the Minister if he would commit to provide that information. I’d like to know what it’s costing us to do this. If there are savings, where are the savings coming from and how do we get to cost neutral and/or actually gain some money? If he could commit to that, thank you.

Just one last question, I guess. I’d like to know from the Minister whether or not there was an evaluation done of this particular program that Food First Foundation was running. If the money is not going to Food First Foundation but it is going into the schools, what’s to guarantee that they’re going to use it for the same sort of program that Food First Foundation was running? Are we taking a program... If there was an evaluation done and it proved that the program was working well, why are we cancelling it?

I just again have to say that I think we’re missing the boat. The Minister mentioned...

Thanks for the response. So then, when we transfer school bandwidth totally way from GNWT, what kind of money are we looking at? Thank you.

That’s rather distressing if this foundation is not going to receive any further funding. The Food First Foundation has received rave reviews from our schools. They have been doing excellent education work in terms of teaching the kids about healthy foods, what they should be eating, what they should not be eating. They’ve been providing foods in the schools and I think they’ve also been providing some education to our staff, as well, to help them to continue with that sort of education and awareness.

To the Minister: what is the department going to do to replace that work that the Food First...

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have a question -- I hope it belongs here -- with regard to bandwidth and provision for bandwidth within the department, at the schools and so on. My understanding is that ECE is working its way out of the GNWT IT system, in terms of provision of bandwidth anyway, and are going to be sort of having their own portal, for lack of a better way of describing it. I’d like to know where that project is at and what kind of cost is being incurred by the department for this kind of moving away from the total government IT. Thank you.

One last comment I want to make and I would hope that the department is considering this already. Since we are looking at an early childhood framework I would hope that there’s going to be a great deal of consultation with daycares, with child care centres. They vary from certified in-home daycares as well as ones that are in a separate building. I would certainly hope that the department is going to utilize the expertise within these various businesses and consult with them, I would hope, copiously. Thanks.

I’m pleased to hear that the revision is going to be part of the overall evaluation of student financial assistance.

One other result struck me as probably not the best. Table 5 in the report shows the results of student financial assistance service objectives. I was really surprised by the measurements used there. They asked whether or not appointments were met within 15 minutes of the appointment time, whether e-mail replies were received within two days of them being received, whether phone messages or voice messages were replied to within two days. I thought those were pretty lax...

I appreciate the answer. When I raised the concern, the major concern of daycares was that they were not funded on a per student basis in the way that we fund our schools but they were funded basically according to the formula that Mr. Daniels just explained. Their very real concern was when a child was not present in the daycare, they didn’t get funding. It had several ramifications. They have to keep fairly onerous notes and attendance records and submit them in order to get their funding, and the other problem is they don’t know from one week or one month to the next what their funding is...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions today are addressed to the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment and I’d like to ask some questions about the student financial assistance client satisfaction survey that was held last year. The survey indicated that in general the student financial assistance staff are doing pretty well, but I was really struck by the answer to one question where 11 percent of the respondents were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with the way staff explained their answers. I’d like to ask the Minister what action the department is taking to lower that percentage...