R.J. Simpson

Sure. This is a carry-over. This is money that was already appropriated and is being carried forward. We're not looking for money that was never appropriated. It's not overbudgeted; it is what was already appropriated, but the cash flow didn't flow during the timeline that was anticipated.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Right now, what's going on with the school is that all of the materials in the school have been removed in preparation for demolition. There is a contract in place for abatement and demolition, and there is a tender out for construction at this time. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. When students at Aurora College left for March break, they were unaware of the uncertainty that the pandemic would bring to so many aspects of their lives, including if they would remain on track to achieving their education and career goals. I would like to share with you today some of the challenges and innovative solutions that the team at Aurora College implemented to support their students and their communities.

When the pandemic hit the Northwest Territories, all Aurora College programming was temporarily suspended while the college team planned and executed a...

Thank you. We are looking for additional funds. If we don't get those funds, we still have a school to build. We have to retender it, or I have to go to FMB to get some money. Those are decisions that I am going to make as soon as we find out if we can get some extra funds. Hopefully, that is within the coming weeks, but I can't say for sure. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Just like all the teachers and support assistants are still working, so are all the counsellors. Every school counsellor in the territory is still working, and they have continued their relationships with students. So, students who they were meeting with on a regular basis, as soon as the schools closed, they reached out to those students and continued those relationships. ECE and the education authorities did our best to let all students know that those counsellors were still available to speak with any student, so it's just not the ones who already have relationships. They're still available...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. That's a big question. There are 10 different education bodies and 49 different schools in 33 different communities, so a lot of different steps have been taken. As the Member noted, school was closed in mid-March, and the decision to close it for the remainder of the school year was made, I believe, on about March 26th. The reason for that is because the authorities and myself felt that, if you waited every two weeks to see if we would reopen, we wouldn't be putting the effort into delivering distance learning, and so the decision was made to close the schools for the...

I'm not a statistician, but I'd think there would be a lot of effort expended to do that that would be better spent teaching languages. The Member wants to know every time someone becomes fluent. Well, hopefully, we're not going to be able to track that because it's going to be so many people. You go around to different communities, and they're doing different things. In certain places, they have early childhood where it's immersion. I don't think we're giving those children tests on a regular basis to determine, "Are you fluent, or are you not fluent?" It's not a simple black-and-white thing...

The Bureau of Statistics has information about the number of speakers. We don't have the information about which speakers have passed versus who has just recently acquired a language, but as I mentioned, work is under way to get better data, and hopefully, the Member will be pleased with what the future holds in terms of that.

As soon as the Chief Public Health Officer released Emerging Wisely as well as the backgrounder document related to schools in which she made the recommendation to reopen schools, the department and the education bodies and the NWT Teachers' Association have been meeting on a daily basis, working to plan for next school year. Now that we know the requirements, we can start the plan. What ECE has done is, they've created a framework so that we have some continuity across the territory, we have a common framework to go by. Schools are now creating plans to open schools and abide by the orders of...

I'm not sure if the Member is speaking about students who don't have access to computers. In those cases, students have relationships with their teachers and, right down to the level of teacher and student, there was outreach. Teacher have done their best to connect with every student and ensure that every student has the opportunity to learn. In a number of locations in the Deh Cho, and I believe up in the Beaufort-Delta, as well, there were initiatives to distribute computers, Chromebooks. There were other jurisdictions where they were lending out their equipment. In communities where...