Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My question today is for the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment. With the fibre optic link on the horizon and education and social passing an issue in some of our smaller communities, I was wondering if the department had any initiatives that would bring e-learning into the communities, especially the ones that are sometimes hard to get into that would only have one or two high school students, and make it more cost-effective what they have on the horizon there for e-learning.
Thank you, Mr. Moses. The honourable Minister responsible for Education, Culture and Employment, Mr. Lafferty.
Mahsi, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to thank the Member for that question. This particular area is of great interest for the Department of Education, Culture and Employment. We’ve initiated e-learning within the Beaufort-Delta and the Department of Education between 2000 and 2005. We had just over 329 students enrolled successfully at that time. Due to budget constraints in 2010, we had to discontinue that particular program. The good news is that we are continuing with our discussion again, because we feel that this is a real need. Now we talk about the fibre optic broadband connectivity into the region and we feel that we need to explore this area. We’re very interested and we will be discussing this further with the Beaufort-Delta.
With students coming out of their communities attending regional centres, specifically in the Beaufort-Delta, their culture and tradition are sometimes lost. They don’t get a chance to practise it. I’d like to see or find out what the timeline is that the department will be looking into getting this e-learning set back up into the community. It did seem between 2000 and 2005 that they did reach a lot of the students. I’d just like to see what the timeline is to have that brought back into the Beaufort-Delta.
We did just recently initiate our discussion with Beaufort-Delta Education Council, talking about recreating the partnership that we had. We had a very successful partnership. We need to re-establish that as part of our distance education within that region. I’m sure this will trickle along with other regions as well. There’s been a lapse in financial aspect towards this particular program, but we are re-addressing that issue and it is a huge opportunity for us that we need to continue discussing.
Being new to the government, I look forward to working with the Minister of ECE to further move this project forward and thank him for his time answering the questions. No further questions from this point on.
