Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I almost forgot to mention happy birthday to the Minister of Housing today. My next questions are not for her. They are for the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment.
My first question, Mr. Speaker, is the GNWT's response to the OAG's education audit contained an action item of to develop greater integration of services for children and youth in the education system through expanding regional capacity. This action item is currently on hold. What concerns me is the deliverables of this action item were to explore regional approaches to expand the current capacity of territorialbased support team, identify a pilot for a demonstration site for the model to be deployed and evaluated, and collaborate with other departments to finalize a model for integrated service delivery that involves provision of services in schools. Given the importance of support services in schools, why was this action item put on hold. Thank you.
Thank you, Member for Kam Lake. Minister responsible for Education, Culture and Employment.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. There was actually a pilot ready to go in the 20212022 school year, but like many things, COVID derailed that, and there was just it was not a possibility to do this work. The department's efforts were elsewhere unfortunately. Since that time, the approach to integrated services has changed across government, and so we are looking at new ways to integrate our services in that new approach. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I find it very hard to accept that response because there are other ways of delivering these services that are creative, out of the box and that are COVID friendly. There are tons of virtual solutions that are out there that a lot of school boards actually pay for out of their own pocket over school shutdowns and during COVID so that students still had access to these very important services. But those funds came out of their own budgets. So my next question, Mr. Speaker, is during my Member's statement, I spoke about a partnership that Nunavut is using to deliver rehabilitation support services in schools both in person and virtually. So is ECE considering a similar hybrid model. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. And, you know, the Member is correct that the school boards have paid for some of those services, and that is with the funding that comes from the department of Education, Culture and Employment under the heading of inclusive schooling, and those funds are restricted for the types of things that the Member is talking about. So we are providing the funds, and we're letting the school boards determine how they use those funds.
And so there are those types of partnerships, but they're not at the territorial level. They are at the school board level. That being said, I think that in the long term, we need to evaluate how we provide services. The Education Act modernization will address a lot of that, will determine the different roles of the different entities. So that work is it's a work in progress, Mr. Speaker. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. And I appreciate the Minister identifying that it is a work in progress and that ECE is still working on this. And I also appreciate the Minister of Health referencing that they are currently working on this with other departments, including the department of education. I think it's really important, and we can't still find ourselves in another decade simply looking at the fact that there's vacancies and saying, well, we just don't have enough speech language pathologist, so we just have to make do. We're going to have to look at other creative solutions like these hybrid models, like paraprofessionals in communities and so forth. And so I guess my next question: Looking at the Nunavut model, how it was facilitated through their department of education, not through their Department of Health and Social Services, where the focus is a hundred percent on inschool services, not on services especially where we have an aging population who also need access to speech language pathology. And so I'm wondering from the Minister of education is this a service that should be provided through Health and Social Services, or in actual fact, should speech language pathology for schoolbased children or schoolaged children be delivered in schools from the department of education. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I don't think there's a straightforward simple answer to that. There's a number of different things you have to factor in. Probably four minutes worth of things that you need to factor in here. So you need to look at you need to look at the capacity within the department of Education, Culture and Employment. If we are talking about ECE managing clinical staff, you know, we don't have that capacity at this point. The Member pointed out the fact that the department of health has a mandate to serve all residents, whereas ECE focuses on the schools. So there is an argument that perhaps we need to be having some we need to deliver services dedicated to students. All of that really is up for discussion right now as we redesign the government system of schools. But there are there's values to every approach. I think the bottom line is no matter who is running this right now, there aren't enough staff; there aren't enough speech language pathologists; there aren't enough people providing rehab services to provide the services we need regardless of who is administering the program. Thank you.
