(Translation) Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I wish to thank the Minister for his initiative on education in the Northwest Territories. I understand that this is the most difficult department to deal with and I appreciate his work done in the Northwest Territories, particularly in the Baffin region. I know that O and M for the schools in the regions is always small, but we can understand that, in light of all the budget cuts by the federal government. However, I wanted to comment on a few items.
In the fall of 1985, I went to Lake Shore for a training program. While I was down there for training, I became aware of how a program is easily run in the southern institutions. I was having great difficulty in my training program due to the fact that I couldn't speak English. It was very difficult for me to be able to speak and participate in that classroom setting due to the fact that I was unilingual. I know all the negative impacts that can have on a unilingual person. I wanted to bring that up just to let you know that we have come a long way in the Baffin region with regard to education and training.
I was also a member of the divisional board of education in the Baffin region, and we had to deal a lot with the curriculum that was put in the schools at the time. This has helped a great deal in the curriculum area.
We all know that education is very important to us and it is becoming more and more difficult to get funding for various training programs. However, we have been trying hard to better our lives and the future for the younger generation and we encourage the younger students to stay in school so that they can have better opportunities in the future.
I don't want to dwell on the negative impacts of schooling and what kind of impacts they can have on married students' families. However, I can see positive impacts on it also. These are the comments that have been put forth, as well.
People were dealing with the fact that the parents have to be more involved in their children's schooling and I appreciate that fact. I also want to encourage other parents to be fully involved in the schooling area, particularly in the smaller communities, because we all know that education is a very important part of our lives, whether we come from smaller or larger centres.
I also wanted to let people within the Legislative Assembly know that we are trying to deal with education, with the resources we have, to the best of our abilities.
In dealing with another subject here, schools were allocated some funding quarterly and we had to deal with proposals every three months or so. The divisional boards of education had to put out proposals every three months and this was causing a little bit of difficulty in our board. However, I wanted to ask a question to the Minister. When you allocate a certain amount of funding for three months, and I am not trying to look at just the Baffin region, we have to put this money into a bank so that it could collect interest for the Inuktitut curriculum in the schools in the Baffin region. This has helped us a great deal in the curriculum area. We have also had to hire a staff member to make up the curriculum.