Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have sent a letter to divisional education councils reminding them of this government's commitment and our expectation that they will help us live up to that commitment. I have discussed the issue with the chairs of the divisional education councils and DEAs in Yellowknife and encouraged them to remember that we expect that they will follow through on that.
We support the DECs to hire our grads by providing an incentive. We support the mentoring of recent grads with, again, incentives to assist the boards and their staff in mentoring new teachers, particularly northern teachers. We are continuing to look at ways that we can continue to make sure that we can live up to our commitments. We have written to all of the recent grads asking them personally what they are doing and we're trying to collect that information to verify just how many have been able to work or have been able to find work or have not been able to.
Since we started hearing about the concern, we're trying to follow through on that. I can give you the information that we have right now, which doesn't include what we've gotten back in this most recent round of letters because we gave people a deadline of February 28th, I believe, to respond. So we're hoping that within the next 10 days we will be able to have some specific names ourselves and some information from those names, but we know right now from our information before that comes back is that of the grads from 1991 to 2004 in the Northwest Territories, these are TEP grads, in the teaching year 2004-05 there are 57 teaching in the Northwest Territories. There is one who is a college instructor. There are 18 who are in other college related professions. There are four teaching outside the Northwest Territories. There are 13 who are in full-time university studies, for instance, either completing their B.Ed. or their master's of education after completing the TEP certificate in the North. There are10 who are employed in other fields and there are 15 who are either unemployed, retired, diseased or that we are not aware of, and two who were originally from Nunavut and have gone back to Nunavut. That gives us a total of 120, which accounts for all of the grads during that period of time. We will be able to report more specifically on the last two years, which is where the area of concern is, hopefully within the next 10 days.