The reason I’m moving this motion is because I feel very strongly about what they do in this position. They work with the school boards. In a time when we talk about accountability to ensure that our education system is meeting the needs of the students — obviously the ones we want to teach— I think it’s principled to make sure we have our system running in a fine-tuned way. That said, we have a person here who does the work to ensure the system is working properly, it’s communicating and it is providing good value. I'm just nervous at this time to hear that this position will be re-profiled in such a way that it’s being eliminated, but yet some of the duties are being pushed off to other areas.
As for the document Towards Excellence right now, I'm probably not a good judge to say if we could live without it. The question is if it's a valued product. I think this whole strategy sort of needs to be thought out a little further.
As far as losing the Alberta achievement tests, it's kind of like these things come and go. This week the flavour is "Let's save some money here." That may be the end result, and it may work fine. But I wouldn't be surprised if we have a new initiative in two years, where someone turns around and says, "These are important things. How do we live without them?" So I'm just worried.
I know the Department of Education probably didn't pick this decision out of a hat, but I'm just cautious at this time to assume that enough work went into
this strategy to figure out who is going to do this. It's my understanding that this is quite technical work and requires not just integrity in the sense of competency. There's a lot to it, and just to let it fall in someone's lap and to say, "You're now going to do this duty," I can't imagine that there are too many individuals who will be running forward to say they want to do this strategy and analysis on this work.
I would define this as weakening our education system, when we constantly talk about how important it is and how we continue to deliver quality education programming. More often than not we hear about the fact that people don't feel as if there's a balanced system throughout the North, and I think this provides those types of strengths.
We talked about it at length earlier, and I don't think I need to continue any further than that. But I would like to request a recorded vote on this when it comes time to vote. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.