Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This being Education Week, I also would like to take this opportunity to recognize the educators in the Northwest Territories in our formal education institutions and Ms. Bisaro listed off a number of areas that people could serve in this capacity.

Mr. Speaker, it’s a challenging task that lies ahead of our educators in our communities here in the North. In any community anywhere, it is a challenging task. It’s something that I admire greatly in those who choose that profession, something that I know I could not succeed in just by virtue of the amount of discipline it takes to stay on course.

Mr. Speaker, I went to school many years ago and I just want to say that I am grateful to the people who educated me for the basics. I wasn’t a good student, but the basics of arithmetic and grammar and spelling and the very basic essentials of education, in spite of my lack of enthusiastic

participation has stood me in fairly good stead going forward in my life. I would have liked to have more formal education, but I came from a home where there was not a high priority put on formal education. My parents were not formally educated and so they did not, in turn, convey to us the importance of that. You’ll notice a lot of times teachers’ kids are the best students because they have that strong parental influence in the home, that getting a good education is a really important thing.

Mr. Speaker, I’d like to also recognize some of the outside of the box kind of thinking that’s taking place in education. I think of the storefront high school program that’s in Hay River, that’s located in the downtown, where we did take students that were not doing well in the routine and regular process, and we found a place where they could participate perhaps in a different way, in a different place, but we did not discard them because they could not accomplish the same amount as kids in the academic program. So I do thank the Department of Education for that kind of creativity, thinking outside the box and trying to make sure that as much as is reasonably possible we meet the education needs of children in the North. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.