Mr. Daniels.

Early childhood development is a very important issue within the riding and certainly with myself. I just want to make sure that we’re providing the right type of support. I often hear concerns about not receiving enough funding support when it comes to being able to address issues such as speech and language as well as behaviour, which I would think falls directly on the Department of Education when you’re funding these organizations. Does the department provide that type of service? I know the deputy minister had alluded, or I should say quite directly pointed out that they provide language nest programming, which is a little bit different. I’m just wondering, specific to things like speech language and behaviour, do they support some of the early childhood development programming in that regard.

With that said, can the department provide some examples and certainly

attach some dollar amounts that they provide in meeting those supports that they’ve highlighted?

Mr. Lafferty.

Mahsi. We’ll provide that information. We don’t have it here with us.

I look forward to that. Thank you for that commitment. On that same vein, does the Department of Education, Culture and Employment, through the early childhood development programming -- and I would like to boldly call it initiative because it’s very important that we stand behind these things -- supply or help fund resources that look at physiotherapy, speech and language pathology, things along those types of lines? Now, they’re slightly different when I referred to it earlier. I’m getting sort of into the nuts and bolts of actual accredited organizations. Sorry, accredited skills. My apologies. On top of that, what type of training services does the department provide the people who would run an early childhood development centre? What type of training and support for resources do they supply?

Mr. Daniels.

Would the department be willing or would they commit to giving me a breakdown of the examples of how they’ve spent that in the last budget year and how they anticipate spending that particular money or targeting that money in this budget year?

Mr. Lafferty.

Mahsi, Mr. Chairman. We can provide that information to the Members, the breakdown of what we have within our department, the expenditure that he’s referring to.

I want to thank the department for that. Just moving lastly to one particular area and hopefully I’ll have time to get into another one. On this particular area of early childhood development programming there’s at least a number of centres. Mainly I’m thinking of one in the downtown of Yellowknife and they work through one of the education boards. One of the things, of course, is the funding seems to be sort of stalled. How does the department meet those initiatives where the increased funding demand is there but it appears that the funding committed to the overall program

remains at a standstill? How are they meeting the challenges of helping them through the funding resources and the funding agreements?

Mr. Daniels.

Recognizing the clock, I’ll just wrap up the next subject quite quickly in a sort of a brief overview. Under inclusive schooling, can I request that the Minister give me a breakdown on how dollars are spent per school per community and how the expenditure is based, whether it’s on base funding then per capita, to get an understanding on the type of programming and how the dollars are attributed to that? Perhaps I’ll just leave that as my last particular question at this time.

Mr. Lafferty.

Mahsi, Mr. Chairman. We can clearly provide breakdowns that we provide to the schools. We don’t have that specific detailed information with us here today but we’ll provide that to the Members.

Just to remind Members to keep your sidebars down so that we can hear the questions. Next I have Ms. Bisaro.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, it was a little difficult to hear you. I have a couple of questions here. The first one has to do with the numbers on page 10-17 for education operations and development. That’s gone down considerably, from about $3.5 million to $2.6 million or so. Can I get an explanation as to why?

Mr. Daniels.

I guess I should use my earpiece, but I didn’t quite hear the answer. It’s to early childhood and student services area? Could I get that clarified?