Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’m rising here today and supporting the motion. I’d like to thank Mr. Menicoche for bringing it forward.
Again, I’m always disheartened when I hear the Cabinet will always abstain on something that they truly believe in and have actually worked on in this initiative, but that’s neither here nor there.
Yesterday when we talked about this in the House, I brought some very startling information, statistics. By the time a student gets to Grade 4, they’ve missed already half of a year of school, and by the time that same student reaches Grade 10, the average NWT student misses two years of schooling.
In the terms that we use out in the public, we call that truancy, or basically lack of attendance, and it’s really disheartening when you look at the areas and the whereas’s in this motion, when it says testing shows that more than 25 percent of our NWT students are not at the academic level they need to be for their age, and that by Grade 12, graduation rates are at 52 percent and they’re declining. As they say in the Wildlife Act that we just debated here a few days ago, you can’t measure what you can’t count. The same holds true with our kids. You can’t measure if they’re not in their seats.
Clearly, all of these initiatives boil down to making sure that, first and foremost, we’ve got to have these kids in their schools. They’ve got to start being in the classroom, and that’s not an easy task.
This Education Renewal and Innovation Initiative is definitely a step in the right direction, but quite frankly, when you look at the dialogue that we had, or at least I had with the Minister yesterday, it’s clear that parents, educators, elected officials, municipalities, I’m really doubting if these people were involved with the framework of action. Unless
we involve the community in trying to find ways to get our students in the classroom, it doesn’t matter what initiative we put, it doesn’t matter what we spend. That money will be for naught.
It’s critical that we also include our elders. Again, good ideas were brought here to the table, and all we heard was, “well, we might look at it.” I think we’re beyond the “we might look at it” phase. We’re beyond the framework. We’ve got to start putting actions to this, and we’ve got to, again, make sure that we can get our students into their classrooms.
That also will take some initiative in terms of money, sometimes financial in nature, and with our budget system before us here coming up here in December, and we’ll be talking about our upcoming operational main estimates in February, I’m going to be truly looking for this government, this Cabinet to put serious hustle behind the muscle. I want to see what we’re doing for education. I want to make sure those dollars are being put aside for this initiative, because if they’re not, I can tell you that I’ll be asking the Department of Transportation to give me a couple kilometres, because when roads start trumping our kids, we have a problem.
I’ll be speaking in favour of this motion. I would like to thank the Members here for bringing it forward.