Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. You saw Members of this side of the House rise one by one yesterday to express their deep concern about this Education Renewal Initiative put forth by our government. Throughout the day it became clear that it was a government initiative with consulting their partners, but it’s not the people’s initiative. That’s what I heard when I did my tour in the fall time, is that people were excited, they want to be involved in the education renewal. They pointed out to me clearly some of the shortcomings that I wasn’t able to get a good answer on yesterday. Some of the shortcomings are: top students in my small schools are failing Alberta standards; top students once again are shown time and time again that what they are being taught is not what they are expected to learn, and I don’t see that in the Education Renewal Initiative at all.

I’m urging the motion partly speaks to getting back out there to the small communities, to all the communities, to speak with the teachers, the students, the educators and the parents and get everybody involved in forming a truly Education Renewal Initiative.

Time after time in past Assemblies, we talked about changing the education system, but we want real changes and we want real results. We’re talking about devolution. We passed three or four pieces of legislation that’s going to make us our own power in this great Northwest Territories. I was talking about resources of land and water, subsurface rights, but the most important resources are people, the students and the people here. We have to educate

them. We have to have the base. We have to have them well educated enough so that we can take over our own land into the future and that’s really important. It is not important for the Department of Education to roll out stuff and say this is how we’re doing it. It is more important for them to hear and roll it back and make those changes that people want.

I see a future where our children are not some poor statistics that show that we’re not learning, we are not graduating, we’re not graduating enough. We must set a standard. We must set a goal. The motion speaks about it. What is the department’s goal? One of the goals ought to be that we will never fail these achievement tests, that we will have graduates that can go to Alberta, that can go to B.C. or other institutions and not have to retake subjects or else, worse yet, have the shame of not even knowing what’s happening down there and coming home by Christmastime.

I have often said in this House we track our students right up to Grade 12, but we don’t track those that do not succeed in southern institutions and they come home. It’s disempowering when we tell them that they’re passing, we tell them that they’ve graduated, but yet they cannot succeed down south when they go to higher institutions of learning time after time. Here we have an opportunity with the Education Renewal Initiative to say, let’s do this right. We have to create a future, and our future is our children, and involving everybody and building a truly Educational Renewal Initiative. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.