Madam Speaker, when the Member first came out with the question, there were a couple of areas that he touched on, a wage top-up subsidy was one, new money that is coming in, approximately $511,000, pending approval of this budget through the Legislative Assembly. With junior kindergarten we talked about re-profiling of funding, and again, working very closely with the school boards. This is an area that I am pleased to announce the implementation is starting this fall. It is phased in over a three-year period. The funding that we’ve been talking about is over a three-year period and is a small impact into our overall PTR that we have been talking about with the school boards.
We have to keep in mind that through the Aboriginal Student Achievement Initiative and through our engagement with our Aboriginal leadership, the community leadership, they want us to do something different within our overall departments, what we can do better with what we have, the funding. We have to be creative and innovative. That’s why we came forward with the standing committee presentation this fall about the various initiatives that we want to undertake. One of them was this whole establishment of junior kindergarten. Over the three-year period, we’re going to be looking at approximately $7 million. What we’re looking at is the impact on some of the school boards will be upwards of 1.2 percent of the overall budget, so there are areas that we need to seriously look at as well. There’s surplus that we
need to seriously consider. I can show the surplus of all the school boards for the Northwest Territories, and here we have fiscal constraint within our budget, so we have to gather all the information, take all those into consideration as we move forward. But we are moving forward on this junior kindergarten, 29 schools to begin with this fall and other regional centres next year. The following year will be all Yellowknife schools. We are going to be capturing all Northwest Territories schools with the junior kindergarten. Mahsi.