Thanks to the Minister. I have to say that I’m really concerned that we are not placing junior kindergarten where I believe it rightly belongs, in early childhood development. Placing it within the schools, albeit junior kindergarten is play-based and kindergarten will become more play-
based, and again, from a pedagogical perspective, it’s probably going to be taught differently, but putting it into schools and treating it like schools is, in my mind, quite dangerous, and I think there’s an opportunity for schools to treat junior kindergarten not like early childhood education but to treat it like school education, and that’s not where we want to go.
In terms of the funding, and this is just a minor thing, but I don’t understand why you can’t internally take the money from K to 12 PTR but place it in early childhood development. Just to say that it’s coming out of school contributions and after the three years to say that it’s absolutely going to be part of school contributions, again, just in my mind, contributes to the mindset that junior kindergarten is school, it’s not early childhood development, and again, I’m really concerned about that.
The other thing that I have to say about junior kindergarten, and Mr. Bromley kind of alluded to it, but I am very concerned that we don’t have… I know it’s early yet. It’s the end of February, and we’re talking about September, but still, I’m very concerned that we will not have qualified early childhood educators in our JK classrooms. Teachers are not early childhood educators. Not all of them. Some of them are if they’re specialized in that specialization. Music teachers are specialists. Early childhood educators are specialists. I think we are not quite prepared to properly teach junior kindergarten because we don’t have the early childhood educators that we need for these classrooms. I know that teachers are flexible and you can take a teacher and move them from one grade to another. You could probably take a kindergarten teacher and put them into a JK classroom and they would be fine, but you can’t take a Grade 3 teacher and do the same and expect them to fully understand early childhood education. There’s a difference between teaching elementary, teaching primary and early childhood.
I share Mr. Bromley’s concern, and he has asked the Minister if we’re going to have fully qualified to federal standards early childhood educators in our classrooms, and I didn’t hear from the Minister that we will. I heard that that’s where we want to go, what we want to have, but I didn’t hear from the Minister that that’s what we will have in September, and I again have to express some concerns about the quality of junior kindergarten that we’re going to be presenting to our small communities. We constantly say the small communities don’t get the same quality of education as the larger centres, and if we start off with that kind of, you know, well, it’s okay, we’ll make do with what we have, then we’re never going to get them up to the level where we think they should be. That’s a major concern for me.
I’d like to ask the Minister, I think I have heard in our conversations and debates that we’ve had to date, but I think I have heard that we’ve got spaces in our schools in our small communities now so we can just put junior kindergarten into the schools. That may be, and I’d like to know if the intent is to have a stand-alone junior kindergarten classroom in the schools where JK is going to be starting.