Thank you, Mr. Speaker. It’s great to see some youth in the audience today. Like you indicated today, there are quite a few graduations going on in the Northwest Territories.

I guess I’d like to speak about the education system right now. It’s in a bit of turmoil and the fact is there are lot of DEAs and authorities that are looking at what’s going on in the education system today.

Junior kindergarten is being rolled out by the government. We’ve had lots of questions in this House. This session has been mainly about asking… Every MLA has asked questions on junior kindergarten or education renewal and what the situation is.

They are definitely in turmoil. People currently in the education system are doing their hard work, and I don’t doubt that the Department of Education and the Minister are trying to make our education system better, making graduation levels higher and getting people educated in the Northwest Territories.

But right now there’s turmoil in how they’re doing it. How these two initiatives are being funded is under question in a system that was already under stress. You know, student-teacher ratios and people not having enough assistance, not enough people to support the youth that we have in our system.

We continue to ask questions and I’ll have more questions today on how we’re funding these

programs without any additional funding. It is causing turmoil throughout the Northwest Territories and it seems like the Department of Education wants to steamroll these initiatives through without even consulting or getting feedback. They’re getting tons of feedback on how are we supposed to do this, how can we do this with the same amount of dollars.

I will have questions for the Minister of Education on junior kindergarten. It is very difficult. It is frustrating from this side that we’re not getting much direction from the department on how we can do all this work without any additional funding. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.