Thanks, Mr. Speaker. It’s hard to know where to start. I’ve been asking questions all week. I haven’t really been getting answers and it has frustrated me, as I imagine this has come across in some of my questions.

I think I’d like to start by asking the question of how important is the Junior Kindergarten Program to the Minister, to the department, to Cabinet. I’ve been hearing it stated that it is very important. I’ve been hearing it stated it’s important to the school districts, that it’s important to the superintendents, that it’s important to teachers, that it’s important to parents. If I listen to the rhetoric, basically coming from across the floor, it’s telling me that this program is extremely important. If it is extremely important, then it should be funded to the level of the perceived importance, and it’s not being. If it’s as important as what we’re being told, then it should be funded not from within but it should be funded as a new program with new money.

Like my colleagues, I’ve been receiving e-mails and letters from constituents who are very concerned about the impacts that an unfunded Junior Kindergarten Program is going to have on school districts and on children in other grades within all our schools across the territory.

I want to just quote a quick bit about importance from a constituent. “Junior kindergarten is not

receiving new funds and instead resulting in staff reductions and cutbacks in Yellowknife. The way the GNWT is implementing JK is contrary to the spirit and values being put forward in the ERI Framework, the Education Renewal and Innovation Framework. The GNWT should provide adequate new funding for this important new early childhood program to do it right.”

That says a great deal to me about what we should be doing in terms of funding this new program.

I’ve been expressing a lot of concerns. One of them is that the Minister, in almost every statement that he has made whenever he discusses junior kindergarten, mentions child care or daycare every time he talks about JK. Almost every time; I can’t guarantee it’s every time. I really am concerned about that. If the Minister and the department want to put a daycare program in place, then let’s do that. Let’s put a daycare program in place. If it is intended to be a Junior Kindergarten Program, then we should not be focusing on the 10 communities who, as the Minister says, do not have any kind of daycare. In my mind, that’s a huge contradiction, and I think the Minister is confusing one subject with the other. I am all for universal daycare, and I do support the Junior Kindergarten Program, but I am extremely fearful that we will end up with a Junior Kindergarten Program which basically is a daycare program.

There have been concerns expressed about Aboriginal Head Start, and I have also done that in the last while. The comment was made by Ms. Erasmus earlier this week that a school is not the right place for four-year-olds. The school is a structured environment and no matter how much you try to make a kindergarten classroom more like a home environment or make it more like a play space, it’s in a school, and as she pointed out, bells are ringing, students are moving back and forth, there’s a lot of noise. Four-year-olds don’t need that kind of environment. Aboriginal Head Start, on the other hand, does provide the play-based environment and does have the facility that allows for that. Yet, we are saying Aboriginal Head Start doesn’t matter. We are saying we are going to junior kindergarten and basically compete with Aboriginal Head Start.

As it was stated in another e-mail that we recently got, why are we not putting more money into Aboriginal Head Start and complementing the Aboriginal Head Start programs that already exist in our eight communities? I don’t see that that’s on the department’s radar, and they seem to want to put JK in regardless and ignore the fact that there’s a successful Aboriginal Head Start program already in place.

The other concern I have with the implementation of junior kindergarten, and I asked the Minister this question yesterday and got no answer, but there’s

no indication that there will be funding for resources for these classrooms. Some of the kindergarten classrooms, because it’s going to be a combined junior kindergarten/kindergarten classroom in many small schools, some of them will have resources already, but you’re adding four-year-olds, and that’s a much younger age. Well, it’s a year. It’s a year younger than kindergarten, but still, it’s a lot younger as kids grow. Basically, you’re talking about one-quarter of their life, and they need different resources, sand tables, water tables, big blocks, little blocks. They need all kinds of things to play with. They learn through play, and most of our kindergarten classrooms are not set up like that.

There is no evidence, in my mind, that the department will work with existing programs. I haven’t heard from the Minister words that make me nice and comfy with regard to that. Because of that – and it’s not just Aboriginal Head Start; there are other preschool programs that operate, not so much in small communities but certainly in the regional centres – there is no indication, in my mind, that the department is willing to work with those programs to ensure that they stay solvent. Many of them operate as businesses and the department says, yes, we’re going to give them money and we’re going to let them convert their spaces from four-year-olds to infants. Maybe so, but my understanding is that in a daycare, for instance, the four-year-old space is the most lucrative, and daycares count on those four-year-old spaces to give them the most revenue and allow them to be able to take in infants and so on.

I spoke earlier in my questions about the pupil-teacher ratio and I want to reiterate, I am very concerned that, as the Minister said when I asked him the question, we are working our way back up from 13.8 to 1 PTR to 16 to 1. I really don’t think that’s going to increase our quality of education. We are just now starting to get higher numbers of graduates from high school. Do we really want to go back to what we had 10 or 20 years ago when we had few graduates, and we’ve been worried about the graduates from high school for a very long time? We’re starting to move upwards and onwards and we’re starting to get a greater number of graduates. Increase the PTR in our schools, as the Minister indicated earlier, and all we’re going to do is reduce the quality of education. Reduce the quality of education, kids are not going to be engaged, they’re not going to get the encouragement that they need, and end result, they’re going to drop out with fewer graduates is what’s going to happen.

To all these things, I am really concerned that we are putting in place a program that is going to bring our education system down. I believe we have a good education system. I believe that we have a very high quality education system. We’ve got a few problems but it’s basically a good system. But by

doing this, instituting a new program without new funding, it’s simply going to bring down the quality of education that we currently have.

The motion is pretty straightforward. It asks for new funding. We put a new program in place in almost any other government department and we look to put new funding in there. We bring a new facility online, and I’ve been screaming for a couple of years that when we bring a new facility online we need to make sure that we budget for O and M funding to make sure the building can operate. This is a similar situation. You’ve got a new program starting with no money.

The motion refers to Aboriginal Head Start, and I’ve covered that already. I think, pretty much, in terms of the questions that I’ve asked in this last week, I think I’ve tried to get across my concerns about funding, I’ve tried to get across my concerns about the type of and quality of junior kindergarten/kindergarten that is going to be put in place. I hope the Minister has heard those words and has listened to the numbers. I don’t get a sense that he has anything in mind except to forge ahead, and I would urge him to seriously consider the concerns from all Members on this side of the House, concerns from every region of the NWT, as was stated by Mr. Bouchard, and seriously look at the recommendations in this motion and changing his mind.