Thank you, Mr. Speaker.We’re embarking on a big project this fall and it’s the first phase of our Junior Kindergarten. Twenty-three communities will be taking it on, and as the Minister stated, it is optional to all those schools who want to do the Junior Kindergarten program. I understand the importance of this, getting our four-year-olds ready for kindergarten, getting them into the schools; however, there are still a lot of issues that have come to the forefront as we brought this program into the schools in 23 communities. We were not sure if the schools were ready, if the staff were ready, in fact, if the communities were ready.

Some of the issues that have been brought up: whether or not we have enough materials for the students, the Grade 4s; whether we have enough adequate space in the schools. Other things that have been brought to my attention are enrollments at daycares, enrollments at daycares like the

Children First Centre, where four-year-olds will now be able to go into the schools in the second phase of this program. Plus, the added extra duties put on our educators who, in some cases, might become sort of like a babysitter – changing diapers, taking kids to the washroom – when they didn’t go to school for those things.

I see the importance of this in the small communities where there are no daycares, where we want to get our students ready for kindergarten. However, when we get into the regional centres and the city of Yellowknife, we do have a lot of daycares out here that do rely on the revenues for the four-year-olds that attend their facilities. The Aboriginal Head Start programs that rely on federal funding based on the amount of enrollments that they have in their programs.

Yesterday I made a comment about how this government donated funding to an infrastructure for children, the Children First Centre in Inuvik. This government is footing money, gave money to a building, only two years later to take kids out and put them into the high school. This is an organization that relies on the revenues from the students that are coming in there. Now we’re taking out one of their ways that they make money and put them into a financial situation, putting financial stress not only on the Children First Centre but on all other daycares, all other facilities in the regional centres as well as those in Yellowknife.

Mr. Speaker, I will have questions today for the Minister of Education on how he is consulting with these groups to ensure that when we go into phase two that we are ready to implement Junior Kindergarten and that we do support daycare and early childhood development. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.