Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I’d like to talk today about our attendance rates in our schools across the Northwest Territories. Recently, the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment tabled and brought out this new Education Renewal and Innovation Framework document, called “Direction for Change.” Actually, when we look through some of the statistics, one of the reasons we’re taking a new direction in our education system is because of low attendance.

In 2011-12 the NWT average for student attendance was 84 percent and it was even lower in the smaller communities at 80 percent. That’s, on average, missing one day of school per week, and when you get to about Grade 10, a student might miss about two years of school. So that’s a lot of education that our students aren’t getting and we’re not having quality students graduate when they get through this school system.

We can have the best programs, we can have the best teachers running the best programs in the nation, in the territory in some of the communities, but if we don’t get those students in their seats, what good is it?

In the community of Inuvik, I know at the East Three Elementary School – I’m not sure what they do at any other schools across the Northwest Territories – students who get perfect attendance for the month get their names put into a draw where they end up winning a prize. It could be a lunch; it could be a video game or something. So there’s an incentive there for the students to make sure that they have perfect attendance for the whole month.

Most recently, we found out that Canadian North has incentives for schools as well. If a student has perfect attendance for the year, I believe, they get their names put into a draw where they get money, and that money can go into a school program or into a community program that that student chooses.

I want to ask the Minister today, what are we doing for our students in the Northwest Territories to get them into the seats, into the schools, and what incentives do we have planned in this new document “Direction for Change”? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.