Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to thank all the honourable Members for all their comments and their concerns, and over the past three weeks there's a lot of common theme that every honourable Member has mentioned here today. I don’t really want to get into detail regarding those, but first off I just really do want to emphasize that this Department of Education, Culture and Employment does, in fact, do a lot of good work as well in the territory. We have a lot of good employees who do a lot of good work for residents, whether it's in income assistance, the JK-to-12 system, post-secondary. So as much as it seems like there's a painting of a grim picture that we do support our residents of the NWT and that we also do have a lot of success stories, and I think some Members can appreciate that and agree with that as well, and we see it in all the communities across the NWT.
First off, the Member for Mackenzie Delta did mention funding for junior kindergarten, and I just want to clarify that junior kindergarten will be rolled out in all communities across the Northwest Territories. There was a little bit of confusion there, I think, where he was saying that some communities might take it on, some might not. It is optional for the parents, the families, so I just wanted to clarify that.
I do want to continue to support the Take a Kid Trapping in schools. We do work with ITI and ENR, and we'll continue to work with them to make sure that we provide that cultural awareness and traditional knowledge in training for our youth right up until grade 12.
There was some concern about communication. I don’t disagree. I think we could have done a better job. The Member from YK Centre did bring that up as a concern. I do think that there could have been better communication on some of the initiatives as we were rolling them out earlier on in this Assembly, as well as early on in the session, and we'll continue to work on that. It is a learning experience.
In terms of the instructional hours, that was work done with three of our education bodies, as well as the NWT Teachers' Association and Education, Culture and Employment.
We do want to see success in our students and get the best outcomes, but we've also got to make sure that we take care of the health and wellbeing of our teachers and our instructors. They're the adults that our children see probably the most or second most throughout their lifetime from when they're a child to when they graduate, and we want to make sure that they have every opportunity to provide the best education to our students.
Language culture and income assistance is also a concern, and when we get to the line-by-line item we will clarify again, but we are seeing more families across the NWT receiving more money in the Income Assistance Program. The Member from Nahendeh did mention some other concerns, and communication and messaging was another concern; as I mentioned, I don’t disagree with that, but we can work on making improvements.
Junior kindergarten, we have seen really strong success in the Member's riding. Having it as a huge issue, I know we were having some pushback when it initially started, and even now that we're implementing we're still getting some concerns. We just want to let all Members know that we have had those consultations with the daycares, we have had those consultations with Aboriginal Head Start, and any other daycares or day home providers and making sure they're aware of the work we're doing. It's not that we're forgetting them; we have made changes to our early childhood programming where costs go up for infants who come in. In some communities, such as Yellowknife, there are waiting lists, and we want to make sure that every family has an opportunity to have their children be able to partake in some kind of early development.
That's something that the Member for Tu Nedhe-Wiilideh mentioned, and I do appreciate his passion for early childhood development. As I mentioned, we made changes to early childhood programming and we have excellent start-up costs for daycares and day homes, and we have actually been working with some of the smallest communities that don’t have daycares right now to help them set up and start up, as well as training for early childhood providers that they get better training but they also get increase their wage subsidies.
There was also some concern about the structure of authorities within the education system and who is kind of in charge of who. As a department, we provide over $150 million to all our education authorities. It's the mandate, the responsibility of the education authorities to roll out our contributions with them, so whether it's busing, whether it's inclusive schooling, whether it's where they want to put money in their arts and languages, that's the sole responsibility of the education authorities. We provide funding, we work with them, we provide resource services, but when we give the dollars to the education authorities it's their responsibility to see how they budget those out. We can discuss that in detail further.
There still seems to be some confusion on the dollars for JK. We're not just throwing a figure out there. The $5.1 million was based on estimates of the four-year-olds going into the education system this year, and as soon as we know the final cost we will make the necessary changes to that, and you've heard that within this government. I know the honourable Member for Frame Lake said that we need come back if it's more; then we'd have to have that discussion with our Finance Minister. That is something that we have discussed, and so that's where we are.
Any decisions that we make, I know the post-secondary with Aurora College has been a common theme and has been in the news quite a bit. We do make evidence-based decisions. We didn't tell them what to do; they didn't tell us what to do. It was collaborative work between our departments, Aurora College, and the executive to see where we can look at those reductions.
Universal child daycare, we will give an update as we get into the line items. Inclusive schooling, there was discussion around that. As you know, they were from the 17th Assembly in transition to the 18th. There was a Ministerial Directive on Inclusive Schooling. We wanted to ensure that the dollars, the money that we've given to inclusive schooling, and you'll see the line item there, it's over $25 million I believe, we want to make sure that that money goes to the child's needs. Before that, there was no accountability behind that; some schools didn't have any program support teachers. Under the new ministerial directive every school in the NWT will have a program support teacher to ensure that the child's needs are met, and that directive is ensuring that those dollars that are flowing go exactly to the child's needs, where before there wasn't a full plan in place
I know there was some discussion about a decrease in the education authority's funding, and the Members are right; it is in administration, and we do want to see some efficiency in administration across the NWT.
Now the student financial cuts, when we do get to the line-by-line item, this is something that we brought up before, almost on a yearly basis we get about $1.3 million that's over-lapsed funding. So because we kept on seeing it coming around regularly, we figured that we could just take that into the reductions.
I'm also glad to see that there was some concern round the Small Community Employment Support Program. As I mentioned in my statement a couple of days ago, with the $1.2 million currently in the SCES funding we had 200 residents in the NWT participate in on-the-job training and then another 69 in community initiatives. So that funding is working and we've increased it by putting $3 million into that program.
In terms of the decrease in budget, there was a comment that this budget has decreased by 1.5 per cent. The reality is, and I did make it in my opening statements last night, our budget has decreased by 0.3 per cent, and we're still providing programs right across the broad spectrum of this department.
I also understand the proper consultation that the honourable Member from Deh Cho has mentioned, and we're continuing to work on that and we'll make it an emphasis when we're working with First Nations communities that we do, in fact, do a proper consultation and make sure that they're involved in some of the decision-making.
Enrolments, we have been seeing a decrease in enrolments in the school system, specifically in some of our small communities, and we need to find a way to address that and work with families and communities as well.
In terms of Aboriginal Head Start in junior kindergarten, we do have two communities where it's working really well, and that's Fort McPherson and Ndilo, where families now have the opportunity to have full-time early childhood programming provided to them, where before it was just half a day. With JK itself, schools will have the option of providing half- and full-time programming.
With just that said, I just want to say that a lot of good comments and a lot of good feedback, and I appreciate the passion that the Members have. As we go line by line we'll get into more detail. Thank you, Mr. Chair. That was a quick 10 minutes.