Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, just a few items that I also want to speak about in my opening remarks on this department. First, the one that's having the greatest impact upon the communities I represent is junior kindergarten. The Minister has indicated that it is fully funded, but the amount doesn't fully fund junior kindergarten. At the outset, there was $2 million taken out of the school boards' funding to address junior kindergarten the first year of rollout.
That $2 million doesn't seem to be in the framework anywhere anymore, and I believe that these decisions were made by the school boards under some duress as well. My understanding is that the department had determined that there is a surplus of funding based on the way they're funding the PTR, which is another whole different issue as well. Based on that, there is a belief that there is accumulated surplus in the various boards.
So, essentially, the direction from this department to the school boards and the schools, I suppose, was that you guys had the money to take on the junior kindergarten and, if you don’t take on junior kindergarten, then the corresponding funding that the department thinks is targeted to support junior kindergarten financially will be removed from their budget.
So it's either take the kids or lose the money. So they did. So it cost the boards $2 million, but now that $2 million is not in the framework at all. That's a very important part of funding the junior kindergarten, when you consider there was also no inclusive schooling for the junior kindergarten students. I think it's known right across this country, maybe right across the whole world, that when you invest in the earlier ages, the greatest return on investment occurs at the youngest age.
Four-year-olds are now the youngest of the people that Education is responsible for; however, a decision has been made that, because your funding level is 2 per cent higher than the legislated amount in the Education Act, that it's fine; but it wasn't enough to start with. I mean, at one point there was no money in inclusive schooling. It's teachers who recognized that there had to be some funding put in inclusive schooling in order to support individuals.
There are two types of agreements that students get into; it's some sort of individual assessments on students that are maybe one or two years behind, or maybe more than that behind. Those students are supported by inclusive schooling. There is a high number of those students in the small communities, and it's not being funded. Now, on top of that, we're adding four-year-olds with no targeted inclusive schooling dollars and no targeted Aboriginal language instruction.
So now things start to get a little bit thinner in those areas in the support for students, I think, in Aboriginal instruction up to grade nine, and I think inclusive schooling also up to grade nine. So when you put in all of these, things start to compound the issue. So to pull out a number to say, well, we'll add $5.1 million, well, this side of the House makes the assumption that includes any money that's already been put into the framework, or asking the school boards to put in that money. I mean, this is a real mess here, and the department or the Minister is not seeing that. I can't understand why the government is not able to see that.
You've got four-year-olds going in, they have the best possible return on investment in all of the people that they're responsible for, and they're refusing to invest in it. Like I'm saying, it's known, when you start to deal with early childhood development, the returns are 7:1.
There is a saying in the business of early childhood development that if that was an actual investment, that would be the greatest investment that any person could make when you think about all your investment portfolios, and that is in young children. Early childhood development investment is the best there is, but we're not doing that. This budget doesn't do that, and it's very, very difficult to understand. When you have these things where you make an investment and you have a tremendous return, it's not happening, and I just don't understand.
The other thing I'm just going to touch briefly on, I have a few minutes left here, is the Small Community Employment Program. It was a really good thing that the government put $3 million into that program. We, on this side of the floor, were asking for $5 million, but that was the total. So $3 million was in addition to what was there, but our understanding when we finally said that's not too bad of a deal was that there was $1.3 million in the framework already, or in that budget item. There was actually only $300,000.
So we kind of were offered something that's $1.7 million short of our target, and having said all those things about kindergarten, you look at the budget, there's a cut to inclusive schooling. Now logically, if we lost a whole bunch of students, that kind of makes sense, but I don't think that's the case. I think the inclusive schooling situation is compounded by adding four-year-olds to the school system. It hasn't decreased the amount that we need for inclusive schooling. There's no indication that taking inclusive schooling money out of the budget is going to help the students or help the people of the Northwest Territories, no indication at all, but it's gone, $1.5 million. Maybe that's what went into junior kindergarten; I don't know.
In inclusive schooling, if you look at it statistically, we have one of the jurisdictions that had the highest rate of special support for students. We have one of the highest rates in the country for individual plans for students who are looking for support to advance to their grade level. Because we all know you no longer have grade 5 teachers, essentially; you have teachers of 10-year-olds, and they're at various levels. In order to make sure that individuals are advancing to the next level and are able to handle it and are able to go on, we need inclusive schooling to support them. If we don't have it, they're not going to advance.
When they get to grade ten and they're no longer getting that support, they're going to fail, and that's what's been happening. This inclusive schooling was negotiated by teachers so that they could support the students to increase the graduation rates. The students are a little behind, we're going to give them support, but no, this government is actually cutting that back. These are real serious issues in our education system.
I'll have a lot to say about Aurora College's TEP and social work programs, but that's going to have to come at another time. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.