Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I want to thank my colleague for his earlier statement, as well as the other colleague from the Deh Cho. I appreciate these conversations coming to light. We need to talk about them if we want to make changes.

The Member is right. Small communities have lower graduation rates. They have lower attendance rates. One of the priorities of this Assembly is to increase student education outcomes to the rest of Canada. In some regional centres and in Yellowknife, the student outcomes are nearly the same as the rest of Canada, so it really is the small communities, in a lot of ways, that we are talking about.

There are things that are being done by the school boards. It is the school boards that have the mandate to deliver education. There are things like Healthy Food for Learning so that there is food in the schools, so that children, once they get there, they can actually eat, and they can learn. Some schools have programs where homes are called when students are missing. They go out looking for the children. Some schools offer incentives or prizes for attendance. However, there is more than that that needs to be done. I think we need buy-in from communities, we need buy-in from parents, and we need to start caring more about education as a society. That is one of the things that I really want to do, is get the word out there and get people involved in their own education.

There are a number of things that we are doing through the education renewal, as well. Like I mentioned before, there are a lot of these old small programs that we are trying to tailor, but more needs to be done. The Member is absolutely right; more needs to be done. If you look at graduation rates, they are declining across the board, and so we have to do more. I am committed to working with the Member and hearing from all of the Members, especially from small communities, about how we can do that.