Thank you. Member for Yellowknife North.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm wondering if the Minister could provide us a breakdown of what that looks like for each of the different DEAs? And I've seen that data before, you know, of how enrolment looks and what the funding corresponding looks like, if that could be provided, Madam Chair.

Thank you. Minister of ECE.

Yeah, I think we -- we may have those numbers. I think that -- perhaps I can ask Mr. Shannon for either the information or when that information will be available. Thank you.

Mr. Shannon.

Thank you. Member for Yellowknife North.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Well, and I guess I'll get to the -- my hope is that there's still some possibility to change this. I -- if we go back to September 2021, we were in the midst of a delta wave and there was quite a few people who did not want to send their kids to school and then there was quite a few schools who switched to online learning, and I know there was quite a few people who just stopped going to school at some point during COVID.

And I heard the Minister say today in session they're not considering kind of doing a best of two years model, and we're not considering using September 2019. But I've heard from the school districts that even if we used October or November when delta kind of started to subside, that their enrolment numbers would be much better and a much more accurate reflection of what they expect to see for this upcoming school year.

So is there any, you know, chance left to move this and do that analysis of -- if schools are going to be losing a bunch of money for students that they're likely to have in the fall, whether we can adjust the formula? Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you. Minister of ECE.

Thank you. So if schools see an influx of students, we have an extraordinary enrolment funding pot of money that schools can apply for, and they have to meet some criteria, but it would give them the funding to accept those students.

We also made changes that are going to protect the -- primarily the smaller schools if they see large decreases in enrolment. So traditionally, the funding formula has some numbers and if a school hits those numbers in terms of enrolment, there's either increases or there's drops in their funding. So what we've done is we've adjusted those numbers to ensure that if enrolment in small schools falls, the drop in funding isn't so drastic so that they aren't having to, you know, find money for a position like a janitor or something like that, which can be quite stressful. And those are often local jobs as well.

And overall, schools in the territory have seen a decline of about .4 percent this year, and that's on track with sorts of traditional trends. And as I've mentioned before to the Member, in Yellowknife there's movement in between schools as well. So while some schools might see an increase, others -- or might see a decrease, others might see a corresponding increase. Thank you.

Thank you, Minister. Member for Yellowknife North.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm just -- you know, I know that the curriculum development group here is about a million dollar unit, and -- which, you know, compared to other jurisdictions is not a lot, and I -- we are adopting a new curriculum.

Can the Minister just speak to whether there are going to be additional resources both for the department and the schools in adopting the BC curriculum in the coming school year? Thank you.

Thank you, Member. Minister of ECE.

Thank you. So one of the factors that we had to weigh when determining whether or not we were going to -- or which curriculum we were going to go with was the cost. And so we don't expect to see increased costs for implementing this curriculum. In fact, I think we might be anticipating some savings from the curriculum that could be used for training and things like that. And I can ask the deputy minister for some more detail on that. Thank you.

Thank you. Deputy minister MacDonald.

Thank you. Member for Kam Lake.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Further to that line of questioning about curriculum development, it's an exciting time for the North as far as curriculum shifts that are happening, and I think it'll be really interesting and exciting to get to watch. At the same time, I know that there are some questions still among residents about when does the NWT start developing some of its own curriculum. And I know that that is quite expensive and is a daunting task to even consider undertaking. But I know that we've done it in the past. Our northern studies class is an example of that. And another potential place to start, or to add to that, might be an arts curriculum. And the reason I bring that up is that ECE also has the culture component to it and developing kind of a made-in-the-North arts curriculum is an opportunity not only for arts preservation and revitalization as well. And so I'm wondering if the department has any indication of whether or not they have interest or plan to take on some of that work of developing our own made-in-the-North arts curriculum? Thank you.

Thank you, Member. Minister of ECE.

Thank you. So currently, no, there is no plan to develop an arts curriculum. But we have developed the JK-K curriculum, the Our Languages curriculum, the northern studies 10. We're working on northern studies 11. I believe there's a health and wellness curriculum. There's a number of locally developed courses as well and those are developed by Indigenous governments, local education bodies. So there are a number of courses around the Northwest Territories that are locally-based, and the nice thing about the British Columbia curriculum as well is that the way it was designed, it's easy to insert local content in there. So -- as opposed to having to develop an entirely new course, we can, you know, insert parts of our own content into it.

Where a curriculum gets, I would say, probably very expensive to develop is when we're talking about a physics course, a math course, chemistry, and there's really no appetite to do that. You know, down the road something like an arts course might be something that would be considered but given the magnitude of the change that is taking place now, it's not something that would be our -- working on. Thank you.

Thank you. Member for Kam Lake.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, the next thing I wanted to take a peek at is the minority language education and second language instruction and that, on the page 50, it indicates that it's specific to French and that it has contributions of just over $3 million.

Is that money coming directly from the federal government as a contribution, and I'm wondering if the Minister can confirm? Thank you.

Thank you. Minister of ECE.

Yes, that's correct.