Mr. Speaker, with education, as with health care, we can get caught up in lurching from one emergency to the next, from COVID to the feds yanking the rug out from under us with the massive scale back of Jordan's Principle funding. Now, it is essential for those supports to be restored, and today I will be tabling a letter from the Yellowknife school boards to the federal Ministers on Jordan's Principle.

We all have different roles. It's our responsibility as leaders and policy-makers to think beyond the immediate emergencies and to keep an eye on the bigger picture and ensure our education fundamentals are sound. I fear, Mr. Speaker, that they are not.

When it comes to teaching kids to read in the early grades, we are not in line with best practices in the rest of the country. There is an overwhelming body of scientific evidence about what works and what doesn't, and as a jurisdiction the NWT is not following it. This is not teachers' fault. Methods for literacy instruction have not been taught in teachers' colleges.

We have adopted the BC curriculum now which includes standardized assessments for literacy and numeracy in grades 4, 7, 10 and 12, but we've ignored another key part of the BC system. In 2024, BC introduced early literacy screenings and structured literacy interventions in kindergarten to grade 3. We've not done it. If you wait until grade 4 before you find out that a kid is struggling to read, by that time students are supposed to be past learning to read; they need to be reading to learn. Letting kids fall so far behind makes everyone's life much more difficult, and it makes teachers' jobs unmanageable. Our failure to implement early literacy best practices is part of what is creating chaos in classrooms. Jordan's Principle funding alone cannot solve it.

In 2022, the Ontario Human Rights Commission released a landmark report called Right to Read. It clearly lays out how the status quo approach has failed students and teachers and how this is actually a human rights violation, particularly for Indigenous students who are already at higher risk of falling through the cracks of the education system. The Right to Read report lays out a detailed path forward that has since been followed by the governments of Ontario, BC, and the Yukon, amongst others. Mr. Speaker, I ask for unanimous consent to conclude my statement.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, if we truly want to support teachers and set students early on on the best possible route to success, there is no time to waste in adopting early literacy best practices in the NWT as well. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.