Still no answers on junior kindergarten
Evan Kiyoshi French
Northern News Services
Monday, February 8, 2016
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Junior kindergarten is coming, but questions about how how it will be implemented and how it will be funded remain unanswered, according to the superintendent of the Beaufort Delta Divisional Education Council.
Denise McDonald met with council staff and members of the Department of Education, Culture and Employment last week to discuss the contents of a draft review of the program's implementation, which was released days earlier.
After a Feb. 3 meeting, she told News/North the department was unable to answer these questions and said she didn't have high hopes for meetings scheduled the following day.
"We have no idea what we will hear," she said.
Yellowknife Education District No. 1 (Yk1) superintendent Metro Huculak said he thinks the draft review shows the merits of junior kindergarten. Students who enter school at a younger age are more likely to do better later on, said Huculak, which is something the schools have known for a long time. "It makes a difference," he said.
Huculak said Education Minister Alfred Moses and deputy minister David Stewart told him the department wants to keep researching implementation and didn't give any indication as to a timeframe, or whether the department will ultimately find new money to fund it.
Junior kindergarten was rolled out in the territory's smallest communities in the fall of 2014. In response to repeated questions from MLAs about community consultation and diversion of funding from mostly Yellowknife school districts to the program, premier Bob McLeod announced in October 2014 that the government would complete an eight-month review of how it had been implemented so far before deciding how to introduce it to Yellowknife and larger regional communities.
Before the Feb. 3rd meeting began, Moses told News/North the report has indeed found junior kindergarten to be a valuable program, but the department had not finished meeting one of its directives - to continue engaging and consulting with superintendents, boards and teachers to "see what our strengths are moving forward in the communities."
"Our job is to continue that engagement and hear from people in the communities before we push the program. We want to do it right," he said.
Moses did not give a timeline as to when the school boards will know what the department plans to do and when.
"We want to get that out," he said. "We're coming to the end of the school year, the sooner we can get that information out the better."
