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Boards applaud junior kindergarten money
Skepticism remains that program will be fully funded

Kirsten Fenn
Northern News Services
Friday, February 17, 2017

SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
School boards are applauding the announcement of full funding for junior kindergarten as a positive step forward, although the city's Catholic board is still feeling some uncertainty about how it will all roll out.

"There's been a lot of confusion around it," said Yellowknife Catholic Schools board chair Miles Welsh.

"We're not 100 per cent certain that it's fully funded."

Welsh explained the school board is worried junior kindergarten students won't be funded for inclusive schooling, and that aboriginal language and culture will lose out. Providing buses for junior kindergarten students, "which was going to prove to be quite expensive," Welsh said, remains another question.

That's something Yellowknife Education District No. 1 (Yk1) is thinking about too.

Following Yk1's regular board meeting on Tuesday night, board chair John Stephenson told Yellowknifer the city's school boards have been meeting with the Department of Education, Culture and Employment to figure out buses and other issues.

School boards' preliminary operating plans are due to the department by the end of March, said Yk1 superintendent Metro Huculak, and will help determine some of those finer details.

Stephenson said the operating plan will lay out the school board's estimates for student enrolment, how many staff will retire or need to be hired, as well as any capital changes that need to be made at schools. While Yk1 may need to hire some additional staff for junior kindergarten, the school is in a good position as it will be able to use early childhood educators already on staff, he said.

"That's a positive decision by the department to allow us to hire those people," Stephenson said.

He said the board recognizes the government's financial situation was challenging, but junior kindergarten was deserving of full funding so as not to detract from other students' quality of education.

Yellowknife Catholic Schools superintendent Claudia Parker echoed this view.

"There's definitely been some positive steps that have been made forward with the Department of Education," she said, adding thanks are owed to parents who lobbied MLAs to put pressure on the government for full funding. "It's because of their hard work that I think we made these positive gains."

She said the Catholic school board is feeling good about next year and that the school board thinks it can minimize change.

"Right now all that we've got decided for certain is cuts here at the central services level," she said.

The Catholic school board members are hopeful that won't change, but Welsh added the board will be watching the budget review closely.

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