May 31, 1993                                              SOCIAL SERVICES ESTIMATES COMMITTEE


Pursuant to Standing Order 87, Mr. Nick Careen, M.H.A. (Placentia) substitutes for Mr. Glenn Tobin, M.H.A. (Burin - Placentia West).

The Committee met at 7:00 p.m. in the Legislative Chamber of the Colonial Building.

MR. CHAIRMAN (Gilbert): Gentlemen, it is 7:00 p.m. so we will start. I should get a few things straightened away again before we start. I will ask the members to introduce themselves and then I will ask the minister to introduce his staff. We will use the same procedure as used in the last meeting. The minister will open with a fifteen minute remark. Now who is going to be the official responder from your side tonight? Lynn are you doing that?

MS. VERGE: Well, we have two committee members here, Nick Careen, the Member for Placentia, is replacing Glen Tobin. I have a letter here to satisfy the formal requirements.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Please give that to the clerk.

MS. VERGE: There will be just a slight hesitation while I fill in the blanks here. Harvey Hodder, the Member for Waterford - Kenmount, who is the official opposition education critic, is here as well. Now, we understand that -

MR. CHAIRMAN: He does not vote.

MS. VERGE: - he cannot vote but as a Member of the House of Assembly he is entitled to participate.

MR. CHAIRMAN: He has a perfect right to question. Before we start, will I recognize Mr. Hodder as the spokesman after the minister is finished?

MS. VERGE: I will do that and Mr. Hodder will join in later.

MR. CHAIRMAN: As long as he realizes that he can be recognized as everything goes along. As the members want to speak, if they will indicate that they want to speak, I will keep a list of them here so that the thing will flow a little freer. You have ten minutes to speak afterwards. You can take that ten minutes to make a statement or you can ask a question to the minister and then give and take for ten minutes, back and forth, then your time is up and I will recognize somebody else. That is sort of the ground rules. Again, it is a three hour meeting. We hope to get the heads passed within those three hours. But in the last meeting at 10:00 p.m. there was consensus that we could finish within a reasonable length of time so we carried on past 10:00 p.m. So, if that is alright with the committee we will follow that procedure again tonight and then see what happens at 10:00 p.m. when we make the decision. Is everybody in agreement on that?

So, now we have confirmed that Mr. Careen is a voting member of this committee. I will ask the members to introduce themselves and we can then start.

MS. YOUNG: Kay Young, Member for Terra Nova district.

MR. SMITH: Gerald Smith, Member for Port au Port.

MR. CAREEN: Nick Careen, Member for Placentia.

MR. HODDER: Harvey Hodder, Member for Waterford - Kenmount.

MR. HARRIS: Jack Harris, Member for St. John's East.

MS. VERGE: Lynn Verge, Member for Humber East.

MR. CHAIRMAN: David Gilbert, Member for Burgeo - Bay d'Espoir.

Now, I will ask the Minister to introduce his people and make his opening remarks. When the officials are speaking, for the sake of our Clerks and the people who are going to type this, please identify yourselves. There are some new members here who the stenographers cannot recognize yet. So, at this time I would like to welcome everybody, welcome you, Mr. Minister, and now I turn it over to you for your opening remarks.

MR. DECKER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I do not intend to take fifteen minutes unless you insist that I do it.

MR. CHAIRMAN: No, Sir, you do not have to.

MR. DECKER: I want to introduce on my immediate right, Dr. Frank Marsh, who is the acting deputy minister. As you are probably aware the previous deputy minister resigned. He resigned actually early in April but he stayed until just before the first of May and Dr. Marsh is acting until such time as we appoint a new deputy. He is the assistant deputy minister responsible for post graduate studies and post secondary education, colleges come under him of course and the university and all of the other post secondary stuff.

On his right is Dr. Edna Turpin-Downey, who is responsible for the K-12 and of course Dr. Turpin-Downey to date, has been involved to a considerable degree in the Royal Commission. As you know, we have two committee's; the committee of principles made up of church leaders and government members, the politicians, the members of the PMP committee and we have a committee of officials with Dr. Turpin-Downey that heads up the governments committee of officials which meets with the officials from the churches. The deputy minister of course, also attends all of these meetings as well.

On my left we have Florence Delaney. Florence is responsible for the financial administration and that part of the department.

We have Jack Thompson, who is a director and Aubrey Halfyard. I cannot go into the detail of what you gentlemen do but I know when calling on you every now and again, when meeting with various people, I use your expertise. Jack would you explain just what you do in the department for the benefit of the people?

MR. THOMPSON: My position with the Department of Education is titled, Director of External Financial Relations. Very briefly it deals with the funding to various agencies basically operating under the Department of Education. For example, it deals with post secondary institutions as well as school boards, a typical example is teacher's payroll and school bus transportation. That is the main thrust of my area of responsibility.

MR. HALFYARD: I am Director of Financial Services and Operations for the department. My main task is being responsible for the financial management overall for the department, responsible for the accounts unit of the department, the co-ordination of the preparation of the estimates, and the operational side of the House for the department's physical plant, as it were.

MR. DECKER: That is the introduction of the officials and I do not care to make any further speech. I would rather make the time available to the members for their questions.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Ms. Verge you have fifteen minutes to make a statement.

MS. VERGE: I will use my fifteen by making some comments and then asking question about a series of topics, then pausing after each for the minister's response.

The first topic is the question of the way our primary, elementary, and high school education system - the minister is asking me to speak up and I will try to project a little better, but let me know if you are having difficulty as we go along.

I am going to deal with a series of topics one by one, pausing after comments and questions about each for your reaction. The first topic is the all important issue of the way children's education is administered and governed, the timely question of the division of powers among the provincial government and the churches. We have before us the William's report, the William's Royal Commission Report which calls for major change in the way children's education is governed with different roles for the players. The William's Commission consulted the public extensively through hearings and they also commissioned public opinion surveys. They amassed a considerable amount of evidence, number one, pointing to the need for massive change, and number two, indicating that there is widespread public support for change along the lines of having the church's role in education confined to developing religious education programs and providing pastoral care but leaving administration and allocation of public funds to elected authorities and having major integration of the denominational groups and boards so that we will lower our administrative spending and concentrate more available resources on instructing children.

It has been a year now since we have had the report and while people's hopes were raised initially it seems as though there has been a significant retreat. The whole matter seems to have been handed over to the church leaders, clergy specifically, and a few cabinet ministers, so similar to the Meech Lake process we have boys meeting in the back room making significant decisions that are going to affect the lives of virtually every person in this Province. I am wondering how the minister can defend the process?

MR. DECKER: It has been almost a year since the Royal Commission report was presented as hon. members know. Government never took an official position until sometime last Fall. I think it was October or November before government finally, publicly said what our position was, which was, generally that we accept the general thrust of the Royal Commission.

There are 211 recommendations in the Royal Commission report, about anywhere from eighteen to twenty-five depending on who you are, who is speaking, about eighteen to twenty-five of these recommendations have a direct impact on the traditional rights of the churches in this Province. In order to do away with these rights, if anyone ever wish to do so, you would either have to have consensus or you would have to change the Constitution without the consent of the churches. To get their consensus you would have to change the Constitution voluntarily, if not you could do it without their consent. I am not sure that government could change the Constitution without the consent of the churches. We have had legal advice, we have had legal people working on it within the Department of Justice.

In 1949, in Confederation, the rights of the churches were entrenched even further than ever they were I suppose, prior to Confederation, so they are there, there is no doubt about that. If we could reach consensus with the churches for these twenty-five, we would have no problem. I should say though, 153, is it, Dr. Turpin-Downey, have been acted on?

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: (Inaudible).

MR. DECKER: 153 of the recommendations, already some action has been taken on them and it is ongoing. For example, at the university, there have been some changes for the -

MS. VERGE: If I might interject, I only have a short time and I am interested particularly in the way the system is governed, the respective roles of the provincial government, elected school boards, churches, so I will leave until later a discussion of other recommendations of the Williams Report. I would like the minister to give us his interpretation of the rights of the churches. In the view of the minister, what are the rights of the churches?

MR. DECKER: In this Province, the churches have the sole right for governance in the system.

MS. VERGE: Where is their authority for that?

MR. DECKER: It is in the Terms of Union.

MS. VERGE: That is not what the Terms of Union say.

MR. DECKER: Madam Chairperson, you were Minister of Education yourself and you know darn well where the rights are.

MS. VERGE: I would like to know what this minister understands to be the rights of the churches -

MR. DECKER: I understand them exactly -

MS. VERGE: - because I am hearing this minister attribute to the churches all kinds of rights and powers which are not given to them in law.

MR. DECKER: Well, if that is correct, I would love for you to give me the legal advice which you have, because the legal advice that I got, is that we have to reach consensus of the churches, governance, they have a role in government to play -

MS. VERGE: A role.

MR. DECKER: - the non-discriminatory distribution of funds, we have no choice we have to distribute money based on whether you are Roman Catholic or whether you are one of the integrating churches.

MS. VERGE: Capital funds only.

MR. DECKER: Capital funding. Over the period of time we are not distributing the operational money based on non-discriminatory distribution, but if you were to follow the letter of the law, I would suspect that could well be challenged and we could have to give the operational monies as well. This past year we attempted to change the way the grant structure was awarded and we had to get all kinds of legal advice before we could even do that, it was delayed by about six months before we finally (inaudible). So the churches do have a very solid list of rights in governance, and I suppose that is where one of our biggest problems could be, if we ever wanted to get the church to let it go, but as you know, the two committees have met, and we are reaching a fair level of consensus with the churches, they have not accepted everything yet.

They have come forward to government with a suggestion as to how we should govern education. We have not accepted or rejected it, it is still being worked on by the committee of officials, but there is no doubt in anybody's mind that the churches do have rights and up to twenty-five of the recommendations of the Royal Commission would be impacted upon, if we were to do it without their consent.

MS. VERGE: Would the minister make public the legal advice he has, because I am hearing the minister attribute to the churches powers and rights which in my opinion they do not have. The minister seems to be trying to expand the constitutional role of the churches.

MR. DECKER: In due course all things will be made public, but at this moment the rights belong to the classes of people.

MS. VERGE: Don't the rights belong to the citizens of the Province, who elect -

MR. DECKER: The rights belong to the Province and the people.

MS. VERGE: - members of the House of Assembly and who comprise the membership of the churches?

MR. DECKER: The rights belong to the classes of people. That is the way it is worded.

MS. VERGE: And who are the people? Isn't this whole business of reforming the way schools are governed in the public property - does this not belong to the people? How can the minister justify having a few of the elite, the planning and priorities committee of Cabinet and the head clergy, meeting behind closed doors, making big decisions that are going to affect the future of education in this Province?

MR. DECKER: Well I am not sure the people of this Province would consider the Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church, and Pastor King of the Pentecostal to be the elite who are somehow in behind closed doors. I am not sure the hon. member would want to call it that.

The rights, according to the Constitution, belong to the classes of people. Now I suppose in theory we should go out and sit down and talk with 570,000 people - however many people are in this Province - and who knows?... it might have to come to that. But you have to talk to someone. At the moment we are talking with the heads of churches.

MS. VERGE: Would the minister entertain the possibility of having a referendum?

MR. DECKER: Mr. Chairman, you will have to try to restrain the hon. member long enough for me to answer my questions. There is lots of time. If we do not do it tonight, we will come back tomorrow night and the night after. If you want an answer, the least you can do is be a little bit patient and I will try to get to it.

There are other groups who have been saying that they want to have some input into the discussion, and I totally agree with that - the trustees, for example. In theory though, we do not have to talk to the trustees. All we have to talk to again are the classes of people - whoever the classes of people are. At the moment we are using the heads of churches to represent the classes of people.

If the number of petitions which hon. members - I guess you brought them in, too, did you not, Ms. Verge?

MS. VERGE: No.

MR. DECKER: You are probably the only one who did not, but most members in the House did bring an awful lot of petitions into the House before it closed the last time, expressing the great desire of our people to maintain a denominational system, and if you were to interpret that you would think they would want the status quo to remain.

The trustees that met with me - I guess it was the same committee that you had when you were there - the general advisory committee to the minister, that makes up the School Trustees Association, that makes up the parent/teachers, that makes up the -

MS. VERGE: The NTA.

MR. LUSH: The Newfoundland Teachers Association and several others.

At our last meeting it was agreed by all present that we would use that as a forum so that other groups can have some input into exactly what is going on. We even agreed that we would add to that general advisory committee so that we could make sure that everybody gets an opportunity to have some input.

We certainly do expect, as a department, over the next two or three weeks, I think, you will see some moves which will be suggesting just how serious we are about following through on the Royal Commission.

MS. VERGE: Would the minister consider having a referendum to go to all the voters in the Province, all the people who make up the -what is the phrase he is using - the classes of persons, all the people who elect members of the House of Assembly, all of the people who make up the membership of the churches?

MR. DECKER: How would you suggest we do that?

MS. VERGE: I get to ask the questions tonight.

Would the minister consider going to all the people, through a referendum -

MR. DECKER: You are talking about a referendum?

MS. VERGE: - to determine the will of all the people about how the education system in this Province should be governed in the future?

MR. DECKER: That was what the Royal Commission did - exactly that. I know with your remarks you said that it was clear that the people of the Province were not totally satisfied with the system, and I believe you suggested that they were ready for a secular system.

MS. VERGE: No, I did not use those words. I did refer to the Williams Commission having held public hearings and also having commissioned polls, but public hearings and polls are quite a bit different from having a referendum and actually allowing every single eligible voter to, through secret ballot, indicate a preference about how the system is to be governed.

MR. DECKER: We do not have any intention right now to go with a referendum. Of course I would not rule it out. You do not know what the future holds, but at the moment we are having discussions with the heads of churches.

MS. VERGE: How do you intend to let the people know what discussions are going on, what options are being looked at?

MR. DECKER: Well I do not think it would be proper, right in the middle of discussions - we are discussing rights that people have entrenched in the Constitution.

MS. VERGE: But who has the rights?

MR. DECKER: I suppose -

MS. VERGE: Whose rights are they?

MR. DECKER: Pardon?

MS. VERGE: Whose rights are they?

MR. DECKER: They belong to the classes of people. Now I don't see where it makes much sense to bring 570,000 people into a building - it would have to be an open air meeting to begin with.

MS. VERGE: What about the constituent assembly model that the Premier keeps talking about for constitutional change?

MR. DECKER: I think it can be done much more expeditiously. I think we can reach a consensus. One of the things which the poll showed in the Royal Commission was not that the people want a secular system. The poll showed that a considerable number of our people want basically one system of education. They want denominational education. I think Newfoundlanders and Labradorians want that. They have problems with the duplication, they have problems where money is being wasted, as they expressed. But there is a very clear desire on the part of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians to have a denominational system of education.

MS. VERGE: Shouldn't people be involved in a determination of what kind of denominational education system they have? Since the ordinary taxpayers and laity may have different values from the clergy and church officials who have vested interests in maintaining power and jobs.

MR. DECKER: Surely you're not suggesting that we totally ignore the heads of the churches?

MS. VERGE: I'm asking the minister if he wouldn't broaden the discussion to involve the people.

MR. DECKER: I've already told you that we are broadening the discussions. The general advisory committee, we've made provision there for other people to come in.

MS. VERGE: Would you make provision for the media to attend meetings of the general advisory committee so that through the news media everyone can find out what's being talked about?

MR. DECKER: No, as a general rule we won't do that. You see, that's not very practical.

MS. VERGE: Why?

MR. DECKER: Would you want the media to attend Cabinet meetings? How far do you push this? It sounds like a great ideal and that sort of thing, but we're talking about entrenched rights. We're talking about -

MS. VERGE: Whose rights are they?

MR. CHAIRMAN: The time is up for this exchange now. There's no one else who has indicated they want to speak. So if you want to carry on again please indicate.

MS. VERGE: No, I'll yield and let one of my colleagues have a turn. I'll come back to this later.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Harris.

MR. HARRIS: Thank you, Chair. Just on another tack. I may have some questions on that issue a little later. I want to talk about one issue that I raised with you, Minister, last year in connection with a particular problem in my own district. That's to do with school bus transportation in the City of St. John's. I want to raise it on a more general level.

As you may know I had a private member's resolution on the Order Paper until the last session was terminated having to do with school bus transportation. Now new members may not know, and perhaps the Member for Waterford - Kenmount would be interested in knowing, that all of the people in Mount Pearl who have children going to school in the schools of Mount Pearl who live more than a mile away from their school get bus transportation provided free at the taxpayers' expense. Free, in other words, to the parents and to the students, at the taxpayers' expense, regardless of the income of the parents or the families. Whereas in my district, and in most districts inside the City of St. John's parents have to pay for their children to travel to school on the St. John's Transportation Commission buses.

We had a situation in St. John's East, in Quidi Vidi, where up until last June there was a school bus provided. The St. John's Transportation Commission in its wisdom decided that it was going to route one of its buses down into Quidi Vidi Village and advised the RC School Board for St. John's that they must cease and desist providing school bus transportation to the parents. The result of that was that the children and the parents couldn't afford to use the St. John's Transportation buses, and of course the Department of Education, or the School Board, was unable to provide the transportation because the system didn't allow it.

Now, through various representations and through some efforts on your part, for which I think I expressed my appreciation and I know the people in Quidi Vidi who are affected by it also appreciate it, the thing was restored basically when the St. John's Transportation Commission decided that it was no longer economically feasible for them to do it because they were not getting the ridership. All of this of course is background to my question, and the question is - and I am not picking on Mount Pearl but I only use it as a contrast, the same is true for every town, every city and every rural community in Newfoundland and Labrador. School bus transportation is provided throughout the Province with the exception of St. John's, and I would like to know, Mr. Minister, why is it that a constituent of mine, who lives in the Battery and goes to Gonzaga High School for example, has to either pay for school bus transportation himself or walk more than a mile to school, where that same situation does not apply in Mount Pearl, in Corner Brook or in Bonavista?

MR. DECKER: You are making some good points, Mr. Harris, and we discussed a lot of this privately before and I agree with you. It would be a simple thing to say that the St. John's Transportation Commission is a problem but that is a copout. In order to run a school bus in this city we do have to have approval of the St. John's Transportation Commission but the fact still remains that people in Corner Brook get bused in for nothing, people in Mount Pearl get bused in for nothing; Grand Falls, Gander, all the more urban areas of the Province, that happens. It is one of the areas that has caused me some concern over the years and it is one of the things that we will be looking at in the not too distant future. We have to deal with it. We have a busing problem all over the Province. What are we spending on busing, Ms. Turpin-Downey, $20 million?

AN HON. MEMBER: It is slightly less than $30 million.

MR. DECKER: Around $30 million - I was going to say around $30 million spent on busing. We also have buses meeting buses as you know, going from one school to the other. It is one of the areas in the department which we are going to have to look at and see what can be done about it. If you are going to be fair, you either provide free transportation to the people in St. John's or you charge people outside of St. John's. There is an unfairness there in the system which I inherited, which my predecessor inherited but we certainly do have to deal with it and I take your criticism, I am sure, in the spirit in which it is offered. We certainly do have to deal with it.

MR. HARRIS: I am surprised. I only became aware of this issue of course, after it was brought to my attention by constituents and two types of constituents, one was the problem of the Quidi Vidi group with St. Joseph's School, but another was the problem with individuals who lived a significant distance from school and who were missing classes because they could not get to school and did not have the means to afford a bus and in bad weather were unable to get to school.

We had one or two cases where the Department of Social Assistance, which does not ordinarily do this, did in fact provide a bus pass for an individual but it was an extraordinary expense to have to establish that this person was missing considerable school and it was - you had to go to great extremes to make an exception for an individual. I know you say that you have a problem, you cannot provide buses where the St. John's Transportation exists but that is a legislative requirement that of course is within the power of government to change.

There are two ways of doing it I suppose, one that you could take away that legislative requirement or on the other hand, a program could be developed to provide assistance to the cost of transportation for individuals either through a bus pass system or some other way, and I would like to know what solutions the minister has in mind? If, as you say, you want to address it, what solutions do you have in mind? What solutions are under consideration, and is there a committee established to look into this? Is there some timetable, what can we expect to see?

MR. DECKER: Before I address that I should also tell you that even within the system itself there are some unique problems. We are still busing from East Meadows even though it is part of the city. We are still bussing from the Goulds. It is also part of the city. So there are problems there.

No, Mr. Chairman, I am not prepared right now to say exactly what I intend to do. I am in the process of putting a mechanism in place to at least try to deal with the problem, but it is not going to be an easy problem to find solutions to, but it will be dealt with in due course.

MR. HARRIS: Well you say in due course. I know that is the diplomatic thing to say. Can you be more specific? Do you have a committee of officials, or have you asked anybody to address it or to come up with a recommendation? Or is there a review process that you have commenced? If you have not, when do you intend to undertake that?

MR. DECKER: Due course is a very specific -

MR. HARRIS: In due course could be in 1998, in the third term of office, like the NDP government getting out of NATO, in our third term of office or something.

MR. DECKER: I think due course is very specific. We certainly will be dealing with it in due course and it will be dealt with. I would not want to get the member's hopes all excited that we are going to do it tomorrow morning, but it will not be left on the back burner forever. It will be addressed.

MR. HARRIS: In due course, with due respect, Mr. Minister, is very unspecific. It could mean anything, and in fact it means nothing. Again with respect, and I would ask if you are serious about this issue, and I take you at your word that you are, that you provide me and the members of the Committee with some undertaking as to when a review of this procedure might be undertaken.

MR. DECKER: In due course we will deal with it, and at the appropriate time the hon. member will be made aware of what we are doing.

MR. HARRIS: Well neither of those phrases mean anything other than what the minister - it is like Alice in Wonderland - these words mean what the speaker wants them to mean. I think that to make, and to continue to make these kinds of meaningless responses is to say there is no response at all. I say that I am continuing to suggest that the minister is being sincere in his response, but if he is he will tell me when he is going to either appoint a committee to review it, or ask for recommendations from his officials, or do something concrete. If the minister is able to do that I would appreciate you telling me whether you are really serious about this and you do have a definite plan.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Harris, your time is up. I now recognize Ms. Young.

MS. YOUNG: Thank you.

I would like to say that I have looked through the budget for the Department of Education and I am relatively pleased that there have not been too many slashes. It looks very good considering the financial restraints.

There are a couple of things that do concern me, however, and that is due to the NCARP seats being taken up at the colleges. There have been a number of young people very concerned that they are not able to get into the courses they want to take. What is going to happen there?

MR. DECKER: My understanding - and I will ask Dr. Marsh to assist me because Dr. Marsh is looking after the NCARP for the department - is that most of the NCARP is over and above what is normally the classes which are available to teach the students. I understand that is correct, Dr. Marsh?

AN HON. MEMBER: (Inaudible).

MR. DECKER: The bulk of the NCARP is contracted out to the private schools and what have you. Our own schools are tendering and getting a lot of it, but Dr. Marsh you could probably go into a little more detail on that.

DR. MARSH: All NCARP funding for training is incremental to other costs to the Province, so it does not impact on what we would call the grant need purchases proceeds that would occur in the Province, or the grant need provision, so it should not impact on regular applicants who are going through the regular process for obtaining training.

MS. YOUNG: Thank you.

I am concerned, too, about the number of young people who are leaving - either dropping out of high school, or completing high school but not going on for secondary education. As I travelled throughout the district these are the people, I was finding, who are availing of the social services funds because they have no skills. I am just wondering if there has been any consideration given to bringing in courses, say at Level 1, in the trades so that there is an incentive for young people to stay in school where they have already begun their training?

MR. DECKER: I see you have Profile 92 there. There has been a slight improvement in the dropout rate as Profile 92 shows. Dr. Marsh can you bring the trades back to the high school level? We have the Bonavista experiment there I notice but I do not know how much more of that is going on in the Province.

MR. MARSH: Dr. Turpin-Downey can speak to it more clearly than I can. There is a program of technological education in the high school program which students can take, and as well there are linkages now occurring between the colleges and the school system. Bonavista in particular is a case where the school and the college is linked for students to be able to take part in those type of courses. In other areas in terms of the general adjustment, if you wish, for people who have left school there is both on the national basis through a study between the Ministers of Social Services, the Ministers of Education, and the Ministers responsible for Labour, who are looking at the whole area of educational adjustment and social adjustment. Initiatives under the SARA agreement, the Social Assistance Recipient Agreement, in this Province are also addressing those same types of adjustment problems for people. Finally, a youth strategy program exists.

AN HON. MEMBER: (Inaudible)

DR. MARSH: Essentially what I have indicated is that there are a number of both federal and provincial agreements that are in place to assist youth who have dropped out of school and there are also programs in place through the school system and the colleges for addressing students, and linkages there to assist them to continue education. There are programs available under the reorganized high school program in the technology areas.

MS. YOUNG: I have a couple of questions. Do I have time, Mr. Chairman.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes.

MS. YOUNG: One of the concerns by some of the younger parents is the fact that there are no seat belts on school buses. That is something, I guess, of great concern. I worked with the school bus monitors and we found that when we were doing practice, leaving through the emergency door at the rear, it was sort of dangerous getting out there, especially if one kid happens to fall. You could have somebody crushed there. We were thinking it would be great if we had something like steps from the rear of the bus that would alleviate some of the problem.

MR. DECKER: How come there are no seat belts? I know when the seat belt legislation came into effect years ago there was no provision for school buses. It is something we should take under advisement and look at though, and just see how practical it would be to do it.

MS. YOUNG: That is right, and as well leaving from the rear if there is an emergency could be quite hazardous to the students.

MR. DECKER: I will take that under advisement and try to get some background as to what is the reason why they are not there.

MS. YOUNG: I am just delighted to know that there is around $1.2 million allocated for the skills training program through the cost shared Canada/Newfoundland Offshore Development Fund. There are a lot of positive things in there but my time is up and I can come back with some more questions that I have later.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Hodder.

MR. HODDER: I have a series of questions, Mr. Chairman. I will ask some of them now and I am sure there will be another opportunity. In the early 80s we witnessed the reorganization of the senior high school curriculum and the introduction of Grade X11, the addition of many, many new courses, and of course through that being able to offer a broader education to our young people. In the mid and late 80s we saw a great restructuring of the primary and elementary divisions in the school system. In the mid 80s as well we had a lot of work being done to reorganize the junior high school program. A report was completed in 1986 but it has never, ever been implemented. We seem to have gone from both ends, and when we got towards the middle we got bogged down in the reorganizational structure. I am wondering what measures are being taken by the government to address the need to reorganize the junior high school part of the curriculum.

MR. DECKER: Dr. Turpin-Downey is working on that area. Do you wish to...?

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: I am quite familiar with the report to which you are referring. It goes back to some time ago, and I think the cost estimate at that time to implement that report would probably be between $70 million and $80 million. The most important thing, I felt, regarding that report that we really should not overlook was the whole business of interacting with adolescents. I guess the most we have been able to do is encourage school boards to have as much in-service as they could in dealing with adolescents.

With regard to curriculum initiatives, I do not have a listing with me but we try to keep up-to-date with the curriculum, and most areas of the curriculum - like I said, I do not have a specific listing of the changes that have been made in junior high, but certainly a number of changes have been made. There are still some that need to be made, but a fair number of changes - now again we had different reactions to that report. Large numbers of people felt that it should be implemented full-scale. There are others who had varying degrees of support for it, but as far as the actual curriculum changes are concerned, we have been trying to do what we can within the means available, and we have allowed for the local development of curriculum, which I think has expanded quite a lot over the last two years where locally school boards will offer courses and just send them in for approval in the area of junior high.

We are making changes in curriculum - maybe not necessarily as fast as we would like to, or people would like for us to, but certainly the junior high area has not been overlooked; but to have implemented that report at that time, and even a few years later, there is no question that the cost is between $70 million and $80 million, and I think a lot of people at the time felt, well maybe it is not necessary, I suppose, to implement the report fully as it was recommended.

Certainly I think in-servicing of teachers, in dealing with adolescents, was a critical factor and one which I think we probably could be doing more of, to be honest with you, but school boards are cognizant that a very serious area is the interaction between teacher and adolescent, particularly with the growing numbers of behaviour problems and severely disturbed children at that age, because then children who have learning problems become behaviour problems at that age - junior high.

MR. HODDER: But this is where we find the greatest -

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: Concentration.

MR. HODDER: Concentration right now. Many children are being promoted through the primary/elementary system, and they move on a normal age/grade relationship, you might say. When they get to the junior high school this is where we find our biggest class sizes, where we find the children who cannot cope with the expectations of curriculum. We find that there is a severe problem of disruptive behaviour. With the transition from elementary to junior high, with the nature of the adolescent, the changing from children who were learning in the concrete to the expectation of going to the abstract, all of these things are all coming about, and within the school board system itself there is the appearance of a lack of recognition. There is a lack of, shall we say, understanding of the nature of the junior high school child, and many junior high school teachers within their own boards and within their own schools feel that they are somewhat abandoned and they sense a lack of commitment.

My question is: Given the nature of this particular problem, which is very pressing, what is the department going to do to try to address this? Are we going to make different allocations? I find it disconcerting that if you have a program let's say in senior high school, let us say chemistry, you want to offer chemistry you find that if you have twelve students you can offer the chemistry course, but if you have a particular need in junior high school, you cannot find the same level of commitment by your school board or for that matter through the allocation of teachers, and this is where we have our biggest problems.

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: I think quite frankly, that the area of junior high has not been an area of emphasis or an area of concern on the part of school boards up to the last couple of years, and I think quite frankly, that school boards are recognizing now that any additional supports and resources ought to go to the junior high, but more importantly, teachers have really not been trained to deal with junior high students. You either have elementary teachers in the junior high or you have senior high teachers in the junior high.

We cannot really control that necessarily, but I think when school boards become totally in sync with the type of individuals who should be placed in the junior high school - the most we have been able to do is through the stay-in-school funding, and other areas of funding is to recommend that most of the resources go in the junior high area, but there is no question, we are cognizant of it and we are trying to get the superintendents, the assistant superintendents of programs, the program co-ordinators, all of whom are staff who are assigned to the board office and are to be responsible for the direct implementation of in-service, and I think quite frankly they are becoming more and more cognizant of it, but there is no question that most of the people dealing with junior high, have not really been trained or qualify because it is an extremely difficult area to deal with.

MR. HODDER: Has the department approached Memorial University faculty to ask them to change the teacher training -

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: Yes, we have.

MR. HODDER: - to put on specific training programs that address junior high school children.

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: It takes years to get something changed at the university, and I mean years; but with the new vice-president of academic, we have laid out all our concerns fully to him re: the training of teachers period. He is very cognizant of it and I think if you hear Dr. May, they are going to be making changes over there in the faculty. There is no question about that.

MR. HODDER: A final supplementary on that particular angle.

We have had a lot of emphasis recently on the changes in what used to be called industrial arts education, you know, technology education. We have a whole group of teachers out there now doing a lot of in-service; what is the commitment of the government to making the transition from the training that is taking place into practical implementation strategies at the classroom level? What monies are going to be made available to permit the new technology education to be implemented at a reasonable time, and with reasonable resources?

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: I feel the industrial arts courses to which you are referring have been changed into more design technology kinds of courses. We made some changes last year, we are making some more this year; again, it has to be phased over a period of time for two reasons: I suppose financial reasons for one but the ability of the school board to implement a new course or a new program by the time they have to get the teacher in-service, they feel as well that they do not want things coming too much too soon, too fast. On the one hand we get told we are doing things at a glacial pace and on the other hand we are being told by the board you are requesting us to do too much, so the design technology courses have in fact been moving fairly quickly because of interest and enthusiasm, and yes, we have given a percentage of dollars to those areas, but again to the extent that we can. But I would say that the changes in those areas will probably be finalized within the next two years, where you will in fact have most of the old, say industrial arts moved into the area of design technology, and students are very enthused so they are already clamouring to register for the new courses that they hear about.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Ms. Verge.

MS. VERGE: There was a brief exchange between Ms. Young and the minister about the participation rate or the converse of that, the dropout rate. I am looking at page 17 of Profile 92, which is a bar graph showing percent of sixteen-year-olds, seventeen-year-olds and eighteen-year-olds in school from 1986-1987 to 1992-1993. I was startled to see that there's been a drop in the participation rate - presumably that means a rise in the drop out rate - from 1991 to 1992. I'm wondering if the minister has any explanation for this.

MR. DECKER: (Inaudible).

MS. VERGE: It's page 17. While the minister is waiting to have a look at this I'd like to praise the department for publishing this document. It was started when Loyola Hearn was minister in the late 'eighties and it's come out each year since then, I believe. It's very valuable and it's good to see that the news media have given extensive coverage of the latest publication, Profile '92. I think the information in this document can give parents and other members of the public more power than they do now, if you believe that with information comes power. I think by better informing the people, the people who make up the classes of people with the rights, we might have better participation and get improvements to our education system.

If the minister's had a chance to look at the graph perhaps he would comment.

MR. DECKER: Yes, I can't explain why this happened. The graph is there and it shows that there is a slight decrease. I could only speculate. As to making the classes of people aware, this document is a public document and -

MS. VERGE: That's my point.

MR. DECKER: - I've been sending out dozens of them to people.

MS. VERGE: I just praised the minister and the department for this publication.

MR. DECKER: But I'll have to take that question under advisement. I can only give you a speculation I would suspect as to why that happened. Are you aware of any logical explanation for this, why it happened?

DR. MARSH: We did note it in the report.

MR. DECKER: Oh, it's noted in the report.

DR. MARSH: And in the briefing, and indicated that it was an area that we would be looking into (inaudible).

MS. VERGE: I'm sorry, I can't hear Dr. Marsh.

DR. MARSH: I'm just explaining to the minister that it's an area that we'd be looking into as part of our research this year.

MR. DECKER: Yes, okay. You heard that?

MS. VERGE: Thank you. Next topic. Last week a Human Rights Commission board of enquiry made a decision saying basically that the Human Rights Code of this Province provides no redress for a teacher by the name of Judy Collins Kearley, who was employed by the Pentecostal Assemblies Board of Education in a fully publicly funded school system, in a publicly funded job, in a situation where her employer, the school board, pressured her to leave because she was divorced and remarried. How does the minister react to this? Does the minister accept this? Is he prepared to defend it, or is he willing to look at some kind of changes that will provide human rights protection to teachers?

MR. DECKER: I look at it the same, I suppose, as any other individual would look at it. But the reality is the Human Rights Commission was correct. We have a unique system of education in this Province and that right of the church to hire and fire people on morality grounds is there and they have it. Whether I think that's a wonderful thing or whether I think it's terrible doesn't mean a row of beans. That is the law of the land. Had that woman got to the courts I would venture to guess that she would have lost her case.

MS. VERGE: But this is the minister responsible for making education laws, and this is the minister in charge of spending the public funds that operate that school system and that used to pay that teacher.

MR. DECKER: With all respect though, Lynn, that hasn't -

MR. LANGDON: Point of order, Mr. Chairman.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Point of order, Mr. Langdon.

MR. LANGDON: I think, and I would stand to be corrected, but I think I'm correct in saying that when the Member for Humber East was Minister of Education the same thing happened when a Roman Catholic teacher married a Salvation Army girl. He was teaching on Bell Island. He lost his job in the RC Board because he had married outside of the church. This is not the only case that has happened. It has happened from time to time. So that minister or this minister, whatever the case might be, I think it goes back to show the powers that the churches do have. So I think if you look it up you'll probably find the same thing.

MR. CHAIRMAN: The member's on a point of order which is not a point of order.

MS. VERGE: Regardless of how many teachers have been fired or forced out of their jobs because of their personal lives, is this minister in 1993 going to acquiesce, or is this minister, with the support of the people who make up the classes of people, going to do something to change the law?

MR. DECKER: I can only, I suppose, do the same thing that the member herself did when she was there. I can have my personal feeling about it. But until the law is changed there's not a whole lot I can do about it. It's the law of the land and the Commission was absolutely right when they made that decision.

MS. VERGE: Is the minister interested in changing the law?

MR. DECKER: I don't want to get into hypothetical or speculative cases. We can only discuss what is. What will be or what we'd like it to be is a totally different matter and we'll deal with that in due course. I don't think it's -

MS. VERGE: That's the question. Are you going to deal with it?

MR. DECKER: - a question of how I feel about things, I don't think that's a proper question.

MS. VERGE: Are you as Minister of Education going to initiate a change in the law that would govern this type of situation?

MR. DECKER: You know, to hear that kind of a question from a person who sat in exactly the same chair sounds a little bit hypocritical. You were there for two or three years when you were minister and you know the problems and you know how difficult it is to do it. I'm not going to jeopardize any chance of making reforms on education by entering into a discussion which will tomorrow be blasted across the headlines, probably taken out of context.

We have some problems in the education system in this Province. I believe over the next few years we're going to see changes the like of which you have never seen before in the history of this Province. But I'm not going to get into any details and tell the hon. member what I'm going to do. We have a system which we have to work through. There are other departments of education in this Province which have to be tuned into what we're doing and it's got to be a give and take.

MS. VERGE: I'd like to ask about another part of Profile '93. It has to do with student achievement levels by area of residence, rural versus urban.

MR. DECKER: That's on the Canadian Test of Basic Skills you're talking about.

MS. VERGE: Yes. Once again this report shows that students in rural areas have lower achievement levels or lower scores on these tests than students in urban areas, with urban being defined as 5,000 or over. We have a higher percentage of our provincial population in rural areas than any other province of Canada so this has a greater significance for us. I understand there's a similar imbalance by urban-rural in other provinces. When you consider that we have more of our people in rural areas, the fact that students in rural areas generally achieve lower levels, have lower scores, is a bigger issue for us than it would be for a province such as Manitoba. I'm wondering what strategy - `strategy' seems to be a current buzzword - the minister has for trying to improve rural students' achievement.

MR. DECKER: You want to go for that?

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: I think we've been cognizant for centuries about the urban-rural problems. I think various school boards in these areas are using a multiplicity of things. Probably the most recent have been through the stay-in-school initiatives where there's been additional resources put in place. Additional types of programs, where we get into peer tutoring, additional remedial help for students, and more importantly, I think, methods of teaching.

Instructional strategies have been recognized as being critically important when it comes to achievement. In some cases there is multi-grading, and I think again teachers have been in these situations without necessarily being taught to deal with that situation. We have things like co-operative learning. I could go into a whole litany of different kinds of things that are being used in different areas with different students. If you go to the Port au Port Peninsula, for example - and I think there are people here who can speak to that even more so than I can, you will see what we call reading recovery programs where they are actually initiated in primary classrooms, particularly in small schools for children whom they feel have probably never seen a book, or have not been exposed to reading prior to going to school.

I think you will see certain local school boards particularly, and principals of schools bringing into play different kinds of initiatives. Again, some of them you are already familiar with but there are a whole multitude of different kinds of strategies and there is no question that it is being focused on. The small schools allocation is another one where additional supports have been given to -

MR. CHAIRMAN: Your time has expired.

Mr. Smith.

MR. SMITH: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Minister, first of all I have a few remarks with regards to the Williams Royal Commission Report. I think in some circles it has been assumed and accepted that the recommendations of the report, especially as it pertains directly with the denominational education system, does have a strong endorsement among the people of the Province. Having appeared myself before the commission and having been present at the hearings where forty briefs were presented, that night, of the forty that were presented there was just about one brief that was presented that supported doing away with denominational education, and subsequent to the release of the report in terms of the response of the churches in particular in going out to the people in the various parishes, I think, people are indicating that there is some concern about the loss of denominational education.

People are concerned that it would go into a purely secular system so in that sense I am pleased that government has decided to make haste slowly on this. I think it is important that we make sure that we are covered with this in what we do have. I think people recognize that at a time with limited resources we have to make better use of our resources and do more sharing, but I certainly do not sense from my experience, and I am speaking as a person who has been in education for twenty-seven years, that there is a strong support out there right now to do away, people are not ready, in my opinion, to go totally to a secular system of education.

However, there are a number of concerns that I would just like to touch on and have you react to if you could. Reference was just made to the achievement levels in the Province and in particular the variance in the urban versus the rural. Having worked all of my life in education in a rural area I know some of the contributing factors to that. One of the things that is currently being debated and is certainly of some concern in rural areas is with regards to the 2 per cent savings clause. In my area of the Province the argument is that if the 2 per cent savings clause were lost, in the school board I work for, we would see a significant decrease in the number of teaching personnel that would be available to the schools, and subsequent I think one could argue on the basis of that, that would probably add further to the problem of achievement. I know that is something that is being reviewed, especially at a time when government is obviously committed to making cuts. I wonder if you would be prepared to say this evening what the situation is with regard to the 2 per cent savings clause?

MR. DECKER: My problem with the 2 per cent savings clause is that it has nothing to do with the need of teachers in the small schools. They are two different things. It is the role and responsibility of management, in this case management being government, to deal with the problems in small schools. If that means extra teachers or that means distance education it is the responsibility of government to see that it is done, but at this moment the only way these problems are being dealt with is because there happens to be a 2 per cent clause. Just supposing, for example, that at the next round of negotiations the 2 per cent clause was negotiated away, we would immediately lose 300 teachers out of the system. Now I am saying that we should not be dependent upon a union contract. It should be government policy to deal with the problems in the small schools, and this is what I want to get down with, but to deal with that policy now I would be stuck with 300 teachers plus the problems of dealing with the small school, so I cannot put the formula in place because I would be doubled. I would be dealing with it doubly.

My concern with the 2 per cent clause, and I made it public on several occasions - sure, we need extra teachers in the small schools. There are many schools which you just cannot close - Harbour Deep, for example, with twenty-five or thirty students. As long as there is a Harbour Deep there is no logical way in the world to move them to another school. In the higher grades some do come out on bursaries, but it is not really sensible. Red Bay in Labrador; Croque, up in my own district; places in Oliver's district - where it is just not reasonable to close schools and bus people out. It is not practical, and we have no desire of doing that.

I want a formula which is applied equally throughout the Province. Under what conditions would you make extra teachers available to a school? One of the first, I think, would be if it is inappropriate to bus them to a bigger school. Then it would depend on whether you are talking about a gravel road or a paved road. The age of the child would be taken into consideration. Once you establish that it is just impossible to do it, then you have to try to address the children in that particular school. I want to see a formula - and it has nothing to do with a union contract at all - but I want to see it as part of the government policy.

Now I know you are going to tell me that we have small schools allocation, but that is not addressing the problem well enough to my liking anyway.

MR. SMITH: Thank you, Mr. Minister.

I am just carrying on, just piggybacking, on something that my colleague Ms. Young mentioned earlier. Again, it kind of ties in with the achievement level insofar as achievement, or lack of it, is a contributing factor to the dropout problem. One of the factors that contributes to students dropping out of school is that they do not achieve in school for a myriad of reasons, but obviously - and again Dr. Turpin-Downey referenced some of the work that has been done in the district that I represent, Port au Port.

The school board there, I must say - and not because I worked with them for a good many years - they are a very progressive board, as you are well aware, and have done some very innovative things there in trying to come to grips with that, and probably because we were faced with a very severe problem there, more so than in most other areas of the Province, maybe that kind of forced us to focus on it. We were looking at the dropout problem in my area - the area where I lived - back in the late seventies and early eighties, and subsequent to that did make representation to government.

One of the things that we identified in the area where I lived, in Lourdes on the Port au Port Peninsula, was that - like a lot of our children starting school were disadvantaged in that they were coming from homes where there was not a lot of stimulation. As a result, these children were not entering school. When they entered school they were not on a level playing field with children who were coming from the better homes where they had lots of stimulation, where the parents were educated, primarily because what we were finding was that a lot of our parents themselves were dropouts. As a result, the environment that they were providing for their children, through no fault of their own, certainly was not comparable to the children coming from the homes of a teacher or the local doctor or whatever.

So what we undertook in that area was universal preschool. Right now we do have, in that area of the Province, all of the children, for the past five years at the school where I worked, we have basically what amounts to a junior kindergarten. The children - next year's kindergarten class - would have been in attendance at the school where I was principal until just a month or so ago, would have been in attendance this year in a preschool program.

We have done that for five years and we have been kind of monitoring it to see what kind of impact it will have. Certainly just from the empirical evidence that we have would certainly seem to indicate that it is a process that is working - it is an experiment that is working - and although we know it is going to take a lot longer than the amount of time that the thing has run at this point in time, I do know the implications of this for the Province.

Obviously if you talk about - when I say universal preschool in Port au Port and we are talking four or five schools, that is one thing, and we can manage it, in finding the resources through the Department of Social Services or wherever, but in terms of the provincial picture, I just throw it out from the point of view, in terms of that aspect in this Province, and it is an area of education that we have had reference here this evening to the reorganized high school and I think at that level, the preschool level, the really early childhood is certainly a very, very crucial area, and I am just wondering in terms of the department's thinking, is this an area that is being actively looked at as to making plans for the future?

MR. DECKER: Dr. Marsh, who were the two people with whom I met, was it Dr. Riggs?

DR. MARSH: Dr. Riggs and Dr. Steve Norris.

MR. DECKER: Yes, Norris and Riggs, a couple of researchers at the university, and they discussed some of these issues. At the moment they are running an experiment out in the Conception Bay South area. They have taken two kindergarten classes and have been going on now for the last - how many years ? Up to Grade IV now. They took one group and made available to them one reading, one text, was it?

AN HON. MEMBER: Yes, one-half hour per week.

MR. DECKER: One-half hour per week in class A of kindergartners and in class B they did not make this available. Now, the ones who did not have the half-hour per week reading, in Grade IV, they are about where the mainland people are in September, is it not? Our Grade IVs in May, are where the mainland's are in September. The ones who read are up to - I think it is in April, is it not, or somewhere thereabouts - just one-half hour a week added, so it is accepted that if we could get some reading and some skills in there at an earlier age, they will indeed pay off; that is after they come to the school, I am talking about there, we have seen clearer evidence in this particular experiment, and we are pursuing that very strongly.

I do not know, Dr. Turpin-Downer, if you want to add to that because it is definitely an area but the cost of a universal preschool program is not in the cards at this fiscal climate, but is something which I am sure would make a difference if we could do it.

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: Well I guess we have given a lot of thought to early childhood education and preschool for a number of years and it has really had a lot of discussion. I mean you are talking to the converted when you talk to any of us re preschool education and everybody in this room, but when we looked at it, I guess we figured well, even if we could have a full day kindergarten right now, that in itself would help, but the cost of implementing that has been just prohibitive, not to speak of a junior kindergarten or to look at the preschool, but nobody, philosophically, and when the reorganized high school was happening, I looked to say: why is government reorganizing the high school at this point in time? For goodness sake, let us look at primary, preschool and primary, so again, it is more fiscal restraint I suppose in the last number of years that has prevented us from really getting into it. Quite frankly, I am very familiar with the preschool situation and I would hate to see it having to be stopped, but to apply it on a provincial basis would be extremely costly.

MR. SMITH: I think the thing -

MR. CHAIRMAN: Your time is up Mr. Smith.

MR. SMITH: There is just one point I want to make and I will be finished with that, if that is okay?

The one point I want to make and I think it is important and I would not want to leave it now, is that, while I recognize the fiscal reality that we are facing in this Province, I do not think we should allow ourselves to not have a vision with regards to that sort of thing and allow ourselves to consider what we should be aspiring to for this Province, and not automatically, at the very beginning say: no way, we could never afford this so we will not even consider it, because, I think, as long as we allow ourselves to think about it, then at some point in time, maybe, we will be able to find the resources to do something with it.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

MR. DECKER: One of the recommendations of the Royal Commission was that we go to a full day of kindergarten right away and that is one which we are actively considering.

MR. CHAIRMAN: I recognize Mr. Langdon.

MR. LANGDON: I just want to follow along with a couple of things that Gerald did, and I am talking about the 2 per cent clause. I represent an area of the Province on the South Coast which has a fewer number I guess of students in any school board and also with some of the smaller schools if not the smallest schools, probably outside of the coastal Labrador communities.

The school board in the area that I represent, the Bay d'Espoir, Fortune Bay, Hermitage board, for example, if the 2 per cent clause were to be totally eliminated today they would lose three teachers, whereas if you eliminate the 2 per cent clause in the Exploits Valley integrated school board which is Grand Falls and the urban areas they would lost thirty-eight teachers, so that 2 per cent clause as such has not really addressed the problem that is in the smaller outlying schools.

That is why, for example, you are going to have people like Gerald where there are a number of students in the 2 per cent category and in the school board where I taught for three years, the Exploits Valley, who want to keep their teachers. It does not really address the problem. As the minister is aware, like the other day, where a school in the English Harbour West area where not only do the rural areas, sparsely populated as they are, find themselves with fewer dollars but they also find themselves - now, I think this is important and I do not think we realize it, they are further from the seat of government and because they are small and do not have the dollars to do the lobbying there are many, many instances where in the larger urban areas through the IECs and so on, the denominational educational committees as well, there are certain areas, certain larger towns that get preference in school construction over many of the smaller towns and that in itself also is an adverse learning disability to the people in the small urban areas.

I agree with Lynn in what she was saying, that in some instances in the rural areas statistics will show that the scores that students receive in standardized tests and so on are lower than what you would find in the urban areas, but all things being equal, given the same references, given the same materials, everything being equal, many of the students who come from the smaller schools can do just as well.

I would like to use an example what happened in David's district, in Burgeo - Bay d'Espoir last year, in the small town of François where there are about 200 people. Through distance education they introduced physics to that school. There were two students who did the physics 3000 level course from that small school. The provincial average last year on the public exams was 55 but these two students did the course through the FAX machines and everything else and both of them scored more than 80 in the public exam. The thing is that the students out there can do it and it is with technology like distance education and so on. I believe that is an answer to many of the inequities and problems that we have facing the schools.

Let me just give you one more example. Some people from English Harbour East came to visit the minister last year. There is a small school there operated by the Roman Catholic school board. Between English Harbour and Terrenceville there is a community called Grand Le Pierre. English Harbour students bypass Grand Le Pierre and go into Terrenceville to go to the Catholic school. They bypass the school in Grand Le Pierre but the people from English Harbour East have to travel over twenty-six miles of gravel road, and it is like a cow path, to go to school in Terrenceville. You take kids even at Grade V11 or Grade V111, get them up at 6:30 in the morning, give them their breakfast and put them on the bus for twenty-six miles and expect them to learn as well as the students do in Mount Pearl, it cannot be done. I think this is where the minister was coming from when he made that particular point earlier.

There has to be some mechanism in place that has to be able to give to the small school in English Harbour East the facilities, the technology, and so on, so that these kids will be able to study at home rather than taking them by bus and sending them somewhere else. Their needs are not addressed. They are losing a teacher this year and the board has said to these people: we cannot very well do it because if we do we will cut our music program or our industrial arts program in one of the larger schools. These are real problems that have to be addressed and I am sure that the minister and the people in his department will be looking at that to see if there are some changes that can be made.

There is one more point, if I may, in talking about something Lynn spoke of earlier, the classes of people having their say in education. I was fortunate enough a few years ago to take a student exchange - take forty kids from Leading Tickles and Point Leamington area, and they were mostly from social services families, from low income families. We brought them into Port Colborne which is right at the mouth of the Welland Canal. They had a beautiful school three. There was around 400 to 500 students attending the school and they had everything in it that you'd name - the shops and so on - they could build a small house really in the industrial arts place there, and the theatres and so on. Because of decreasing enrollment the public school system had to close this school. But previous to that, through the courts in Ontario, the government was forced to give full, equal funding to the Catholic system. They weren't fully funded up to a few years ago. The court said that they had to be fully funded. So therefore when the -

AN HON. MEMBER: (Inaudible).

MR. LANGDON: Pardon? Anyhow, they were. So what happened was that school that was closed under the public system was re-opened as a Catholic school and today it still has around 400 or 500 students in that separate system.

In our situation, in Newfoundland, I can think of Gerald's point, in so many of our other communities we can do a lot to eliminate duplication by sharing. In a community in Badger, where a few years ago the Integrated Board put $250,000 into a school called the Terry Fox Academy. When Terry went across they named the school in that area. Within three years it was all closed and all the kids now go to the RC system of Voker Collegiate. You have $250,000 that has been put into a building that can't be used any more.

It's these types of things that I think have to be addressed and if we look at the number of dollars through the sharing, we can save them. We can probably put some extra dollars into every universal pre-kindergarten class or whatever. I think we have to come to grips with that. I think I share Gerald's comment that I don't think the majority of people in the Province want to have a secular system and to do away with the denominational system as such. That's how I see it. I'll leave it at that for now.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Ms. Young.

MS. YOUNG: Yes. I want to carry on, Mr. Minister, with the full day kindergarten. Coming from rural Newfoundland, if that were the case, a full day kindergarten class, we would have children leaving home at about 7:50 a.m. and arriving home at 4:00 p.m. That's a man-sized day or adult-sized day. I think that is really heavy. A lot of these kids are less than five years old. I have seen them come in for about two and a half hours, and by the time the morning session is over they are exhausted. They are actually cantankerous and very hard to deal with in a lot of cases, because they are really tired and not all of them get to bed early. That would be one of my big concerns.

On the other hand, I would like the idea of a universal kindergarten. I think that it would give a lot of kids a kick start that they need. It would also probably save the government money down the road, if these children did complete their high school education. I believe the foundation for a good education all begins the first day the child comes to school. As a kindergarten teacher for about twenty years I have found that if I check with a teacher when a child comes in this year, and if I check with the teacher six years down the road, and that's Grave V, that child is still having the same problems.

Somewhere along the way these problems should have been addressed. I look at myself as a GP. I see there's a problem. Quite often I send them to what I consider is a specialist hoping that a prescription will be given to me. Quite often there's no prescription. So the child continues to flounder along, ending up in total frustration at some point I guess, probably about fourteen, if it hasn't hit before that. Therefore we lose a lot of our children. They just drop out.

I am wondering, on Page 217 of the Budget, I have a question on the curriculum development, at the bottom of the page there. Can you explain to me why there is about a $500,000 decrease for salaries?

DR. MARSH: The answer to this question is that this is essentially a financial adjustment that was made which required the department to enact savings in the area of program consultant and educational consultant areas, and it was registered in a particular area and does not recognize a cut solely in this division, but I guess for presentation figures purposes it does register here. So the actual result will not be the same as is printed in this estimate - in this category.

MS. YOUNG: Thank you.

We looked at the chart there - I guess the number of children who are not completing high school. Is there a further breakdown showing the percentage for rural and the percentage for urban? This just turned up on my desk today, so I have not had a chance to go through it thoroughly.

MR. DECKER: I thought all the districts were broken out. Are they not? The districts are all broken out there somewhere.

MS. YOUNG: Are they? Okay, thank you. I will look that up myself.

The other thing too is that we were finding that in communities and towns where there are fish plants there were a lot of children leaving school. They would get summer jobs and see they were making a lot of money, and of course they would drop out. I guess that we will be seeing just how accurate that assumption is - that they were dropping out. Now, with the closure of a lot of fish plants we will be able to do some comparisons between towns and communities that still have fish plants operating as compared to those who do not.

MR. DECKER: As I said earlier, there seems to be a little bit of improvement in the dropout rate, and there has been some speculation as to what is causing it, and that is one of the speculations. Now I do not think there has been a definitive study done to say, yes, that is the reason. I do not know if it is just coincidence, but it does seem that maybe in some of the areas where the fish plants are now the children are staying in school a little bit longer, but it might just be coincidence. I would not want to speculate on it yet because it has not been around long enough. The trend is too short for us to make a definitive answer on it.

MS. YOUNG: If I have another minute?

AN HON. MEMBER: (Inaudible).

MS. YOUNG: I would like to know the number of seats that we have guaranteed for Newfoundland and Labrador students at the Atlantic Veterinary College. Are these seats filled each year?

MR. DECKER: Is it ten?

AN HON. MEMBER: Yes it is.

MR. DECKER: It costs a fortune. I know that much.

MS. YOUNG: Yes.

MR. DECKER: Ten. What do they cost? Forty -

DR. MARSH: Our contribution to the Veterinary College is $559,000. It is registered here, in fact, in the estimates, and for ten seats. We pay 4 per cent of the cost of the operation of the Veterinary College under the Atlantic Provinces agreement.

MS. YOUNG: Do we fill these ten seats each year?

DR. MARSH: Yes.

MS. YOUNG: Thank you.

MR. DECKER: I believe it is the most expensive per seat that we deal with? I think, if I am not mistaken, it is the most expensive one.

MS. YOUNG: How many of these students then would return to Newfoundland to work as veterinarians?

MR. DECKER: Has any tracking been done on that? I am not sure. They are not required to return, are they?

DR. MARSH: There is no return of service agreement at this point.

MS. YOUNG: There is another thing that bothers me as well. That is, children whose parents are receiving social assistance get their books free. I do not think there is any commitment on behalf of the parents to return these books or anything, is there?

MR. DECKER: No.

MS. YOUNG: Do you not think that there should be -

AN HON. MEMBER: Should they not be given to the schools?

MS. YOUNG: Yes, some way that these books can be passed back to the schools so that -

MR. DECKER: No, I do not think so.

MS. YOUNG: No?

MR. DECKER: It is one of the things we looked at during the budgetary process, and society cannot cause any stigma. What process would you put in place so that when this person who, through no fault of his own, goes in to get his books and stands in a different place in line where we are going to look after the people on social services, or we are going to make them return the books? What are you going to do with them when they return them? You going to give them to the social services people next year, so they're the only ones who have the second-hand books, sort of thing?

It's a very difficult - when you think it through - there is no way that I know, and there are a lot of people looking at it with me, that we can avoid the stigma on the human being. The program costs two hundred and some odd thousand dollars, I believe. In an $800 million budget I don't think it would be proper to inflict that kind of stigma on the person. We did look at it but we....

MS. YOUNG: I'd like to add that there's some concern among parents that quite often it is the social services children who do get the new books, because the other families can't afford to buy new books. They have to look for the second-hand ones. So then what happens is that they end up making money off them, because the child from the working family actually winds up buying second-hand books from the social service recipients.

MR. DECKER: I've heard that criticism made, but....

MS. YOUNG: I realise it is....

MR. DECKER: We couldn't see any way of doing it. The school lunch program, for example. In St. John's they have some school lunch programs where a child will put some money in an envelope. It might be two dollars, it might be nothing, or it might be two cents, to pay for the lunch, no matter what, we have to avoid embarrassing a child who through no fault of his or her own can't afford to buy his books. I've heard a lot of public criticism about that. We looked at it and we said no. It just wasn't worth it. With our liberal conscience, our concern for the individual, it would be contrary to our philosophy. So we decided not to do it.

MS. YOUNG: Thank you.

MR. CHAIRMAN: I think maybe your time is about up now, Ms. Young. So I think maybe would be a time now that we could have a break. We'll could come back again at 8:45 p.m. It'd be a good time to have a coffee and to stretch your legs. We'll be back at 8:45 and Mr. Hodder will enlighten us then when we come back.

 

Recess

 

MR. CHAIRMAN: Order, please!

We're back in session. I'll ask Mr. Hodder to start off.

MR. HODDER: Mr. Chairman, we've heard a lot about the junior high school, the problems of motivation. I don't apologize for zeroing in on that area. I've been in central high schools and junior high school for thirty years.

I wanted particularly to focus attention on the illiteracy rate that we have in the Province. It's a problem of motivation in junior high school and what rationale the minister can give for the dropping of the reading novel program in the junior high school. It seems to be terribly inconsistent, a step backwards, and regressive in its utmost sense that we would drop in many schools the only exposure the child has to good, consistent reading material. Apparently there's a proposal to drop it.

SOME HON. MEMBERS: (Inaudible).

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: I guess I can only say that with the limited amount of dollars for curriculum resources it was in fact seen as one that - not necessarily - I mean, it was extremely difficult to prioritize. But that would have been -

MR. DECKER: There still should be novels in the schools just not new ones.

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: They've been buying novels for years and years. The program coordinators responsible, through the consultant and the people on the advisory committee, said: yes, there are certainly copies out there, there's always a need for more. But people have accumulated a lot of novels over time. There are always new ones that people want to buy. But it's just for this year, we hope. It's not cancelled completely, entirely. No, we intend to get it back into the budget process next year.

MR. HODDER: I do want to re-emphasize the fact that when you are talking about twelve and thirteen-year-olds and you are talking about keeping them on track, keeping them interested, providing them with new materials every year to try to get them to stay reading, we try to get children reading in primary and through elementary and in many of our schools particularly - well in all schools regardless of whether they are rural or urban, we have to try to keep materials there for them and in my opinion it is a regressive step. It is regrettable that the department would focus on that particular area because of the tremendous message we are sending to junior high school children, that their novels and their reading materials have been cut. I would like to ask the minister if he could possibly look at that because it is an area that I think sends a very wrong message.

MR. DECKER: We have looked at it, you know, ideally, you do everything; ideally, you take the whole $3.2 billion and spend it all on education and you do it all, but somewhere along the line you have to make value judgements. You have to decide whether or not you are going to open up fifteen or sixteen new distance education sites which we did this year. You have to decide what you are going to do, as you only have so much money to go around, and at the end of the day you have to make a judgement. Now how much did that program cost us?

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: It was a very small amount, I don't have the exact figure, but a very minimal amount.

MR. DECKER: Anyway, we recognize that, as Dr. Turpin-Downey pointed out, that the novels that were in the school would not disappear because of what we did. We will interrupt the program for one year and hopefully bring it back on stream next year, it was an either or situation, and at the end of the day we thought that we would do less damage here - we wanted to add on more distance education, I just take that one but I could give you a dozen different instances.

MR. HODDER: I would like to commend the department on distance education and the sixty-four sites that have been selected, something like that?

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: Yes.

MR. HODDER: I think that is a tremendous program. I am familiar with the program from my days when I sat on the Board of Regents with the university and how it is set up, so I am very familiar with it, but I would like to think that we are not advancing in one direction at the expense of the grass roots.

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: The choice came down to the soft ware versus the novels and the boards prefer to have the new soft ware to go with the new technology courses, so again, it came down to choices.

MR. HODDER: Yes, along that line as well. Just glancing through there, I noticed something and today I went and I picked up the price list for the senior high school text books from last year to this year. I found that in September parents are going to be paying in some cases, 46 to 45 per cent more for certain books. Now part of that I assume is because of the increase in the cost of the books themselves from the publishers, but is there not a $700,000 drop in the subsidy in total within the department for subsidizing text books?

MR. DECKER: We used to subsidize the books to 50 percent.

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: It increased 10 per cent, it went from 50 per cent to 60 per cent.

MR. DECKER: Government bought the books as you know for say, ten bucks and we sold it for five bucks. This year, we will buy it for ten and sell it for six bucks, so you are quite correct, the cost has gone from 50 per cent subsidy to 60 percent.

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: But not at 40 per cent. Instead of us supporting the program 50/50, it is 40/60.

MR. HODDER: That 10 per cent and then the increasing costs from the publishers, the net effect, having taken an actual Grade IX, Grade X or Level I, Level II, Level III student today and just quickly calculated, the average increase for textbooks in September in Newfoundland will vary from about 20 percent to 24 percent. There is a substantial increase and part of it is because of the drop in the subsidy and 10 per cent of it will be from the department itself.

I have a couple of other questions. I wanted to talk about the CTBS scores in Grade 8, and the fact that we are very pleased to see that females are really doing quite well, as they have consistently. On all sub-tests females are outperforming males but this is not consistent with the all Canadian experience. Is there any intent on the department's part to try to address why Newfoundland males are not performing on CTBS scores at the same level as females in Newfoundland, or the same consistent level as males in other parts of Canada?

MR. DECKER: This has been brought to my attention but I have not heard it said publicly. There are also more females involved in Math and Science I think in this Province.

MR. HODDER: Yes, and that is wonderful.

MR. DECKER: Dr. Turpin-Downey or Dr. Marsh do you want to elaborate on what we are going to do with this report now that we have it? We are not just going to let it sit.

DR. MARSH: The intent of Profile 92 is to report to the people the general results that have occurred. This is then gone through with the school boards as part of their strategic planning process which essentially says, here are the results of your students in your district. Now, take these results, interpret them, and put in place actions to correct any of the deficiencies or to address any of the anomalies that might occur. The question of the member would be viewed in Canada as a very positive achievement in this Province, one which other provinces would strive towards, which is to increase both the achievement and the enrolment of females in both mathematics and science. The second aspect of that from a follow-up point of view within the department is that we do follow up on the results and over a period of time, through what we call the indicators approach, we will be looking at ways where we can generally improve the system and have in fact acquired monies through the Human Resource Development Agreement to look at both school improvement, development of indicator systems, and then follow-up in what we would call capacity building, which is really increasing the abilities of teachers to address problems in those areas.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Dr. Marsh.

Your time has expired, Mr. Hodder, and I now recognize Ms. Verge.

MS. VERGE: Thank you.

I was quite interested in listening to the comments of Mr. Smith, the Member for Port au Port, about the pre-kindergarten program in Lourdes, or in that area.

MR. HARRIS: A point of order, Mr. Chairman.

I do not want to interrupt you, Ms. Verge, but the Member for Placentia, the newest MHA has not been heard from. I do not know if he is on the list.

MR. CHAIRMAN: He is on the list after you, Sir.

MR. HARRIS: Oh, he is on the list, is he?

MR. CHAIRMAN: Oh, yes. Do you think I would ignore the new Member for Placentia? I would like to hear him enlighten us.

Carry on, Ms. Verge.

MS. VERGE: I was saying that I know of a similar pre-kindergarten program at the school in Cox's Cove in the Bay of Islands and I have know of a variety of other in-school and community preschool day care head start programs which have been done on an ad hoc basis in other parts of the Province. Does the department have an inventory of these pre-kindergarten programs? Is the department keeping track of pre-kindergarten programing? I know there was an early childhood education consultant in the department.

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: As far as preschool is concerned the Department of Social Services has the mandate but we have a consultant. We do not have the full-time early childhood education consultant but we have that person basically half-time who works closely with the Department of Social Services, who does keep a listing. We are supposed to be responsible for overseeing the actual program.

MS. VERGE: One of my frustrations as minister - and it sounds like nothing has improved - is that there is insufficient co-ordination among the Departments of Education, Social Services and Health, and those three departments have joint responsibility for the social and intellectual development of young children.

You mentioned Dr. Riggs and Dr. Norris doing some research about the significance of extra reading in the kindergarten program. From my own reading - and this is not my field - I know lots and lots of research done in the US as well as Canada that shows clearly the value of good early childhood education or play programs to supplement parental care.

Mr. Smith and I were talking during the break about the obvious benefits of early childhood education programs, and it seems to me the Department of Education, in co-operation with Social Services and Health, should be keeping track of what is being done in the Province and trying to foster and reward people - school boards, teachers, parents, social workers - who are uniting to provide pre kindergarten programs. What happened to the full-time early childhood education consultant position in the Department of Education?

AN HON. MEMBER: (Inaudible).

MS. VERGE: Full-time early childhood education consultant position.

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: Yes, we basically assigned one person for kindergarten and primary education in the whole area, and hopefully that person will be able to give some time to the Department of Social Services to continue to monitor the programs in preschool, but where we did not have the direct mandate - a direct mandate is basically kindergarten and primary.

MS. VERGE: Well when I was minister I expanded the mandate to early childhood education. That was a long time ago now.

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: We still are responsible -

MS. VERGE: We were working co-operatively with Social Services and Health back then.

MR. DECKER: Notwithstanding your opinion, there is still a lot of co-operation among the three departments, and the whole social policy committee is one way we mesh - work - with all the departments, the social departments together. I do not share your opinion on that.

The preschool or the pre kindergarten: essentially what you are talking about is lowering the age that children start school - start their educational process, their formal educational process. When I started you had to be six, going on seven.

MS. VERGE: That is not what I am advocating. I am talking about a variety of models tailored to the needs of communities and families.

MR. DECKER: Well are you suggesting that we make it compulsory or not?

MS. VERGE: I am talking about expanding on what is being done in communities such as Lourdes and Cox's Cove and St. John's. We have a variety of positive models. We have Daybreak in St. John's, that many of us talked about in the House of Assembly before the election call. We have the program in Cox's Cove, which has been talked about in the House of Assembly before, years ago. There was a program in Gander Bay, and the program that Mr. Smith talked about here tonight.

Now each of those has been initiated at the local level, and I am talking about - well first of all I was asking if the department is monitoring what is happening, and trying to identify positive developments and devise polices or strategies to foster the good programs, to reward people like Mr. Smith in his former job as principal of the school in Lourdes, or Mr. Oxford, principal of the school in Cox's Cove, and to try to help people in other communities emulate those positive models.

MR. DECKER: I can just reiterate what I have said. We have no intention at this time of lowering the age that we force people into a formal education.

MS. VERGE: Nobody is talking about that.

MR. DECKER: But when we do that, we will make it available to all our people. In the meantime, it is probably haphazard, as the member rightfully points out.

MS. VERGE: But haphazard is better than nothing. It is like the debate we had over Daybreak. You do not discourage or close Daybreak because other communities in the Province do not have it. What we have to try to do is nurture the good programs and try to help people in other areas copy or innovate -

MR. DECKER: As I said, if government were to decide to drop the age for formal education then we would do it, but when government gets involved we cannot say to a group of people in Cox's Cove - unless there are some special circumstances, as Daybreak was one case in point - you cannot say to one group of people: We are going to tick you off now and here is what you are getting. You are going to be treated with preferential treatment - unless there are some extenuating circumstances. The policy would have to be made right across the board. At this moment we have not made a conscious decision to do it, and I do not see us doing that - certainly not in the near future. There are so many other things in education that we have to deal with. At the moment there has been no plan to deal specifically with that one.

MS. VERGE: That is too bad.

During the election campaign I heard a news report that the Department of Education was going to reinstate funding for artists visiting schools, and theatre in the schools. Was that a correct report?

MR. DECKER: I did not hear that news report. I do not know (inaudible).

MS. VERGE: You are the news maker. Are you going to reinstate funding for -

MR. DECKER: I never heard it and I can only take it as rumour at this moment.

MS. VERGE: Well forget about what was on the news. Are you, as Minister of Education, and your department, going to reinstate funding for the visiting artists program?

MR. DECKER: No.

MS. VERGE: No?

MR. DECKER: Not that I am aware of.

MS. VERGE: Why?

MR. DECKER: I do not know why. During the budgetary process we made a lot of cuts, and I suppose you can pick anything that we cut and say `why'? It is a value judgement, and we had to trade off one against the other, and this is one of the ones which we are not going to reinstate.

MS. VERGE: Are you going to reinstate funding for theatre in the schools?

AN HON. MEMBER: Funding has not been reinstated (inaudible).

MS. VERGE: Has any of the Department of Education funding to third party organizations been reinstated?

MR. DECKER: No, have they? We are considering a couple.

AN HON. MEMBER: Some are being considered.

MR. DECKER: We are considering a couple, and do not ask me - you can beat it over my head all night and I will not tell what they are, but we are considering a couple, and when we make the decision then I will let you know.

MS. VERGE: Thank you. What else do I have here?

There was a discussion a little earlier, initiated by Ms. Young, about the department's policy of providing text books to primary and elementary school children. Ms. Young was asking about the wisdom of continuing the policy of having the government pay for books for children of social assistance recipients. Has there been any thought to changing the arrangement for all children such that all children simply rent books and all of them have to turn them in at the end of the year so that they can be recycled?

MR. DECKER: There has been no decision made to do that at this time.

MS. VERGE: Are you considering it?

MR. DECKER: The policy which has been in place for the last number of years is still in place. There is no change.

MS. VERGE: The minister disagreed with Ms. Young's idea because he did not want different treatment for children at the end of the school year in terms of some having to return the books and others getting to keep them. What about a change that would require all children to return the books so that they can be recycled?

MR. DECKER: It has not been considered.

MS. VERGE: But it might be in the future?

Post-secondary education, what is our current participation rate in post-secondary education, both university and non-university post-secondary education, and how does it compare to the participation rate of people in other provinces?

MR. DECKER: I've dealt with the university one today in the House, as you know. The University one is the second-highest in Canada the next one to PEI. But the total, including the colleges and that, I don't have that off the top of my head.

DR. MARSH: In general we are slightly below the participation rate in the non-university sector of the rest of Canada.

MS. VERGE: Isolating non-university, we are slightly below?

DR. MARSH: Yes.

MS. VERGE: In university, we're slightly ahead? Is it slightly or significantly?

MR. DECKER: More than slightly.

DR. MARSH: More than slightly. We are second -

MR. DECKER: Light-years ahead. Except for PEI.

MS. VERGE: The government cut in funding to Memorial University, which is a whopping decrease, according to the university president is going to lead to a smaller university. Obviously it's also going to result in whopping increases in tuition fees. Is the minister aiming at lowering our participation rate in university education to the national average?

MR. DECKER: I'm sorry, I never heard the question.

MS. VERGE: I asked about the large cut in funding to Memorial University.

MR. DECKER: Okay. How much was the cut? Where is that? Where are we?

MS. VERGE: The budget doesn't give accurate figures. What's printed in the budget, what you see is not what you get.-

MR. DECKER: The University was cut as all other boards -

MS. VERGE: Yes.

MR. DECKER: - they have to take their cut like everybody else, yes. So there was a cut, yes.

MS. VERGE: The university president and the president of the Faculty Association are both saying that the university will be down $11 million compared to what would be required to carry on the present level of operations when you look at the absolute cut as well as the inflation factor.

MR. DECKER: There's not a whole lot of inflation, as you know, this year. What's inflation? Less than 1 per cent or something? Whatever the rate is. What was the amount of the cut? Is it there in the budget?

MS. VERGE: What's in the budget is not for real because you didn't put in the budget the $71 million reduction in public sector compensation.

MR. DECKER: What we did with the university, we could have said: you have to have a wage freeze, or you have to deal with the pension option, or what. We want to let them have as much autonomy, surely goodness, as a university should have. So we said: here's your budget, you deal with it.

MS. VERGE: Sure. You do the dirty work.

MR. CHAIRMAN: With that your time has expired, Ms. Verge, and now I'll recognize Mr. Harris.

MR. HARRIS: I would like to go back to the pre-school issue and not talk about the lowering of compulsory education age, or the moving of a kindergarten program to a full day program. I want to talk about something that Ms. Young brought up in terms of her experience as a teacher seeing kids come to kindergarten and then seeing the same children six years later.

A lot of school teachers and school principals tell me that when the kids walk in the door at the beginning of kindergarten a significant number of students, as opposed to large, can be identified from the very beginning as... I wouldn't call it programmed for failure, but identified as kids who are going to have serious problems in completing and doing well in school. They're going to be contributing to the drop out rate later on. School is not going to be a positive experience for them because they're starting off, for various social and economic reasons, sometimes nutrition reasons, far behind the others.

This is the kind of pre-school program that might be a place that the Department of Education would want to start. I.e., not wait until we can afford to have all over the Province full kindergarten program, or all over the Province full program for every three- or four-year old. We do have some programs. I'm aware of one on Bell Island that was started a number of years ago. The Daybreak deals with particular types of special needs and some of the other ones we've mentioned.

I guess the first question is: to what extent is the department spending money at all on preschool programs? I know the programs exist. I am not looking in the Budget for a head but can you tell us, or perhaps Dr. Turpin-Downey tell us what level of expenditure there is in your department on preschool education programs as opposed to policy development?

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: Other departments of government do, and some federal. We sometimes are part of a federal proposal.

MR. HARRIS: That is a demonstration project?

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: Yes, and through the community development programs for the most part there is access either through other departments of the provincial government, Social Services particularly, or through federal programs. Again, it is the initiative of the individual school board. The school board usually takes the initiative or the school takes the initiative.

MR. HARRIS: So, am I to assume that the Department of Education does not accept any responsibility in that area and treats it as either a social problem or somebody else's problem?

MR. DECKER: It is not part of the department's mandate.

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: We work very closely with the Department of Social Services in monitoring the program. We have to approve the actual program, the academic side of the program, and we do that. We help with in-service as well.

MR. DECKER: I understand what you are saying Mr. Harris and it would probably make sense but at this moment it is outside our mandate. It is picked up as a mandate of Social Services, so it would be just as logical to ask the Department of Education why it does not pave roads. As desirable as it would be for us to pave roads it is outside our mandate but government picks up the thing by giving that mandate to Social services.

MR. HARRIS: I am just looking at the departmental mission statement and commitments. It says the mission of the Department of Education is to enable and encourage every individual to acquire through lifelong learning the knowledge, skills, and values necessary for personal growth in the development of society. One of the commitments down below is to foster the aims of public education providing for each person's intellectual, moral, social, and physical development. Mr. Minster, if the people in the education field see on day one someone coming to an educational setting, an individual whose personal development is so outside the norm that that person is not going to be able to take advantage of the school system and in fact have serious problems throughout, that that would be part of your mandate.

I am just wondering if it is part of your mandate, it is part of your mission, why it is that no program money at all, even developmental program, why does the department not have its own demonstration projects if that be a way of getting started and start dealing with some of those individuals who have recognized serious problems on day one so that they can achieve better results? We have seen success, and I have been told that the program on Bell Island for those students who are involved in it is providing a chance for kids who, through whatever reasons, do not have the same exposure or access, whether it be books, whether it be reading or vocabulary, or any social experience, that would allow them to participate in the educational setting, that in fact makes a difference. I think the other speakers who talked about this know the same thing. Why does your department not start trying to fulfil this mission even in difficult times by commencing a program of that nature?

MR. DECKER: I do not know how many more times I have to say this. In the first instance I am not sure of your premise. I have heard it myself, that when the little student walks in the teacher can say he is going to be a failure or he is going to do this or do that. I would be very careful in putting any stock in that kind of a statement, because I am sure there might be a few case where that is the case but I would be extremely disappointed if I thought that children are being prejudged when they come into the system. I do recognize though, that there seems to be different people in society who for some reason, whatever, is not at the starting line when the shot is fired, they are probably behind the starting line.

Now, government is responsible for that, and government has chosen to put that responsibility not into the Department of Works, Services and Transportation, not into the Department of Environment and Lands but into the Department of Social Services. If any formal learning program is being used by programs like Daybreak or any other example you may wish to use, then we have a process whereby the Department of Education approves the program and has some input into the program, but a lot of the preschool is more than an academic program, as the hon. member knows.

There are an awful lot of other things involved in preschool than just teaching, but it is not our mandate to set that up - when it becomes the mandate of the Department of Education to drop the age of entrance to formal education, then we will do it and we will put a program in place which applies to everybody, but for the exception, the way government has chosen to deal with that over the years, is to have a Department of Social Services, which, in co-operation with Education where the academic portion is concerned, is fulfilling that mandate by and large. I am sure you could probably give me exceptions where so and so's child who lives on such and such a street is not getting it. By and large, there is a considerable number of preschool programs which are dealing with some extreme cases right down to cases which are not so extreme, but in the wisdom of government, it is the mandate of a different department to fulfill that need.

MR. HARRIS: I fail to see how it does not fit in within this mission and these commitments that are listed here. Can you explain that to me?

MR. DECKER: I do not see the need because that is quite obvious, I just told you, the educational aspect of it - the department has to approve the component of their program which is educational based.

MR. HARRIS: It provides no financial support.

MR. DECKER: No, but government provides financial support through a different department.

MR. CHAIRMAN: At that point, Mr. Harris, you time has expired. I will now give Mr. Careen a chance to make his maiden speech.

MR. CAREEN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Earlier tonight, Ms. Young was talking about NCARP and I want to elaborate on it a little bit. I have been around a good many years and have been on that Avalon Community College Board and that was revamped and whatever and before that (inaudible) -

MR. DECKER: Did we appoint you to that board? Boy how we miss everything.

MR. CAREEN: No, you lost a good person, Mr. Minister. Over the years you hear people talk about illiteracy and some people make out these brochures; now they all talk about brochures and I know the poor illiterate is not reading them, but we have this NCARP program and there are problems with it and everything else, but getting back to our area and I will just use where we live, the Avalon West Community Futures, takes in parts of Trinity Bay, the Chance Cove area down to Norman's Cove, Southern Harbour in Placentia Bay eastern shores sweeping up through all the areas, Long Harbour right on through Dunville area, Placentia, out to Cape Shore, then over into St. Mary's taking in St. Mary's Bay north.

There was a five-year plan a number of years ago and it outdid the area, the provincial average in literacy, there are certain different standards of literacy. Now we all know that different types of people use different standards of literacy, whether you can read a paper or you are not computer literate, and all this, but these people, a number of these, will use the exercise on the newspaper.

The thing I am looking forward to in this NCARP is building up the standards, done in a certain way. Now I know of certain schools, we have public schools and we have the private institutions and some of these coming on, and I am not interfering with private enterprise because there is an opportunity there for other Newfoundlanders to be at work, but, there has to be an element in this A, B, E stuff, the coach, the pep talk, the one for the Gipper, all these ones that are important because if the parents and the grandparents of these are raising their standards, to hold on to the money - that's part of it - by going to school, it's a great initiative, getting paid for going to school. They in turn will be encouraging their offspring or their godchildren or their nieces or whoever. I think in all our system there has to be a certain way of encouragement.

Lots of time there's no money on encouragement. It doesn't cost a cent. I don't know if it's fair or not, and I'll leave it to you people, but I think, in our tourism we have a point system. We know that there's a great article in the newspaper the week before last about a Mr. Tobin in a certain other district - I'm not looking for his vote - he's in another district. Who could never read. He didn't read. He went to the store and he signed. She said: you can mark your X here, Mr. Tobin. After a few weeks he wrote out his name. Then for badness he signed it "X" underneath it. He's hoping by September to be able to read a newspaper.

I think that kind of stuff is great and it builds up a standard. I don't know if we should be putting in - and I'll just throw it out here - a point system for some of these. Whether it's the public schools or what, one can be better than another, because it goes only on the human element that's there - or the private schools which are teaching the A,B,Es, they should be based on a point system of which is the best one to go to. There should be some kind of a standard, I figure that should be in there. Because there are some of them out there I know of, and I'm not in the business of advertising for any of them, that there are those who are a cut above. I think it's an opportunity. Do you have any response to that, sir?

MR. DECKER: I think you're making some excellent points. There are schools and there are schools. No doubt about that. The department, though, is ultimately responsible for the program. From what I gather, generally speaking, the program passes. I had an illustration given me the other day of a school in this Province which has a group of people under the NCARP, and they were supposed to have had a class a week which they spent on 'show and tell', to a group of people who were in their forties and fifties, and probably sixties, or forties and fifties at least. I'm having that checked out to see if that exactly did happen.

The theory is the department is supposed to make sure that the program is up to a standard. I've had private school operators come to me and telling me that government is treating them unfairly. The standard that we require for their labs is higher than the standard that the department would require in the public system. The public system has (inaudible) contractor saying to provide some NCARP when they're not, sort of thing. But you're making some excellent points. I'm sure there are exceptions. Unfortunately, the department is really to blame, because we have to approve their courses. I can take you to some private schools in this Province which are as good as any in the country.

MR. CAREEN: I'm not pointing fingers of blame, I'm just thinking of the golden opportunity that we all have.

MR. DECKER: Yes, you're right.

MR. CAREEN: Last fiscal year there was trouble all around and we find this - I'm a believer, sometimes my heart rules my head, that everybody should have an access to the classroom. There was trouble last year with the teachers' aides in places, monetary troubles.

MR. DECKER: Yes.

MR. CAREEN: The money projections are at the same level as last year. Do you foresee many problems yourself? The same problems chasing you around as did last year about parents -?

MR. DECKER: The big problem we had was Labrador West, as you're probably aware.

MR. CAREEN: Yes, but there were other places as well.

MR. DECKER: There are other places as well. I spent a lot of time examining this program which we're offering. I'm going to let Dr. Turpin-Downey explain it to you in a little while. After hearing all the sides of the story, I'm satisfied that we have in this Province one of the best programs in the country for the... what's the word? The physically challenged, is it?

AN HON. MEMBER: The challenging need.

MR. DECKER: The challenging need students in the country. That's just recently been verified. For the longest time we were being pointed to New Brunswick. New Brunswick was supposed to be the be-all, end-all. We brought in one of the experts from New Brunswick. That person has told us: your system is better than the New Brunswick system. But now, it's probably never good enough. Is our Grade XII good enough? Dr. Turpin-Downey, do you want to elaborate on that a little bit?

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: As far as the provincial situation is concerned, we did a survey which showed that there were sufficient numbers of student assistants for the total number of challenging needs kids, but there are some boards that had too many and some that had too little. So we've been trying to bring up and level down, which has been difficult. For the most part we haven't to date had too many concerns expressed from the school boards. New dollars have been allocated via the grant system this year, so the boards will be given the option. If they do in fact need some additional dollars they can take it from their grant allocations because most boards will be receiving additional dollars through that. For the most part, I don't think we'll have the problems that we had last year. But you never know. Because new kids seem to come out of the woodwork when it comes to June, July and August.

MR. DECKER: It's got to be dealt with on a professional basis as well, you know. The parent is involved there and has a big say and a big concern. But the whole idea of helping the challenging needs person is to hopefully, if it is at all possible, make that person a productive member of society. If you take that child and you meet all his or her needs the child is never going to learn - at some time the child has to learn to crawl and to walk and to run. I'm speaking figuratively, of course. So you have to strike the balance there between encouraging that person to become a contributing member of society, as opposed to being totally dependent on a person.

I can tell you, there are examples in the system too where we try to integrate the children, but there are examples where the children are not being integrated. Where they're in the same room but the segregation is stronger than it would ever be if they were in different rooms, in some cases, where they're up in one little corner there and the assistant is there, sort of thing.

So these are all matters which you have to deal with. There's no simple answer but -

MR. CAREEN: But there's an undercurrent there with it all. Because those people, even the worst of them, whatever their afflictions, have an affect on the best of the students.

MR. CHAIRMAN: With that, Mr. Careen, your time is up.

MR. CAREEN: Can I have one little statement made, sir?

MR. CHAIRMAN: Yes. By leave?

SOME HON. MEMBERS: (Inaudible).

MR. CAREEN: Thank you. They do make a contribution because they're mixing with the others, and the others are the so-called normals. I've seen them taken and made pets of - and that's a wrong term to use, sir. But they do take the responsibility of the other, and we've all seen it. It's nice to see an integration of it. Thank you.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Mr. Smith.

MR. SMITH: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Minister, I'm sure you're aware of another of the developments in the area of the Province that I represent. I would be remiss if I didn't take advantage of this opportunity this evening to highlight it for those present. I did that in the House last week when I spoke. This is the community education initiative which to me is one of the most exciting things that I've seen, not just in education, but in development generally. Certainly in the area of the Province where I've lived for the last number of years.

For the past two years we have now in the Port au Port Peninsula been working on this concept. Basically, the level of cooperation from the different agencies has been phenomenal. I've never witnessed it in anything that I've been involved in over the years. It's, in that sense, truly innovative and somewhat unique, at least for our Province. Also I guess the members here this evening would be pleased to note as well that just recently, within the last two weeks, that at a national conference this program or initiative in Port au Port was recognized as the top community education program for this past year.

I think it kind of gives some idea of the calibre of the program. Time this evening does not permit - since I only have ten minutes, and I don't want to use up my ten minutes by entirely speaking to that. But certainly my colleagues from the House of Assembly I think would be very interested in knowing more about this project. From your perspective, Mr. Minister, I guess just to indicate - because one of the things that the group is looking at, the steering committee, is the idea in Port au Port of establishing a pilot with the community education initiative.

Because I think it provides us with an ideal opportunity to try some of these things. Because I firmly believe that as an educator and somebody who's been involved in community development for a number of years, that it has possibilities for the entire Province. I'm just wondering if you wanted to just respond generally to that. I don't know how familiar you are with the program itself.

MR. DECKER: Dr. Turpin-Downey could speak all night on that because she gets extremely excited over it. We also found a new source of money for some of the HRD agreement. There is money in that to encourage community education so we have found a source of money which hopefully we can get into.

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: I would just like to tell you that your model is being proposed and presented this week to the Province and to encourage the other superintendents to start initiating the same way your board did. In fact it is happening tomorrow and Wednesday, so there is no question that we have been extremely excited about it and again funding through HRD is being made available, hopefully for you people to expand and for others to begin, but it is being presented to all of the superintendents in the Province tomorrow and the next day.

MR. SMITH: Thank you.

There was one other thing I wanted to touch on. Getting back to the Williams Royal Commission Report, and I mention this now as it was mentioned in the House the other day, with regard to the public libraries. I realize it is not the responsibility of the Department of Education but for years I have contended that one of the things in rural Newfoundland that always bothered me was when I saw public library buildings being constructed in communities where we had school libraries, school libraries that had just a handful of books and at a time of limited resources. I know somebody who tried to promote shared services in libraries and it was unbelievable to see people defending their turf and saying, no way, you cannot do this, this has to be a public library.

Twenty years ago when I was fighting to establish a library service in my little community on the Port au Port Peninsula that was what I ran into, and for the last twenty years serving as a member of the library board in that area I do know that from the public libraries end of it there was no commitment to it. When I appeared before the Williams Royal Commission one of the recommendations that I made dealt with that, that I really felt it was something the Province should look at, and I was very disappointed when I got the report and read it. It was not that it was a slap to me but I really felt that it was something that should have been noted and I was really disappointed that it did not appear anywhere in the Royal Commission Report. There was no recommendation with regards to it and it was not addressed at all. I felt it twenty years ago and I certainly feel it today at a time when we have very limited resources and we have to maximize the benefit. I think that is an area we can do it in.

In rural areas where we are trying to establish library services there is absolutely no reason why we cannot have these shared services, where we have a library that is serving the school during the daytime and serving communities in the evening. Now, twenty years later it is certain in Port au Port because when we are talking community education this is what it is all about. I just wanted to make that point this evening because I really think while public libraries are not your responsibility, Sir, I think we do need to be doing more, there needs to be more co-operation among the various departments in making sure that we do spend our few dollars wisely. I just wanted to make that point. In referring to the report itself there are a couple of things I want to mention. From the estimates we have there under l.2.07 on Page 213, Youth Services. I wonder if you could just tell me exactly what is referred to there when it talks about the programs that would be included under this?

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: These are grants primarily to youth organizations throughout the Province, the Boys and Girls Club, church camps, a variety of those types of organizations.

MR. DECKER: We cut most of them in half and some we eliminated. We did not add any new ones. We can make available a full list, by the way.

MR. SMITH: I was just curious for my own benefit. I was wondering what that would refer to. On Page 219, 2.2.07. Bilingual Facilities, obviously, Mr. Minister, I cannot overlook that one since it is for my district and I am very pleased to see it listed there. I can assure you that the people of the district I represent, the bilingual district I represent, will be very pleased to know that funding has been earmarked for the expansions. I just wanted to mention that and commend you and your officials for ensuring it is there, and also recognizing this evening that we do have, sitting as part of the committee, the person who was the Minister of Education when work initially began on the French school in Port au Port, Ms. Verge. I would certainly like to take this opportunity to recognize her as well on behalf of the people of my district, since it was at that time that the commitment was made to the French school system in my area, and I am very pleased to see that the funding is there, and, as a question, when can we expect to see something happening with regards to that?

MR. DECKER: That is a federal/provincial thing, and Dr. Turpin-Downey has just come back from meetings on that. I do not know if there is anything you would like to say.

Dr. TURPIN-DOWNEY: Yes. In fact, I have not had a chance to brief the minister fully, I just got back from Ottawa on this. We have the provincial commitment but we do not have the federal commitment at this point in time to continue. I am optimistic that we will get it but not necessarily to the amount that people are asking for out there, but they have basically told me that I will know something within the next twelve to fourteen days. So the feds have had their dollars cut too, so I have told them that we absolutely have to have what we have asked for because we brought it down to the very basic requirement, but at this point I do not have the federal agreement for their portion of the contribution, so if they cut their contribution, we will obviously have to revisit ours because it is a 75/25 agreement, but for the most part, I am optimistic that they will come through.

MR. DECKER: You did have a chance to tell them that we might have to meet at the political level?

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: Yes, we might have to, but -

MR. DECKER: Well we certainly do have our money available for it.

MR. SMITH: Yes, thank you.

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: - we should know within two weeks.

MR. DECKER: In addition, you see, we have committed the roads and all this sort of thing, (inaudible) a commitment to it.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Ms. Verge.

MS. VERGE: Thank you.

The Human Resource Development Agreement, the federal/provincial agreement that has been referred to several times this evening, according to the estimates, is going to lead to the spending by the two orders of government of $7.6 million this year. How will that money be spent and how will the decisions be made, and, will any of it be spent for the kind of pre-kindergarten or early childhood programs that we were discussing earlier?

MR. DECKER: Well the big one of course is the computer network. Do you want to explain it Dr. Marsh?

DR. MARSH: The computer network and that sort of thing?

The HRD agreement is a federal/provincial agreement, cost-shared $42.7 million over a five-year period. Essentially, we are into the first year and in fact the $42 million will be spent over, normally a four-year period, since the initial stages of last year there were very little monies expended as we tried to engage in having the agreement signed.

The process is that there is a management committee established between the officials of both the federal government represented by ACOA and EIC and the Province represented by the Department of Education, the Industry, Trade and Technology Department and Employment and Labour Relations. There is a secretariat set up which receives applications for programming. The external criteria for the HRD Agreement has just recently been forwarded to all of the major agencies and as well presentations have been made across the Province which finished only on Friday and what we would refer to as the stakeholders in Education and in the employment sector, are made aware of the programs.

The aspects that would be looked at, first of course, there is a major number of components, six program levels with subprograms in that; the major areas would be the area of first of all ensuring that people are aware of new dimensions of technology through communications networks and things of that nature, and there is a proposal before the committee which deals with that and the committee has entered into some negotiations on things like linking schools through network and things of that nature.

MS. VERGE: If I might interject -

DR. MARSH: I am going to come back to your question -

MS. VERGE: I am really interested in this but I do not want to use up my whole ten minutes on it. Perhaps I will follow up with Dr. Marsh separately, but I would like an answer to the precise question about whether there is any prospect of some of this money going to support pre-kindergarten or early childhood development programs?

DR. MARSH: The next major part is indicators and measures of achievement. As you look at measures of achievement you determine where problems exist and then schools are expected, through a school improvement process, to put in place measures to address where the problems exist. If the problems exist at the child entering the school level, then you would expect that the schools' efforts would be focused towards that and they would apply for funding in order to meet that objective.

MS. VERGE: Okay.

DR. MARSH: But the intent is that you focus it on the problems as identified.

MS. VERGE: Thank you. Next question. During the second week of the election campaign, right after Easter weekend, the minister and his good friend, the Member for Gander, the Minister of Finance, made a major announcement in Gander that the government would be funding the beginning of first-year university courses in Gander starting this September, and preparatory to that would be constructing science labs in Gander, and that the government would be funding the start up of first-year university courses in Clarenville in September of 1994. Now that the election is over, does the government still intend to do that, and where will the money for first-year university courses in Gander this September come from? Where is that in the estimates?

MR. DECKER: We're totally committed to doing it, as you have said. The money for the capital construction is in there, one hundred and some odd thousand, I believe it was, (inaudible) for Gander.

AN HON. MEMBER: Five hundred thousand.

MR. DECKER: Five hundred altogether, but Gander is not costing $500,000, is it?

MS. VERGE: You announced $500,000 for science labs for Gander.

MR. DECKER: Special equipment, was it? Okay, yes, the equipment, that's in the budget.

MS. VERGE: Where is the capital?

DR. MARSH: Page 228, 3.3.02. You'll note the difference in the revised 1992-1993 and 1993-1994.

MS. VERGE: The college operating budgets are grouped together on page 227. Can you give us a breakdown of operating grants for each of the five colleges?

MR. DECKER: I don't have that in my head. Do you have that available?

DR. MARSH: We deal with the public colleges essentially on a by college basis -

MS. VERGE: Yes.

DR. MARSH: - and we have not come to a conclusion on each of their grants at this point in time.

MS. VERGE: When do you expect to come to a conclusion?

DR. MARSH: Dealing with them, in fact -

MR. DECKER: (Inaudible).

DR. MARSH: - we have to have, as the minister's indicated, the approval of the Budget in the House to have finalizations. But we also deal with them on the submission of their annual financial statements, which occurs at the end of March, with submissions in May. So we are in that period now of negotiating with them.

MS. VERGE: The Budget should go through the House in the next week or two. When will there be final decisions on allocations to each of the five colleges?

MR. DECKER: Shortly thereafter.

MS. VERGE: One of the major frustrations education institutions - school boards in particular, as well as municipalities - have had with this government is that government funding decisions are so late that agencies have insufficient time to adjust. There have been instances where the government has imposed cuts partway through a school board operating year - I'm thinking of operating grants, I'm thinking of funding for substitute teachers - or partway through the municipalities' fiscal year. School boards now are very nervous because of the cuts in the Budget, because of the sweeping reforms that are being discussed behind closed doors. What kind of notice are school boards going to have about what they'll have to work with for the next school year? When will they find out? Will they find out before September?

MR. DECKER: They'll have plenty of notice, no problem there. The only criticisms or complaints I have heard have been when we've had emergencies. Last year when we had a fiscal emergency throughout the Province we had to take some action, which nobody wanted to take. When you look at the big picture it was better to save the Province than it was to follow the strict letter and the niceties that you would like to do. There have been no major complaints and the system is working as it has worked for the past twenty-five years and if certain dates do pass they are notified of their spending, but the few exceptions you talk about were brought about - well, I cannot talk for Municipal Affairs as I am not that minister, but in education there is no major problem.

MS. VERGE: Well, there have been major problems. The minister may chose to ignore them but in the case of cuts in funding for substitute teachers a couple of years ago the government made the decision in March when the Budget was brought down - the fiscal year started on April 1 but the Department of Education did not tell school boards until the end of September, so naturally school boards had to make adjustments which were much more disruptive, having been issued late notice, than if they had been told up front.

MR. DECKER: Well, I am not aware of that. School boards were notified at the appropriate time of the changes made to substitute teachers. The extraordinary changes that were made were made in the October or November crisis and, of course, nobody would really expect us to give any more notice than we gave. It was an emergency and we dealt with it.

MS. VERGE: Regardless of problems in the past when will school boards find out what they will have to work with next year? When I say next year I mean September 1993.

DR. MARSH: Well, tentative allocations have been sent to the school boards by the minister. The other is, for the purpose of the records, that school boards operate on a fiscal year ending in June and beginning on July 1, and not the April to March fiscal year as the government does.

MS. VERGE: Yes, I know.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Your time is up.

Mr. Harris.

MR. HARRIS: I wanted to ask some questions on youth services as well. Do we have any departmental salary details this year? I do not remember seeing them. We do? Under youth services there seems to be as much money spent on salaries in the department as there is on allowances and grants and subsidies, about $360,000.

MR. DECKER: Are you saying it is costing as much to administer that program as we are giving out?

MR. HARRIS: That is the conclusion that one might reach. Perhaps you could tell me whether that is true or not?

MR. DECKER: I will take that under advisement and have it checked out. To be quite frank with you I suspected that. It came to my mind on several occasions but I never sat down to check it. I will have that checked because if that is the case we may have to make some more changes there.

MR. HARRIS: I guess the question really is, does the department do anything on its own other than give out grants and subsidies? Could the minister tell me the difference between grants and subsidies, allowances and assistance?

MS. DELANEY: Actually there is no difference. We intend to combine two of those main objects during 1993-94 and it will all be called grants and subsidies basically.

MR. HARRIS: One seems to have increased by $35,000 and the other one has decreased by about $60,000. The whole cost of that particular subhead seems to have decreased from an expenditure of about $20,000. The minister said we cut most of the grants and subsidies in half but we still see a similar amount of money being available for grants and subsidies. Can you explain that? If you are cutting everybody in half you would expect there to be half as much money.

MS. DELANEY: Not all the organizations were cut in half. A lot of the local organizations, the local boys and girls clubs, all their level of funding was retained at the 1992-93 level. It is only some of the organizations for which funding will be cut.

MR. HARRIS: I have letters from boys and girls clubs complaining about major cuts.

MS. DELANEY: There will be funding reductions for provincial organizations but not for the local organizations.

MR. HARRIS: Would the minister make available a list of all of the grants and subsidies and allowances and assistance figures for 1993-1994, and comparison with 1992-1993?

MR. DECKER: Is that available right now or not? Or do we have to deal with these other two first?

MS. DELANEY: You need to deal with the other two.

MR. DECKER: Yes, but we can make that available. Mr. Harris, I'll need probably two weeks before I can make it available, for the simple reason, as I explained earlier, there are some for which we are trying to determine whether or not we are going to reinstate the funding. I will make it available to you within two weeks, the actual listing.

MS. DELANEY: Can I say something?

MR. DECKER: Yes, please do.

MS. DELANEY: The other thing as well is that we are in the process now of notifying the respective organizations as to the level of funding for 1993-1994. So I think these organizations should be written as well.

MR. DECKER: Absolutely. They would have to be notified before, yes, that's correct. I believe I signed some today, if I'm not mistaken.

MS. DELANEY: Probably some, yes.

MR. HARRIS: I do have the salary estimates here in front of me now. I see a staff complement of ten in that department, with a Director of Youth Services, Administrative Officer, Youth Program Supervisor, Departmental Programme Coordinator, Youth Programme Specialist. Are there programs that the department administers itself through these program coordinators and program specialists? There's a Program Supervisor, a Programme Coordinator and a Programme Specialist. There's three -

MR. DECKER: That whole division was transferred to us from Municipal Affairs I think in this fiscal year, wasn't it, Florence?

MS. DELANEY: The 1992-1993 fiscal year.

MR. DECKER: One of the things that my new ADM has been asked to do is to evaluate the whole role of that Youth Services division to just see where it's going. Do we keep it as a separate division or will we try to integrate it with something else that's being done? It's just newly arrived in the last eight or ten months, whenever it came in, but it is being re-evaluated. But you make a good point. If we are paying $180,000 to deliver $180,000 worth of grants, that would have to be looked at.

MR. HARRIS: Well, I mean, assuming that the only thing that a Youth Services division can do is give out money but -

MR. DECKER: That's correct.

MR. HARRIS: - there may well be other things that that program -

MR. DECKER: That's what we'll be looking at, the whole thing to see what they do.

MR. HARRIS: - could or should do, or maybe is doing. That was part of my question. The Four H program is a youth service program. That probably comes under the Department of Agriculture. It may be administered directly by the department, I don't know. So I was asking about other services that might be there.

MR. DECKER: They do more than give out money -

MS. DELANEY: Yes.

MR. DECKER: - but a substantial part of their existence is to give out money.

MR. HARRIS: Is one of the agencies that is being financially affected from last year, there is a group coordinating youth serving agencies, a provincial body. Have they not had their funding cut, and are you now considering reinstating that?

MR. DECKER: Which group is that?

MR. HARRIS: There's a provincial... I'm trying to remember the name of it now.

MR. DECKER: What's it called?

MR. HARRIS: The Provincial Association of Youth Serving Agencies. Which has a provincial -

MR. DECKER: Did we cut it altogether? Yes, we did.

SOME HON. MEMBERS: (Inaudible).

MR. HARRIS: I think you cut them altogether.

SOME HON. MEMBERS: (Inaudible).

MR. DECKER: No.

AN HON. MEMBER: Last year.

MR. DECKER: We cut it last year. We did not reinstate it.

MR. HARRIS: And you did not reinstate it.

MR. DECKER: That's right.

MR. HARRIS: Can you tell us the rationale for cutting that out? That seems to be a group that has allowed all of these other agencies that exist to get together. I don't think they got very much money. I don't think they had an executive director or anything like that. I think they just had money to get together and communicate. Is there a rationale for eliminating support for them?

MR. DECKER: Other than the rationale which I explained earlier. When government dealt with this $3.2 billion Budget we had to make some judgement calls as to where would the pain be least, recognizing that we would like to be able to do all things that were always done, but in the fiscal reality that we live in we couldn't do everything. Down the line we made a conscious decision that it was less harmful to cut this one than say for example, do something with your special needs children, so we had to make value judgements and part of the responsibility of governing is to make these judgements and that was done.

MR. HARRIS: In terms of specifics, and I just wondered, it is an explanation point I guess under the head for, I believe it is Advanced Studies dealing with the provisions for tuition and allowances and I was not in the House that day when you were asked -

MR. DECKER: What page?

MR. HARRIS: Page 230 - the Student Aid budget, and I suppose really, it is dealing with the expenditures for the previous year where $21.8 million was budgeted but only $18.9 million was spent and I think it is fair to say that over the past year or so there has been quite a lot of clamouring by students about the availability of student aid, and complaints about the department not adequately providing funds and it appears that almost $3 million of what was budgeted was in fact not spent last year and you may have been asked that in the House.

MR. DECKER: So it would lead one to believe that a lot of complaints were not warranted. I mean we had $21 million budgeted and did not even spend it all. Obviously people did not qualify to take up all that money so I suppose it goes to show that a lot of these complaints and arguments are really not warranted.

MR. HARRIS: Or that your criteria were too stingy.

MR. DECKER: The criteria is an excellent criteria I understand.

DR. MARSH: If I might answer: one of the explanations for the less call on the amount of money has to do with the introduction of the verification process which has resulted in numbers of people who were generally receiving monies that they should not have, have been checked on and it has acted as a deterrent for others to improperly access the program.

MR. CHAIRMAN: It is two minutes to ten. I have two more speakers after Mr. Harris is finished, and the three hours will have expired in about seven minutes I think. If we had some indication that we were going to be able to finish this up we could carry on and do as we did in the last session, if not, we have a choice of calling for a motion to adjourn and if that is passed, adjourn. If it is not, we can carry on and then a motion - but I am the Chairman and I am prepared to accept your ruling. What do you think, the two more speaker will clue it up?

MS. VERGE: That sounds good.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Okay, well in that case we will carry on to about twenty past ten and I will now recognize Mr. Hodder.

MR. HODDER: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I have a question on the Denominational Education Councils on page 216, noting the vote that has been given there of $922,700. If one were to ask the minister to identify the two, three or four things that Denominational Education Councils do in the process of education, what are the three top things that they would do in the whole structure?

MR. DECKER: Well, of course they exist - they are representing the classes of people in all this. In the capital funding of schools, we actually give them the money. We have given them $117 million in the past four years I think it was. I am running out, Dr. Turpin-Downey, tell me some other things they did.

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: They are responsible for the religious education programs in the schools. Governance is the big thing in the sense that they are responsible for the structures that are put in place. They are working on consolidation of school boards because basically, for example, if we want to reduce the number of school boards we can't do it without their okay and their approval, so right now they are busily looking at the downsizing of the number of boards, looking at consolidation, sharing of services in every area, and religious education. These are basically the three key areas.

MR. DECKER: Yes, but they are really the (inaudible) -

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: Of course, the hiring and firing and the responsibility of teachers.

MR. DECKER: They are the vessel that the denominations use to exercise their rights.

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: They are the executive staff of the heads of the churches. You know that.

MR. HODDER: But in reality, I hear three roles. Teacher certification, first. First, teacher certification -

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: Teacher certification.

MR. HODDER: Only the first one. Religious education, allocation of capital funds.

DR. TURPIN-DOWNEY: Religious education. Right.

MR. HODDER: You look at the other side of it and you have $13,500,000 in allocation of capital funds in 2.1.09. You look at the other rows and it's costing us $922,700 to fund this particular group. I'm questioning the financial return to the Province of this kind of commitment. I know that you don't want to justify that, and neither do you want to have any of your assistants justify that. I'm just drawing attention to it.

MR. DECKER: The Royal Commission (inaudible) -

MR. HODDER: I'm wondering if there is value to the taxpayer in equal proportion to the allocation of funds in proportion to the amount of monies which are to be dispersed by that group this year.

MR. DECKER: The Royal Commission recommended that they be abolished.

MR. HODDER: Yes, exactly. I'll move to another question. The structure of parent councils on the Royal Commission. I've just concluded that the denominational education committee should be abolished and in essence they are a waste of taxpayers' money. In this particular case, looking for parent council -

MR. DECKER: I'm sorry, I missed your first statement.

MR. HODDER: No, I was saying that I was agreeing with -

MR. DECKER: The Royal Commission.

MR. HODDER: - Dr. Williams' Royal Commission -

MR. DECKER: That they should be abolished.

MR. HODDER: - which had to look at other ways of having the denominational input put into education other than through a direct allocation of funds in this kind of way through department estimates. I suspect that will happen.

The structuring of parent councils. This was a major recommendation of the Williams' Royal Commission. Has the department looked at ways of trying to address that particular role in education in the future, and what relationship they would have with school boards and with other agencies, department or, you know, what roles they would play.

MR. DECKER: Yes. Has the department looked at it? It's one of the things which is being dealt with by the resource committee of officials both from church and from government who are looking at these questions. I get as much negative criticism as I do positive criticism on the school councils. I did visit England where I think Mr. Williams saw the school councils at work. I believe that it is certainly one positive way that parents can get involved in the education of their children. I would not be surprised if at the end of the day we will end up with some form, some mechanism, either of a school council or some body which is connected to either a school or a cluster of schools which will ensure the parental involvement. So it is one of the things which is very much alive and is being discussed in the Royal Commission.

MR. HODDER: On the issue of portable classrooms. Some school boards are in the process of trying to eliminate them. I happen to be the past mayor of a community which gave a temporary permit in 1968 for portable classrooms in Mount Pearl. They have been removed now in 1993. There has been an assessment of physical facilities that has been completed by the department. What is the department's response to its own assessment? How does the department plan to try to address the poor conditions?

MR. DECKER: The department did not do an assessment. The assessment was done by the school board.

MR. HODDER: By the denominational education council?

MR. DECKER: You must understand, the way that capital dollars have been distributed over the past - since Confederation - well, even before Confederation - is that it is based on non-discriminatory funding, whereby we give 55 per cent or 56 per cent of our capital dollars to the Integrated School Council. We give 36 per cent to the Roman Catholic and whatever the proportion is to the Pentecostal. They have the absolute right to decide where they are going to build those schools, whether they are portables and what have you. Within the last two weeks, I attended the official opening of a school in this Province which cost somewhere between $6 million and $7 million, a beautiful structure, glass brick, which I understand costs three times the price of ordinary brick; aerobics room, weight lifting facility, a gymnasium which would meet the standard of anything required in North America.

In the same week, I visited two schools both of which are falling to the ground. Now was it right and proper for the DECs who have spent $117 million to spend close to $7 million on a school, could they not have done it for $3 million? I do not know, but I would have to ask that question: why would you allow Gander Bay to fall into the ground and English Harbour to fall into the ground and spend the $117 million elsewhere, and spend $7 million for a particular school? These are questions which certainly we have an obligation to look at and we are looking at, but under the present system, we can say you are not getting any money, but if I were to attempt to address the Gander Bay problem at the cost of three million bucks, I would immediately have to activate another $3 million for the rest of the system. That is how it works, but we do not have -

MR. HODDER: I am familiar with the formula and you have both answered my supplementary question in giving your response as well because there are tremendous inequities built into the way the funding is allocated and children who are in poor facilities continue to be in poor facilities while they watch other communities and other schools get better facilities and that kind of poor methodology of allocating public dollars has to be more accountable to the public treasury; we just cannot continue to do that kind of thing. That is not to say that school A does not deserve a first class school, it does, but so do all the other school districts as well and I am hoping that in the future there will be some more realistic way to allocate funding to guarantee equity.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Ms. Young.

MS. YOUNG: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I just need to clarify that I was not advocating the return of books by the children of social services recipients. I was merely asking a question because it had been asked of me when I had been out canvassing and -

MR. DECKER: I do not want to get political but I am sure it was asked to you by some Tory, because it is not Liberal philosophy to treat children like that.

MS. YOUNG: I am very pleased that the minister and his department are sensitive to the plight of these people and that you would not single these children out.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Ms. Young.

MS. VERGE: Could I just ask who got the fancy school with the glass brick like the Cabinet room?

MR. DECKER: Bonavista, a beautiful structure.

MR. CHAIRMAN: I will now ask the clerk to call the heads.

On motion, Department of Education, total heads, carried.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Before we adjourn, I have a couple of little housekeeping things to do and I would ask for someone to make a motion that the minutes of our previous meeting where we met on the Department of Environment and Lands be carried.

On motion, minutes adopted as circulated.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Before I ask for the motion to adjourn, I will point out to the members of the committee that we will be meeting again tomorrow night in the House of Assembly and will be examining the estimates of the Department of Health, and I would now like to thank the minister and his officials for coming and providing the answers that everybody was looking for.

I would like to thank the committee for their diligent work in the way they examined the minister and his committee and I will now ask for a motion to adjourn.

MS. VERGE: I so move, and I would like to thank the Chairperson for his capable chairing of the meeting.

MR. CHAIRMAN: Oh! Thank you, my God, this is almost too good. The spirit of Camp David is coming right through here.

On motion of Ms. Verge, the Committee now stands adjourned.