ASSEMBLY OF ONTARIO
Official Record of Debate
(Hansard)
EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
May 7, 2001
Mr Ted Arnott (Waterloo-Wellington): My question is for the Minister of Education. As we welcome Education Week in Ontario, parents and students across the province are interested in knowing that the government is taking the right steps to ensure that students receive the best possible education.
Today in Pickering the minister made some significant announcements. Will the minister inform the House as to how these will benefit students in Waterloo-Wellington and across the province?
Hon Janet Ecker (Minister of Education, Government House Leader): I think this week was an appropriate time to announce the package that we did, being Education Week, which gives us an opportunity to celebrate, to congratulate and to thank all of the members of our public education system for the hard work and the excellence that they produce on a daily basis.
What we announced this week were additional resources on top of the money that we announced last month. So we're looking at $360 million more, new dollars, for our education system. That's going out flexibly to school boards so they can address local priorities. But we've also made some significant changes to make sure that our schools and our teachers have the resources and the flexibility that they need to provide more remediation for those students who might require help with the new curriculum and also to ensure that extracurricular, co-instructional activities, which are very important to our students, can also be provided for our students in all schools.
Mr Arnott: I want to thank the minister for that excellent answer, and I'm pleased to hear that the government is putting students first.
The additional funding that the minister has announced today is welcome news for Ontario parents and students alike. I want to say that initiatives like she talked about today include some welcome news on co-instructional activities, or, as we used to call them, extracurricular activities.
Parents and students in my riding would like to know, how does your announcement advance this issue?
Hon Mrs Ecker: We've made a couple of changes, as I said. We've put in place more resources that school boards and schools can use flexibly. We have also changed the rules around the definition of the instructional time standard so that things like extra remediation time and on-call for teachers who might be doing extracurricular activities can be part of what's recognized and funded for our schools. This is a package that not only the task force but also our education partners asked us to put in place. They said this would work.
We are proclaiming one piece of Bill 74, the legislation that says school boards should put in place plans for extracurricular activities in their high schools. We're also going to be withdrawing the section of Bill 74 that could have made it mandatory for a teacher in elementary or secondary to do extracurriculars. So we have withdrawn that. I think that's an exceptionally good sign for the teachers.
This is what our education partners said would work and we've been very pleased to put this in place. |
