This gives you some idea of how this is managed and how it works.
Let's move on to immersion. Immersion has always been a very strong phenomenon here. I arrived here in 1984 and I remember that one had to line up every September to register children in immersion classes.
Immersion courses have served the francophone population, for better or for worse, before schools were established and before we had French-language education in our communities. We've lost contact with the immersion section to some extent because in the final analysis, that is not our clientele. Having said that, I want to open a parenthesis here, because before we had our schools, we lost many francophone students to immersion programs especially at the high school level.
There are still people who have the following perception. I'm thinking particularly of Quebec parents who arrive in Newfoundland. They settle here and they decide that they want their children to be bilingual. So instead of sending them to a francophone school system, they send their children to an immersion program. So in this way we lose part of our clientele, and I find that unfortunate.
We do have school planning councils, the SPC. Once again, we have established some partnerships with them, but they operate autonomously. They mostly help us to organize cultural or extracurricular events. This is when we are in contact with them.
I'll put on the hat that I wore when I was in charge of cultural issues for the Fédération des francophones de Terre-Neuve-et-Labrador. What hurt us to some extent, was the redistribution of school boards particularly when immersion programs were amalgamated. They put them in the mainstream of anglophone schools. So we more or less lost track of the schools where children were going because they were absorbed into the English-language system. To my mind, this is one of the weaknesses of our system.
Having said that, as we speak, we are trying to re-establish contact with immersion schools. Moreover, I know that a show is in the works for December. The person responsible, Xavier Georges of the Association communautaire francophone de Saint-Jean, has contacted them, and over 400 students will attend that show. It's far more pleasant for an artist to perform for a student audience of 400 rather than 20 or 50 as is the case at our school.
In essence, that's what I can tell you regarding education.