Sarah has asked me to answer that. I think I'll do it from my own personal experience, because I think that's the better story. I have three daughters, two who have finished school now and one who is still in high school. All of them took French immersion, which has been exceptional.
Just to tell you about the calibre of the programming here, which we as a family had always heard was good, we ended up going down to Alberta for six months because my husband had a job opportunity that took us out for a while. There, our kids were in a totally uni-track French immersion school in St. Albert for six months, for a term. The teachers there were shocked and actually not that happy that their speaking skills were so good, having come from a dual-track school. Now, I like to think my kids are bright, but it wasn't just that: it was the level of education they had received.
But one of the issues that happens in high school in remote communities--and I'll include Yellowknife in this--is that you need teachers at that high school level who are competent in teaching those matriculation types of courses--I don't know if this translates well into French--those university prep types of courses so that those kids feel comfortable continuing at that high school level in French and can get their bilingual diploma.
What happens is that it's sometimes difficult to get the teachers who are comfortable teaching those high school level courses to come here. You might have a Biology 20 teacher who is teaching in French and who says, “I'm francophone and I can teach the children some French, but it's really not my area of expertise, so I'm not really comfortable”. The kids sense that. They get concerned about their education, so they make a conscious decision to do that subject in English, because they're thinking “What am I doing after high school?”
My personal experience is that if you want to keep kids learning and doing that--and this is for the kids who are francophone as well, who are making those conscious decisions and asking where they are going after school--you have to invest money. Particularly when you get to the high school level where the students are thinking about their future, I would suggest some incentives for well-trained teachers who are comfortable with and confident about teaching those matriculation types of subjects. I think that's where things kind of fall apart.
Other than that, I think the schools work diligently to try to provide a very comprehensive French immersion program. My personal experience is that I would put not just my kids but the other kids we know who've gone through that program up against kids from anywhere else in the country.