There is no differential funding for us to teach more than the core French second language program. That is not enough for our parents. They are at our doors all the time.
They are always after us. They regularly rattle the cage. They want more for their children.
They don't want their kids to feel they have to leave and go to work in Toronto, Vancouver, and Alberta, even though the opportunities are there and they'll want to go west at some point in their life. But they want them to come back and live in their communities. Otherwise there's no sustainability in those communities. For what we do, we do not get funded. We have to find it here and there in our budgets. The Canada-Quebec Accord is very helpful in that regard.
Then there is the whole area of special education. If you have children who need services and you're in the Montreal area, it's fine. But if you're in the rural areas, you don't have that service. It has to be brought in. School boards are finding it very difficult. For instance, psychologists are paid more in the private sector than they ever could earn from a school board. We can't keep them. We have to start trying to match those salaries. If we want to do that, we have to find the resources elsewhere.
Also, when you run schools today, the world is the classroom. It's no longer an isolated room. There are trips outside, there's video conferencing, there are the whiteboards, there are the laptops. Our schools have invested heavily, not only in the implementation of gadgetry, as we would call it, but also
regarding teacher training. This is very important and there's not enough money for that.
The government is offering, by the 2015-16 school year,
intensive French training in Grade 6 of primary school. We asked what we would be getting? We have been providing immersion for a very long time and we are prepared to cooperate. We have heard nothing, not a single thing. To date not one red cent has been allocated for us.