(Translation) Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have a few comments to make on the education issue. Having been a previous Member of the divisional board of education, I am familiar with the trends concerning teachers and students. First of all, I remember that teachers need support staff in order for them to teach properly. In particular, when it concerns capable professionals we hire from the south to live up here and teach. They are in our communities during the school year in order to teach and help our students to educate themselves and so it is important that we support our staff. The other thing is during their tenure as teachers in our communities, they experience problems with housing rates, especially in the higher Arctic communities. These include per diem and other money or indemnities that they receive which comes to a minimum of $100. We did a survey and came to this conclusion and this is really not fair. In many instances, teachers feel that their salaries are comparable to social assistance, or income support that they can receive and this is not right either. There is a 67.5 ratio of students that need adult supervision or special assistance. We have problems in dealing with this issue. We have problems in finding part-time special needs educators for our special need's children. For these reasons I feel that we need full-time employees to deal with this problem in order for our students to accomplish their potential. This also looks at the high rate of rent in the communities. This effects the special need's students as well as the special need's teachers, in particular, because they need professional development days. This effects the professional teachers and we cannot just overlook this issue. It is important that we afford professional days.

The other issue is, there are up to 25 students in a classroom with one teacher with many special needs students integrated into those classrooms. When you go beyond a certain comfortable teacher/student ratio, you have to look at the problem and you need further assistance. We need more funding targeted toward this problem because a lot of these teachers have to produce their own school curriculum. When they have this extra workload, it does not fully recognize the extra workload they have considering their salary. (Translation ends)

We are trying alternative studies as well. We are at the point where we cannot really handle all the needs we have.

(Translation) This has been recognized as a problem by the management of the divisional boards. It is becoming increasingly difficult to be a teacher as your student numbers continue to increase. This will result in teachers resigning, and then we have a problem there. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. (Translation ends)