Thank you, Madam Chairperson. Madam Chairperson, I recognize the concern of my colleague, but as a government, as a department, when we do look at numbers we do see that the graduation rates are up, that post-secondary attendance is up and that over the last ten years there has been a significant increase in student financial assistance. That is not to say that there are not problems. The issue that my colleague mentioned in regard to the leakage from when you start in grade 1 and you have 20 some students as he indicated, or in my community they graduate out of grade 7 about 60 students a year and we are not graduating 60 grade 12 students every year in grade 12, but that is an issue. Where do they go? Why do they leave? And do they come back into the system five or ten years down the road and take adult education? That is an issue that has not been addressed.

The core subjects, communities with grade extensions are there. Once again my colleague talked about the quality. That is an issue that the department, every DEC and DEA struggles with to ensure that the quality for those courses that are taught is the highest possible. Very clearly, small community school grade extensions do not have the same curriculum that is available to the larger communities, for instance I toured Sir John Franklin a week or so ago and it is under construction. They have automotive courses, they have fine arts courses, multi-media courses and they are all nice courses and it would be nice to have those in every community, but the reality is that they do not. Once again, that is an issue that is predicated on revenue and funding and no matter how you dice it or slice it in terms of these particular issues it always comes back to that particular matter. Thank you.