Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I too, would like to acknowledge the many people that have turned out today to show their concern, interest in the education of our youth and not only our youth but also educating adults and I suppose whoever requires it. Mr. Chairman, I have a lot of concerns and I just wanted to indicate some of them before I get into the main thing that I would like to see changed. Mr. Chairman, we all know that we have a high pupil/teacher ratio. We have a lot of special needs children and we do not have an adequate way of financing that. I think a lot of this is reflected in our high social programs. We know that we have the highest alcohol and drug rates, suicide rates, high rates of people incarcerated, on social assistance, the whole works. I think a lot of that stems from the ability of our school boards and school authorities to adequately educate the people within their jurisdictions. When I see us funding training programs which may not necessary be restricted to long-term Northerners, I am a little bit concerned.

When I see our kids and post-secondary schools, children that have been born and raised in the Northwest Territories go out to university and we have seen the tuition rates probably double or maybe even more than that in the recent years and tuition rates have remained the same. A couple of years ago, we had a Student Financial Assistance Committee or forum, whatever it was called, that went around, made a lot of recommendations, and we thought a new plan was going to be put into place for this year and that is not going to happen. We heard just recently from the Minister, he indicated that the teacher turnover had decreased from 18 percent to 12 percent. I am glad to hear that, but at the same time he did not indicate where the pockets may be where there were high turnover rates or was this consistently seen across the territories that it was a 12 percent turnover or did we have some areas where maybe there is a 50 percent turnover and some with only a 2 percent turnover. It would be nice to know that. I know that, in the past, we have heard that we were having a lot of problems, it seemed like anyways, we were hearing just about every week that there were more people having problems because we had done away with the GNWT housing for staff, particularly young teachers coming into a community where they seemed to have be having hard times making ends meet.

Mr. Chairman, we can identify a lot of problems and one of the biggest ones I think is when we moved to the inclusive schooling policy to discontinue special education classes and allow all students to be taught and have their needs met in a regular classroom. This was supposed to mean that students with severe special needs would be provided with additional assistance or the one-on-one care of special needs assistants. Mr. Chairman, this is a noble cause and one I am sure that everyone would agree with. But if you can do this, you have got to have enough money to do it. There are a lot of problems in this area, I believe. A part of it is caused by the fact that we do not have a proper funding mechanism. We do not have a rating system, if you would call it that, for students who may have very severe special needs and who may all be concentrated in the larger communities. I have heard that people move from the smaller communities, to Yellowknife for instance, because they feel that their children are going to be dealt with better and when you do that, that places a special emphasis or it places these schools in a special situation because they are having to spend all kinds of money to deal with students who require one-on-one work. They may need one person to work with one student almost on a full-time basis. That adds to the pupil/teacher ratio situation.

I have noticed that the problem in the past, there were already wide-ranging problems with supporting the students who some may have attended classes regularly, some did not, some were very bright, some were not, some tried hard, some did not. But now, they also have children who may be very low grades. Say you are dealing with a grade 7 class but some of those kids are at a grade 3 level in certain areas. Some are at grade 7, some are at grade 5 and some may actually be over that. We do not have the adequate financing to ensure that there is classroom assistance to deal with all those kids. Say you have one poor teacher who has to try to break up all those kids into different groups or however they deal with them. I understand that each of those children are supposed to have their own learning plan or whatever it is called, and the teacher may be trying to do that but when you have 20 kids in your class and you have to deal with them every day, I imagine it must be pretty hard. I guess the thrust of my general comments, Mr. Chairman, is that I think if we want to do anything, we have to properly address the special needs area. We have to make sure that they are getting adequate funding for this and the funding stays in those areas, and they need to make distinctions to account for the higher cost of educating some very special needs students over other special needs students. Thank you.