Mr. Chairman, earlier I had spoken about special needs and I did not quite have enough time to properly state what I had wanted to. I am glad that the Minister had indicated that they are going to take steps to rank students with special needs. Hopefully, that will also mean that we are going to be finding a way to address the situation where there may be a huge number of students with special needs centralized or in one location as opposed to areas where there are maybe a lot of students, but where there are not a lot of students that have special needs, particularly, not a lot of students with severe special needs.

The Ministers' Forum on Education had also indicated that teachers and support staff recognized the need for and strongly requested additional training to help them deal with the requirements of the special needs policy and, that most staff members have not received sufficient specialized training to be able to provide the best programs for such a wide range of student abilities and challenges. We were told that in service training has been sporadic and considerably limited by insufficient time and money. Mr. Chairman, this is a huge problem if, in the first place, we do not have a policy that recognizes that some students or that special needs students may be attracted to certain schools and that those schools would require additional funding because of the numbers of special needs students, and particularly special needs students with severe problems and a lot of one on one requirements.

If you add to that the fact that our staff are not properly trained and that there is not sufficient in-service training, this makes it even worse. I guess what I am wondering is the Minister had indicated that they were going to undertake to rank special needs students. Would it also include finding a way to provide funding to the schools that require it the most? For instance, if one school has several students with a lot of one-on-one required that they would receive additional funding over that of another school that may have no students that require one-on-one. Would this project also take this into consideration and make some adjustments for that? Thank you.