Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to thank the Minister for his response because as I had indicated, while Yellowknife does have huge numbers of jobs, unfortunately the Yellowknives's Dene First Nation members are not that highly educated. Because of that, they do not participate in the workforce to that great of a degree. Unless something is done differently, there does not seem to be that much of a change, I suppose, that would participate any greater in the future because they have been living next to Yellowknife ever since Yellowknife has been here and they still have very poor education rates so this adult education class is a very, very important program for them. Mr. Chairman, yesterday I had spoken for a short period of time on special needs and my colleague from Hay River indicated earlier that dealing with special needs would help in a lot of areas and this is certainly true if we look at the Minister's Forum on Education, there is an indication in there that special needs children tend to disrupt classes and they take a disproportionate amount of the teacher's time and educational budgets and there are greater dropout rates, greater problems associated with that as well. There have been comments in here from community people like this where one person says the workload for staff is very heavy and we feel fragmented and torn and drawn until we are exhausted in mind, heart and spirit.
The present allocation of monies to school does not take into account the higher costs of educating some special needs students over others. This is what we are talking about, Mr. Chairman. We feel that if we put more money into special needs, and if it is actually spent on special needs, that this will alleviate problems tremendously in the schools. First of all, it will lower the pupil/teacher ratio and it would help the teacher that now has to spend a disproportionate amount of time with special needs students to be able to spend more time with the other students.
Mr. Chairman, a very good example of the importance that the former Minister of Education placed on special needs is that he lobbied last year for $7.7 million in additional funds to be put into special needs and now that he is the Finance Minister I am sure that he is going to put more money. Mr. Chairman, I think that this just indicates the importance the Minister and the department themselves place on special needs. Otherwise, why would the Minister have been trying to access more money to put into this area before any other area, even before trying to lower the pupil/teacher ratio, because he could see that by dealing with this it would free up teachers, dollars, the whole works.
Mr. Chairman, when I hear words of cancelling Highway 3 in order to put money into special needs it does not make me feel good. Just because a committee did not recommend that more money be put into education does not mean that people cannot change their minds. People get overtaken with different things at different times and committee Members have changed dramatically, Mr. Chairman and new Members now feel that this should occur. I must add that not all of the Ordinary Members are on the social programs committee, only half of them are so I do not think we have to be consistently reminded that in this little book here it does not recommend there be more money put into education.
At this time, Mr. Chairman, what I wanted to ask the Minister, is there currently a formula for providing money for special needs to the school boards. Could the Minister indicate that the money that is designated through this formula for special needs, does it actually have to be spent on special needs, training, classroom assistants or whatever or can it just be spent on anything, and perhaps put the special needs student in the corner to play by himself or herself so you do not actually have to deal with that problem and you could use that money for something else? Can this occur? Thank you.