Thank you. I am really hopeful that this will become a major focus of the department. I know that internally within the department -- and I can just tell from the information that I have in front of me -- there are some folks doing some really good work and spending what must be a huge amount of time to compile a lot of this very valuable information. I can go through this information and tell you by district, I can look at my own community, I can tell you how we have been doing on Biology 30 exams since 1998. The level of detail is amazing here and I do not believe it is about trying to hide information because in some cases I can see that we are drastically improving.
But this is not something that we talk about. We do not talk enough about the successes. We do not talk enough about the failures. I acknowledge and recognize that statistics and tests are not perfect, are not always accurate and consistent. There may be anomalies. But I am just saying that I think we have to start somewhere. I think we have to start making this information publicly available. When I go on the Alberta education Web site the level of statistics and trends analysis is quite detailed, but it is not anything that this department is not already doing internally and I can tell that by the level of information they are able to provide me when I ask for it.
I just think we have to do a better job of taking that message to the public and making them aware of the same information that we are aware of. This has been an ongoing frustration for me over the number of years, the three years that I have been here. I have not seen the publicizing of this information. I have not seen the tracking of the trends and it is a problem. It is something that we need to improve on. I think we have to start somewhere and we have to pick something and start every year consistently publicizing it. We have information here going back years. We can talk about how students in the Territories have been doing on Social Studies 30 for the last four years. Specifically, we spent a lot of effort and money raising the special needs funding to 15 percent, because we recognized that we think we have a high proportion of students with special needs. I think all of the teachers would tell you that that is the case. But I can't tell you, as a legislator, whether it makes sense now to re-evaluate our targets from 15 percent and talk about 20 percent, because I don't know what our percentage of special needs are in the classrooms, and I certainly don't know if we're getting better or worse than when we were first elected. I don't know how many kids we suspect might have fetal alcohol syndrome or fetal alcohol effect. I know it's difficult to adequately access that, but I think we have to take a try at some of these things. If we're going to do our job and make sure the money gets where it's most needed, we have to know what the needs are. In an area like special needs, we know it's bad; we just don't know how bad and we don't know if it's getting worse or better and that's a problem.