Thank you, Mr. Chairman. In the Minister's opening comments he talked about how we've improved funding over the years for our schools. In particular, we're now running at 15 percent of school funding for student support. I would agree with the Minister that over the life of this Assembly we have managed to increase the amount that goes into school supports significantly. I know that the educators that I've talked to told me that this is a very key investment for us to make. In fact, some have told me that they think it's more important than reducing the pupil-teacher ratio. That's because by providing adequate supports in the class, we enable teachers to do more with the class sizes that they may have. So I think right now we can say that we've done a good job for the increases that we've provided in this area to date.
But having said that, we know that we have a lot of kids with challenges in the Northwest Territories. While we haven't got any clinical work that we can point to so you can't prove what the level is, I think that there's a general feeling that the level of challenge faced in the classroom is certainly higher than what is the average found in Canada south of 60. So if we have a higher number of students in need of special support, we need to be able to put a higher proportion in.
I know we get into the issue of comparing apples to apples or comparing apples to oranges perhaps, but when we look at student support rates across Canada, some jurisdictions say that they are putting as much as 24 or 25 percent total funding into student supports. I know that every jurisdiction classifies student support differently, so we can't say that that's the sort of number that we should be aiming for. But obviously, given the level of challenge that our teachers are facing in the classrooms, we need to try to find a way to provide better supports.
All the educators I've talked to agree that inclusive schooling is the right policy. It's the right policy for us to implement but, for it to work, there has to be adequate support for the teachers to make it work in the classroom. So I'm hoping that while we can take a moment here and pat ourselves on the back for increasing student supports to 15 percent, I hope that the Minister will take it as a personal challenge to continue the fight to increase the amount of funding that we can find to put into schools for student support.
Having just given the Minister kudos, I'll launch off on the other side. I have to say that as a Member of the Standing Committee on Social Programs, I've been quite dismayed with the information that we received when it came to the capital this year. It seems like every time we talked about usage of student housing in Fort Smith the numbers changed. We don't seem to be able to get consistent answers. It has never been explained to the committee, or to me personally, what we have to change in the accommodations in Fort Smith to make them pass the fire marshal's concerns, which is to get past those concerns. So saying that because we have the fire marshal's report that says we're going to have to shut it down if we don't do something, for all I know that means that there's a fire door that has the hinges on the wrong side. I would really appreciate having a better understanding of what the requirements are, so that I can have a clear understanding of why we have to spend the money there. It certainly seemed to make a lot of sense to the Members to take a look at...Clearly a preponderance of our college student housing is in Fort Smith. We do have three campuses, and the committee thought that it was time, perhaps, that we looked at broadening that out. Knowing that we're doing a construction project in Inuvik, it seemed that we could probably save some money for mobilization if we could get that project underway more quickly in Inuvik to see more student housing up there. As has been noted by other Members, we certainly need to address student housing in Yellowknife as well.
We have not had the information that leads us to accept what the Minister and the department have told us about the needs in Fort Smith. I'm looking forward to receiving that. I hope the Minister will provide the details of that information, so we can all agree on where the money should be spent and how it should be spent. I would challenge him to say if you have the information, let's lay it on the table. Let's see it. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.