Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is my third time going around on special needs and I'm not sure if I'm getting much further ahead. There's a nine-page opening statement by the Minister. There's a lot of items that I need to cover, and I don't know if I'm just not asking the right questions or what, but I'm going to try one more time. The last go around the Minister suggested that to say that to be able to assess and diagnose, or labelling it as sometimes it's put, the Minister indicated that we couldn't wait for that long and that would somehow preclude providing special needs services to the children who need them. I don't think that that was in any way what I was trying to get at. I know that there's going to be a number of briefings booked by not only this department, but other departments for Social Programs at the end of March. I'm interested in making sure that the Minister does the kind of legwork beforehand so that we could have, you know, a substantively meaningful discussion about how to improve this special needs funding and special needs programming.
So I wasn't looking for, I guess, some of the diagnosis or assessments for the children of special needs have to be medical or whatever, but I just want to be able to know that we are hitting the mark with the money we are giving. The Minister indicates in the information we have here is the needs assessment of our children show that almost six out of 10 needed some kind of special needs assistance. We are funding at 15 percent now and we're trying to increase it to 17 with the hope of making it to 20. That is still a lot less than 40 percent, granted that not every one of those 40 percent need full-time funding or full-time aid, but it's entirely possible that we fund special needs at 20 percent, we just top it at 20 percent to whatever we're funding to schools. It could be that one person or the top five percent of needed students who could take up the entire 20 percent, and then what do we do with the 90 percent of kids? I just need to be able to get from the Minister that there's some kind of system in place that tells him, or tells us, how far we are meeting the mark. Is there any kind of system there? Is there any kind of a consistent policy you're applying to all the districts? I understand he talks to the district heads and blah, blah, blah and he must be getting some kind of information, but he used to sit as a Regular Member on this side of the floor and we used to talk about the need for special needs funding and I cannot believe he didn't discover until last year, after two years of being a Minister,
that actually the money was not being spent on special needs like he thought it was.
So you've got to sit here and wonder, like, what do we have to do to make sure that money we're spending on special needs are going to the kids who need special needs, and that we have some kind of idea about what the needs are out there without all that distraction about labelling or whatever. I mean how do we do that? Like, I need better information from the Minister as to how we are meeting the mark and how we are improving this situation. So I want the Minister to give me another round on what his plan is. Hopefully I'll get ahead there.