Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We report pupil/teacher ratio in the Northwest Territories the same way that it is reported by all other jurisdictions in Canada and that allows comparability between jurisdictions so that everybody can say we're comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges. That said, Ms. Lee is right; we don't tell a school that they have to put somebody in the library. We don't tell the school that they have to have a vice-principal. The schools determine what their needs are in consultation with the DEAs in their communities, because we think it's something that parents and those who are elected to a DEA should have significant control over.

We provide the funding, but there's a considerable amount of flexibility. The boards could choose to either have specialist teachers or not choose to have specialists and reduce class size. While we say that there's, right now, an average of about 15.5 students per teacher in the Northwest Territories, again, Ms. Lee is quite right; that doesn't translate into 15.5 kids in every classroom because many classes, or in many cases, the school boards have determined there's a better way to allocate people. At this point, we don't require the boards to report to us on how large or how small their classes are. That tends to vary by the size of the community. A community like Kakisa where you've got perhaps seven or eight students in the whole school with a teacher and a classroom assistant, you've got a fairly low PTR. However, a larger high school in one of the major centres like Inuvik, Hay River or Yellowknife, may choose to concentrate students in a larger class some of the times.

It's difficult to say, in order to come up with what is actually happening on the ground. The best way to do that is through the DEAs and what parents have decided is the right way to see the school, or class size.