Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have to confess that I’m quite conflicted by this motion. As a teacher I understand the rationale behind the motion, but I have great difficulty in supporting the motion as it’s written.

I actually lived through the implementation of the Inclusive Schooling Policy many years ago and it was hotly contested at the time. Teachers were not totally in support. It was probably 50/50. At the time we had classrooms where students were pulled out, special students were pulled out and were taught separate from other students. I don’t support that. I think students should be included in with students in regular classrooms, but I think there’s also an opportunity for students to be pulled out and to receive special teaching, whether it be on the lower end of the scale or the upper end of the scale.

I considered early start, late start for my own children and it’s a difficult decision to make. Very often teachers can assist you with that. This policy takes away that flexibility that I think teachers and schools probably should have.

Thanks to modern technology, I’ve had a quick look at the directive and I think the operative part is that it states that students receive their education program in regular instructional settings in their local school with their age peers and the exceptions are only allowed in rare instances. I think that’s part of the problem here. There’s no flexibility on the part of the school or on the part of the teacher to make an exception for some student to stay back or some student to move forward.

It’s a really complex issue for me. It’s not just as simple as saying let’s get rid of social passing. I’m not even sure what social passing means, or peer passing, whatever we want to call it. I think that as the acting deputy minister pointed out, many, many students have an individual education program and they are taught differently from their classmates, but they’re in that classroom and they have the

interaction on a regular basis with kids at their own age level and that’s a good thing. To have, as Mr. Yakeleya said, a 16-year-old in a Grade 5 class, many people consider that not to be the way to go. I wonder how the child is going to feel. It’s not going to make them feel all that great, but there are instances when children should be held back, and in reading this policy it tells me that no we can’t do that.

So I think this needs to be evaluated. I think it’s probably time that we did an extremely thorough, extremely comprehensive review of the Inclusive Schooling Policy or directive. It’s been in place for quite a number of years and I think that the thinking in the education field is changing a bit and I think some people are starting to think that pulling kids out is not the horrible thing that we thought it was about 20 years ago. I would urge the department to look at a really comprehensive evaluation of the policy and do some in-depth analysis of what this is doing. And that means talking to students, it means talking to parents, it means talking to the boards, it means talking to businesspeople. You know, we have to do a full cross-section evaluation of what our residents think about this policy and the impact that it has on them as individuals, as families and as business owners and operators.

That said, I am not going to vote against this motion but I will abstain. I appreciate where my colleagues are coming from. I just don’t feel that this motion speaks to what I think is necessary, so I won’t vote against it but I won’t vote for it. Thank you.