School board demise not shocking

I was surprised but not shocked by the decision to scrap elected school boards in Nova Scotia.

It’s not because of anything boards did or didn’t do. School boards were the middle level of the multi-decker outhouse we call our education model, and in a no-win situation. They bore the brunt of impossible demands and decisions, from such things as declining enrolment, inclusion and school closures. Funding formulas didn’t provide the resources to adequately address those demands and boards didn’t have the authority to change that.

I always suspected that once the school closure decisions were complete, school board members wouldn’t serve their full term.

Voter apathy was a factor in that decision. If school board elections weren’t combined with municipal elections, voter turnout likely wouldn’t exceed 20 per cent. Over the past few elections, 67 per cent of the seats were uncontested. Obviously, public interest in school board elections was low.

One of reason for that apathy is the correlation between the political stripe of the provincial MLA and the political stripe of the elected school board member, for the same area. Anyone who isn’t connected to a particular party realizes the futility of running in those areas. There were other factors, such as the negative auditor general reports and a multitude of public complaints.

We sometimes miss the bigger picture. There has been a trend by the Council of Atlantic Premiers to make regulations, practices and procedures as common as possible among those provinces. The creation of one English school board and one French school board, per province, certainly fits that regulatory trend.

Two school boards in Nova Scotia were so dysfunctional they were shut down, one of which was the largest in Atlantic Canada. Both were then capably run by one person. For decades, the Glace Bay school system was run by a superintendent and a secretary. Large schools now have a principal, two vice-principals and two secretaries. That’s three times the administrative staff and twice the clerical staff as the administration that ran the entire school system in this town.

Principals receive an extra stipend of $20,000/year and each vice-principal earns am extra $10,000/year. They also bank days if they work the last week of August to prepare for the September opening, despite the fact the academic school year begins Aug. 1. Haven’t they negotiated well for themselves, while classrooms have become suffocated and classroom teaching positions have been eliminated. Perhaps it’s time to put the “T” back in Nova Scotia Teachers’ Union (NSTU).

I don’t buy the NSTU claim that removing principals and vice-principals from the union will create chaos in the education system. The system has been chaotic and dysfunctional for decades. How likely is a teacher, especially a young teacher, to take a problem she/he is having with administration to the local union, if the local union president is an administrator, which is often the reality? How likely is she/he to do so if the local union president is a teacher?

During the recent work-to-rule campaign administrators were in their usual paradoxical position - members of the NSTU and the board’s representatives in those school buildings. But, they followed the NSTU directives, which shut down schools. Having the union shut down schools wouldn’t sit well with government. Since we had previously discarded appointed boards that only left the site-based-management model, which will put principals in a much-expanded, administrative role. Al Moore Glace Bay