SPEAK OUT, TRUSTEES
We elect trustees to keep our school system accountable to us, to the people. They are there to represent us. To raise their voices. To ask questions on our behalf and to tell us when they disagree with something and how they will work to change it.
And if they don’t disagree with something as egregious as a school principal vetoing a Grade 6 project on gay rights, they have a duty to tell us why.
Two students at St. George Catholic School in Ottawa were assigned a project on social justice. They chose gay rights, but the principal said that would be inappropriate. Although the school board initially supported the principal, it eventually put out a statement at the end of last week saying the project should be allowed.
Betty-Ann Kealey, the Catholic board trustee for the Kitchissippi/Bay ward, is no media-shy rookie. She’s been a trustee off and on since 1985. She’s been a regional director for a trustee association and last year, she won an award of merit. Yet when the Citizen asked her to comment on these students having their project vetoed, she refused, directing the reporter to the school board’s communication department.
Kealey is not alone in this. The trustees of both English boards in Ottawa, Catholic and public, have a policy of speaking as a single entity. Some trustees interpret that to mean they can never speak to the media, that all communications must come as carefully crafted central statements.
The federal government gets a lot of deserved criticism for its closed-ranks communication strategy, but it is certainly not alone in it. It’s bad enough when bureaucrats are ordered to clam up. But trustees are not staff. They’re not there to toe some kind of company line. A school board is not a brand; it’s meant to be a forum for debate, and not only internally. Trustees represent the community, which means they are supposed to be in constant dialogue with citizens, and not just with the people who can attend school board meetings. Trustees are elected to have opinions and to explain them to the people who elected them.
No wonder trustee elections are such pallid affairs; several of the trustees who won their positions in the recent election ran uncontested. It’s difficult for people to know whether they agree with an incumbent when they have very few ways of finding out what he or she even thinks. The entire trustee system is looking increasingly like a farce, and trustees themselves are doing the system no favours by acting like mere cogs in a wheel.