District 67 trustees seeking ‘buried’ rural school report
Okanagan Skaha School District 67 trustees are joining a call across the province for the release of a report on the state of rural schools in B.C.
At Monday’s meeting, the board voted unanimously to pen a letter to the minister of education requesting the release of the results from the rural and remote education review completed by Boundary Similkameen MLA Linda Larson.
“It’s a public document that should be made public, and for some reason it’s buried,” board chair Bill Bidlake said.
The report, called a “Status Check on Rural Education,” has been made a cabinet document and is not accessible through the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, according to a CBC report where one parent received 59 pages of redacted documents.
Trustee Ginny Manning highlighted the time, effort and money put in by school boards in the area during the consultation process, with Larson travelling to face-to-face meetings in rural areas.
“It was a lot of hours. We put in a submission as a board, we all did stuff individually. Tons of people, I would venture to guess there were hundreds of people that actually took the time to go online and type up their stories,” Manning said.
The report was supposed to be released by June 2017.
“From my point of view the minister of education has said they’ve seen the summary, they’ll use what’s useful out of the report for the funding formula that they’re working on,” Manning said.
“But how do we know that? There’s no accountability, there’s not transparency. This is our paper, the people of B.C., this is our report being informed by our input from people around the province.”