School board unions dispute bullying charges
A group of Vancouver school board unions came out Friday evening strongly disputing several aspects of the bullying investigation and report about the district released last week.
The investigation, by lawyer Roslyn Goldner, found that VSB staff “felt attacked, humiliated and devalued,” most notably at a Sept. 26 public meeting when the board debated whether to proceed with closures of 12 Vancouver schools.
The report found that former trustee Patti Bacchus “threw staff under the bus,” when she asked for a review of information in the staff’s recommendations, calling into question their professionalism and competence in the public forum.
But the VSB unions came out in favour of trustees pushing hard for answers.
“... Representatives of VSB unionized stakeholders believe school board trustees’ job is to ask hard questions and to represent their constituents,” the group of unions said in a news release. “Public education is a political undertaking and to suggest that it should be otherwise is deeply disturbing and naive.”
The unions included in the news release are the Vancouver Secondary Teachers’ Association, the Vancouver Elementary School Teachers’ Association and locals of the International Union of Operating Engineers and the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
The unions also say the Goldner report’s finding that union representatives on VSB committees were “disrespectful and verbally abusive toward staff in committee meetings” is “unfair, unsubstantiated and appearing to be politically motivated, as no union was interviewed by Goldner, yet as a group they were criticized . ...
“Any report that does not interview those whose behaviour it impugns while using unnamed witnesses as credible sources of information is seriously lacking in integrity and appears politically motivate.”
The unions say Education Minister Mike Bernier should hold a byelection for school trustees in conjunction with the May 9 provincial election, to save election costs.
The union also notes that the Goldner report is very similar to the Ernst & Young report done last summer after the VSB trustees refused to pass a balanced budget.
They were fired for that in October. A provincially appointed trustee, Dianne Turner, has replaced them, and Bernier says she will stay in place for at least a year.
Meanwhile, teachers voted overwhelmingly to ratify the agreement with the province to implement their restored collective agreement language. The vote was 98.4 per cent in favour of the deal with the province, BCTF said Friday night.
Thousands of teachers are expected to be hired as a result of the agreement, which came after the Supreme Court of Canada said that rules about class size, class composition and the numbers of specialist teachers were illegally stripped from teachers contracts in 2002.
As school districts are preparing their budgets this spring, it is unknown how the deal will affect per-pupil funding grants. The VSB has already announced it is short $12 million, and Richmond is short $10.5 million for next year, before any new hires are made. Bernier has said the deal will be fully funded. He said the negotiations were complex and hinted at possible change in the next set of contact negotiations with teachers, which will begin in two years.