English panel to study options for school board elections

Now that Quebec has announced plans to scrap school board elections, a coalition of groups representing the province’s English community has formed a panel to come up with options for selecting school commissioners.

The panel will be chaired by former Liberal Member of Parliament Marlene Jennings and will submit its report to Education Minister François Blais around Labour Day. Blais announced in April that he planned to abolish school board elections because of the high cost and poor voter turnout. He told the school boards to come up with alternatives, which Quebec will consider.

Jennings said the panel will seek input and ideas from the anglophone community across Quebec on the best ways to select school commissioners. Continuing with elections is still an option and “the standard by which other options will have to be measured,” she said.

Jennings said she is open to any suggestion “as long as it can be shown that it respects the English minority’s constitutional right to control and manage education.”

“That’s the bottom line. Any proposal has to meet that test,” Jennings said at press conference in Notre Dame de Grâce on Wednesday.

The panel will also consider what steps can be taken to facilitate a high voter turnout if Quebec decides to continue with elections. The turnout in last fall’s provincewide school board elections was about 17 per cent for the English boards and five per cent for the French boards.

There are many factors that have contributed to a low voter turnout over the years, Jennings said. The elections are run by the school boards, but the boards are not given a special budget to cover their costs. She wondered whether Quebec’s director of elections would be better suited to run school board elections and suggested that they should be held on the same day as municipal elections. It was far too difficult for voters to get their names on the voters’ list and many people in rural areas had to travel long distances to get to a polling station. “I had a heck of a time getting on the voters’ list to exercise my right,” Jennings recalled.

The external panel is being sponsored by the Quebec English School Boards Association, the

Once we have done our homework, we can go see the minister and say this is how we want to run our schools.

English Parents’ Community Association, the Quebec Community Groups Network and the Quebec Federation of Home and School Associations.

Stephen Burke, acting president of the school board association, said the panel will give the coalition a good picture of what the English community wants. “Once we have done our homework, we can go see the minister and say this is how we want to run our schools and this is how we want to choose the people who will run our schools,” Burke said.

The members of the panel can be contacted at electionspanel@gmail.com