National association urges Quebec to rethink proposed changes to school boards

School board officials from outside Quebec are warning the Legault government not to convert the province’s boards into service centres and scrap elections for francophone voters.

Arguing democratically electing representatives to help run the education system is a “cornerstone” of Canadian society, the Canadian School Boards Association (CSBA) held a news conference Monday urging Quebec to reconsider.

They said Quebec must not make the same mistake as two other provinces, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, which undertook similar streamlining reforms as Quebec proposes in Bill 40.

Tabled in the National Assembly last week, the bill proposes to convert Quebec’s school boards into service centres run by boards of directors, including parent volunteers and members of the community.

Elections for francophone boards are to be abolished but maintained in the English system.

But CSBA president Laurie French said Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island have tried a similar formula and it is not working, with a decline in student performance and success rates.

In 2018, the Nova Scotia government dissolved the province’s seven elected regional school boards and created one provincial advisory council made up of people appointed by the minister of education.

The director general of the advisory council reports directly to the deputy minister of education. Only the French-speaking minority board has been allowed to continue to exist and hold elections.

French said they have been contacted by the teachers’ union in Nova Scotia, which has numerous examples of parents who feel they have nowhere to go with their issues because they have no access to school commissioners.

There were busing problems when schools opened this fall and there was no one locally to call for help, she added.

“It’s very difficult to call the minister’s office for individual parents in that situation,” French said. “Local school boards provide that contact and that level of accountability and assistance in their individual communities.”

She added all Quebecers should have the right to democratically elected governing school boards.

And Shawn Davidson, president of the Saskatchewan School Boards Association, also on hand for the news conference, said

Local school boards provide that contact and that level of accountability and assistance in their … communities.

western provinces are going the opposite way by “enhancing” the school-board system, not stripping it down.

That followed a public outcry when the government tried to merge boards.

“In my province, we would argue school boards should be representative of communities,” Davidson said.

“The community is much larger than just the parent groups.

“To think that something is less empowered, less democratic and less representative of the entire community, which education serves, we think is highly short-sighted.”