Looks like Ontario has trust issues with its elected school trustees
There once was a time when school trustees — Roy Bushfield, Dalton McGuinty Sr., Alex Cullen, Brian McGarry — were almost household names.
In the October election, and I admit only slight embarrassment, I had no idea who any of the public board candidates were on my ballot. And I’m supposedly in the news business.
There’s lots of sheesh to go around. They held school board elections — separate from the municipal vote — in Quebec last month. The turnout, across the province, was 5.5 per cent of eligible voters. Yes, one in 20.
Several boards were entirely acclaimed. In the Western Quebec school board, which stretches beyond Rouyn-Noranda, by the way, the voter turnout was just under 10 per cent; in the des Draveurs district, it was 3.22. Little wonder Quebec’s minister of education, who might assume no one is watching, is trying to reduce Quebec boards from 72 to 46. In Eastern Ontario, it wasn’t the democracy the Greeks dreamed of. At the French Catholic board that takes in Ottawa and the countryside from Pembroke to Trenton, nine of 11 seats were acclaimed. In the French public board, two trustees were elected with fewer than 1,000 votes (988 and 930). This isn’t a municipal election, it’s Archie vs. Jughead for head cheerleader at Riverdale High. Sheesh.
In Ottawa, the voter participation rates for school trustees would normally be alarming but, given present circumstances, maybe isn’t so bad. A quick Citizen analysis found voter participation in trustee elections was generally in the 15- to 25-per-cent range. (Overall turnout for the mayor’s race was 40 per cent.) So, what’s going on? Over several decades, school boards have become geographically much, much larger while meaningful trustee input has grown smaller and smaller. (Ontario cut the number of school boards in half in 1997.) Little wonder that individual voter engagement has suffered.
In Ontario, trustees no longer set tax rates or decide core curriculum. Teachers’ salaries are more or less provincially set. Money for new schools is not local.
As we read in Monday’s paper, trustees don’t particularly like talking to the media, which, weirdly, makes them a kind of anti-politician. When a hotbutton issue crops up — like Grade 6 students exploring gay rights in a school project — the trustees don’t lead the debate, they run from it.
And this is the elected layer between the paying populace and the administration?
There was a time when being a trustee was a springboard to higher political office. (McGuinty, Cullen and McGarry all went on to other levels of government.) These days, honestly, it sounds like a thankless, miserable job and trustees should be given medals, not scorn, for attending endless meetings in obscurity, in some cases for $6,000 a year. They sound like the tail trying to wag the big dog, who ain’t keen on the hunt.
The media don’t help. When I first started scribbling here, we had two full-time education reporters and another covering
We elected used hydro to have commissioners who oversaw local utilities. They disappeared and it’s not like the lights went out.
colleges and universities. It was unthinkable to miss school board meetings. Now, not so much. So, that’s our bad.
But the question of media access or adequate coverage is really a side issue to a bigger question, one increasingly being asked across Ontario: If we aren’t invested in the issue of who runs school boards, are we even committed to the idea of school boards?
We have a Ministry of Education that sets the big parameters for how children are educated and how much funding schools need to run themselves. Is it such a big leap to think they could take over the rest?
We used to have elected hydro commissioners who oversaw local utilities. They disappeared and it’s not like the lights went out.
New Brunswick ditched its school boards about 15 years ago and installed regional councils to handle parental input. The system, no doubt, has its problems, but stands as proof there are other ways to implement what is, after all, a provincial duty.
A group of Canadian academics studied the governance question in a paper published in 2013. Part of their conclusion:
“Our judgment, based on the findings from this research, is that the continuation of meaningful local educational governance in Canadian jurisdictions requires that elected school boards evaluate how they are situated in relation to the governments that create and fund them and the public who elect them.”
In other words, give trustees real powers — “trust” them with something — or don’t have them at all.