N.S. unprepared for school advisory council changes: NDP
Education minister says things have gone relatively smoothly this year and should go smoother in the future
The Nova Scotia NDP says government emails they recently obtained through a Freedom of Information request show the Department of Education was not ready to hand local School Advisory Councils enhanced roles in the system last winter when the province axed its English-language school boards.
Claudia Chender, the NDP’s education critic, also said the email trails in the heavily redacted documents reveal questions continued within the government well into the 2018-2019 school term about what role SACs would have and guidelines for funding grants they would receive.
“What we discovered, looking at that FOIPOP was, as we had suspected, the announcement of funding directly to SACs that was made shortly after the dissolution of the school boards, and sort of promoted as an alternative method — a superior method — of local decision making, was, in fact, a stunt,” Chender said in a telephone interview.
“When they made that announcement, they hadn’t done a jurisdictional scan, they hadn’t done any research, they didn’t even know how SACs were budgeted and operationalized at that time, and then, as if to add insult to injury, we also discovered that the decision or the request to explore funding directly to SACs came not from the minister for education but from the premier’s office.
“So, there’s a question of who’s on first, who’s running this show, anyway? Obviously, the premier is running the province but we would certainly hope that the minister of education was running the department.”
“…ALWAYS GOING TO BE
SOME HICCUPS”
Education Minister Zach Churchill said the roll-out of the governing changes has gone relatively smoothly considering the extent of them.
“Of course, there’s always going to be some hiccups and communication challenges when you’re making big changes but we’re in a really good place,” Churchill said last week.
He said the department engaged and consulted the SACs after Dr. Avis Glaze submitted her report on the education system that became the basis of the province’s vision.
“This is Year 1 of some really major changes in a lot of areas in education. The education system has not experienced such transformational changes in at least 30 years, some would argue even longer, and change is a process, it’s not an event.”
— Education Minister Zach Churchill
“We ... talked to them about how they saw their enhanced role in the system and where they wanted their focus to be and that led to the guidelines we developed,” Churchill said.
“Those were provided to SACs in October and every SAC in the province had access to their funding by the end of November.”
He said SACs each received $5,000, plus an additional one dollar for every student in their respective schools.
For Jennifer Salib Huber, the SAC chairwoman at Hawthorne Elementary School in Dartmouth, the timing and implementation of the guidelines is too compressed for comfort.
An SAC, made up of parents and community volunteers along with school staff, aims to meet six times a year, she said, but storms or other factors often result in that figure cut to four or five.
She said her SAC didn’t get the guidelines on funding distribution until mid-December. She also said the funds have to be used by the end of March.
“It just didn’t leave us a lot of time to really poll the teachers, poll the community, work with home and school and decide how best these funds are going to be distributed,” Salib Huber said.
Churchill said the SAC should have received the guidelines in October when the department sent them out.
“Although I do recognize that communicating with volunteer organizations like SACs can be challenging where people are dealing with varying pressures and situations and there’s different levels of engagement between the volunteers, so I’m not sure what could have happened there, but we did send those out from the department in mid-October,” he said.
He also said SACs do have until the end of the school year to allocate the funding, contrary to Salib Huber’s understanding.
“Communication is always a challenging thing,” Churchill said. “We have to keep working with them and doing better in that regard.”
A SIGNIFICANT SHIFT
“It’s a significant shift from the roles and responsibilities of the SACs in prior years so it’s definitely going to be a learning process for all of us.”
The funds are to be used if teachers need resources in addition to what is already there or a program the SAC wants to implement, or they want to do up posters or something to increase awareness of the program, Salib Huber said.
She was unable to say whether any such needs had to be put off early in the school year until the guidelines came out.
“That’s a difficult question to answer because this is a new part of the SAC’s role so we really don’t have any precedent or any prior years’ experience. I think that moving forward as the school comes up with ideas or as needs are identified that could help to supplement the learning environment, we’ll be able to put those into notes for the next year or to think about.”
Churchill said there are now people in place to serve as designated points of contact for SACs, “so if they do have any questions, if they do need any help understanding the guidelines or interpreting them, there are contact people that they should be aware of in the regions that can help them navigate those questions.”
Churchill added it should be no surprise that Premier Stephen McNeil took an interest.
“Of course the premier’s office is engaged in conversations we’re having around education reform and investment,” he said. “This has been a premier that has been very focused on improving our education system and if it wasn’t for that focus from him, we would not be in a position during a time of fiscal restraint where we’ve seen such an increase in education investment.”
As for the emails, the education minister said it’s “regular stuff” for MLAs to have questions and others to do their best to answer them.
He expects smoother going in the future.
“This is Year 1 of some really major changes in a lot of areas in education. The education system has not experienced such transformational changes in at least 30 years, some would argue even longer, and change is a process, it’s not an event.”