In recent years, the muscle of the elected school board trustee has atrophied across Canada.Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press
Ontario’s Ministry of Education has told elected trustees at five school boards to step aside in recent months, citing financial mismanagement significant enough to warrant a supervisor stepping in to oversee day-to-day operations.
In media sound bites, Ontario Education Minister Paul Calandra has zeroed in on the expenses of certain school board trustees – ranging from the mundane (a $15 milkshake and a $145 Apple Watch band were expensed by a trustee in Toronto) to the more egregious (four members of a Brantford, Ont., school board spent $190,000 on a trip to Italy last year) – all to make a greater point that the province’s education system needs a major overhaul.
He’s right, but for a far more important reason than what a trustee might be ordering late at night from McDonald’s. Abolishing elected school boards would be less a move against democratic oversight than an acknowledgment of reality: the school board model is outdated, and represents faux accountability.
Beginning in the early 19th century, the small, mostly rural settler communities of pre-Confederation Canada were locally represented in the education system by school board trustees with a modicum of power. Trustees could set taxation levels for parents to enroll their children. They could hire teachers, and even determine curriculums.
But it has been nearly three decades since the era of the taxing (and therefore relevant) trustee ended in Ontario. The province’s school system had over 120 boards in the 1990s when premier Mike Harris came to power. Mr. Harris – in part citing very real issues with funding discrepancies between regions – determined that boards must be consolidated into larger entities (today there are 72), with oversight of funding allocation, curriculums, taxation, contract negotiations and other powers moving to the Education Ministry.
Mr. Harris created a more streamlined education system, but he also kicked the all-important question of school-board governance down the road. The role of trustee remained on municipal ballots, but gutted of power.
Since then, the muscle of the elected school board trustee has atrophied across Canada. Voter turnout reflects the problem: on average, acclamation has accounted for many trustee roles being filled in recent municipal elections across Ontario (34 per cent), Nova Scotia (63 per cent), Manitoba (46 per cent) and Alberta (49 per cent). The lack of interest comes down to the reduced ability of trustees to make meaningful decisions, and woeful compensation.
As trustee powers have shrunk, the controversy they’ve managed to stir up has grown. In Manitoba, B.C., Ontario and Alberta, fringe trustee candidates promoting transphobia, book bans and pandemic conspiracy theories have brought unnecessary turmoil to school board elections and operations. A dispute over the presence of police in schools at a B.C. board led to an 18-month standoff between trustees who didn’t want them there, and parents in the Greater Victoria area who did. The NDP government eventually stepped in and took over.
In May, Mr. Calandra introduced Bill 33, which he says will mean some elected boards being scrapped (he clarified that no changes will be made to French or Roman Catholic boards). What the new governance structures will look like is not yet clear, but Ontario has an opportunity to end the pretense that elected school boards provide real accountability.
In Ontario currently, the only person trustees are responsible for hiring is the director of education. This duty could easily become the purview of the ministry. All other trustee responsibilities – such as attendance at expulsion committees, school closures, fielding parental complaints – are already attended to by professional administrators who are accountable to the minister. They should be able to continue carrying out their duties with one less layer of red tape.
Vigorous reform would end the charade of off-loading parents’ concerns to increasingly powerless trustees, rather than the existing chain of command within the school system. Overhauling the outdated trustee model will make it much clearer to parents that the government is ultimately responsible for the education of their children. If a student is struggling, or parents are unhappy, concerns can be readily addressed at the school level, or higher ranking administrators.
Failing that, they can seek out answers from those to whom administrators must answer – people who actually have had to win an election.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify that the acclamation accounts for nearly half of trustee roles being filled in municipal elections when averaged across Ontario, Nova Scotia, Manitoba and Alberta.