É«É«À²

“The work they’re doing right now, they will not be doing in the future — there is absolutely no way,” Calandra told the Star in an interview. “The model just has to be updated, one way or another.”

However, he added, “any change that I do make with respect to trustees, it will be accompanied by a very robust mechanism” for parents to “have their voices heard if there is an issue that they need to have addressed with their child in the school.”

The revamp “is all about making it better for students, parents and teachers,” he said.

But critics warn that eliminating elected trustees won’t solve any problems — and could create a whole set of new ones. They point to places like PEI or New Brunswick, where trustees were reinstated after public outcry, or Nova Scotia, where they are set to make a return after the education centres that took over their work left families feeling shut out of the system.

“We heard from colleagues on the ground, and certainly from families and employees in the sector that, predictably, there was almost an immediate — and now, sustained — loss of parental engagement and community accountability that had existed when the locally elected school boards were there,” said Alan Campbell, president of the Canadian School Boards’ Association and a Manitoba trustee, where communities fought off a similar move by the government there.

“It has continued to be a problem for families in Nova Scotia.”

Campbell said trustees know their communities, know where resources need to go — from nutrition programs to help for special needs students — and “to remove that piece of the puzzle would be catastrophic for Ontario public schools.”

On the flip side, there are some trustees across Ontario who bicker, behave badly and bog down board business. A group of four in the Brantford area cost their Catholic board more than $150,000 on a controversial, first-class summer trip to Italy last year to purchase religious artwork for schools.

Just last week, a York Catholic trustee spent time at a board meeting unsuccessfully  approved “to re-establish Christ as the only way, the only truth and the only lifestyle,” saying students’ souls are endangered. He wanted the director to examine “secular practices” in schools and provide a list of artifacts, paintings and literature, seeking a plan by the end of the year to remove all “anti-Christian elements.” He also wanted Bible training for teachers. 

While small in number, these situations keep cropping up and garnering big attention — bringing disrepute to boards — and amid ongoing struggles to balance their books, Calandra swooped in last spring and placed an unprecedented five under provincial control. 

The province is using the “stupidity” of the Brantford trustees’ actions “as a general smear of all trustees,” said Markus de Domenico, chair of the É«É«À² Catholic District School Board, which is now run by a supervisor.

“It’s a way of demonizing hundreds and hundreds of trustees across Ontario because of the bad behaviour of a few.”

His Catholic board’s budget woes can be traced back to provincial underfunding, especially in special education, he added, noting no financial mismanagement was found during two different, independent probes. 

“It doesn’t take a $360,000-a-year supervisor to figure out that if you shortchange special education by $20 million, the board is going to be short $20 million,” he said. 

But Michael Totten, head of the York Catholic teachers’ union local, wasted no time in reaching out to Calandra’s office “to express my displeasure with some of what our board of trustees does, and how it was contrary to the minister’s comments about making sure money in our schools is going back to our students.”

He pointed to ongoing legal costs paid by the board in light of a judicial review of disciplinary measures against a trustee, that it lost.

The board told the Star it has paid out about $150,000 in lawyer fees and a settlement; a source, speaking confidentially to discuss the case, told the Star it kept fighting it despite at least two legal opinions warning it would not win.

While all teachers’ unions support having elected trustees, Totten believes they need stronger provincial oversight. 

“It is a good amount of money that has been used to just deal with squabbles amongst themselves,” he added. “Our students are losing out because of that.”

Trustees, who run in municipal elections every four years, are advocates for parents and communities and are, overall, responsible for policies ensuring student achievement and well-being. They are in charge of allocating government funding and are expected to balance the books each year.

They hire the director of education, and no one else, which Totten said leaves the director at their mercy.

At the York Catholic board, one leader lasted just a month.

“They hired him, they didn’t like him, and then all of a sudden he was gone,” he said. “We’ve been through so many directors in the past few years ... it does affect what goes on in our classrooms.”

Calandra said any governance changes will be revealed before the end of this year, and stressed he has no plans to do away with the Catholic and French systems as part of the reforms.

“I could just absolutely, completely disagree that people’s only access to the education system is through a trustee that (most) of the people never voted for and couldn’t name,” he said, referring to the typically low election turnout. 

Having trustees, he added, “is a very old model.” They lost the ability to tax almost three decades ago, and given most of the budget is spent on salaries, “they argue over a very, very small fraction of the budget that they can manipulate, and often fill their time with things that have nothing to do with providing students a better education, that only lead to division in our schools.”

In the Near North District School Board, uproar over a new Parry Sound school that isn’t ready also caught Calandra’s eye, with teens forced to learn online at home this fall. Trust for the way the situation was handled.

However, speaking generally about any upset with elected officials, Campbell said “there’s a strong argument to be made that every single one of those school board trustees will be held democratically accountable” at the ballot box.

But senior staff at a handful of Ontario school boards who have worked closely with trustees — and who spoke to the Star on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal — said trustee infighting and interference in areas beyond their mandate is a problem, and most lack the expertise to run such complex organizations. (Though such expertise is not required of elected officials at any level of government.)

Giving power instead to appointed officials or senior administrators who know the education system means they “are going to be held accountable for their decisions, and if parents are not happy with a decision that’s made, there will be avenues to escalate their concerns so that it does get addressed properly,” assured one insider.

But based on what they’ve seen elsewhere, parents are still worried.

“This is going to be a total annihilation of all parent voices without our trustees delegating for us, advocating for us, pushing for things to get done. They know who to talk to. They know the ins, the outs — they know all of that,”  said Jennifer Di Francesco, who chairs the parent involvement committee at the É«É«À² Catholic District School Board.

“Parents work every day. We have maybe multiple children to look after, activities at the end of the day,” she added. “We can’t be doing what trustees do, and that’s what they specialize in. That’s why we elect them.”

Stephanie Donaldson, a former É«É«À² trustee who is now executive director of the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association, said boards here do well in terms of student achievement when compared to other jurisdictions, which “continues to prove that (the current system) works.”

De Domenico said appointing officials to run boards is no answer, and electing citywide trustees instead of ward by ward would not work in a large place like É«É«À².

Sue Winton, an education professor at York University, said placing the five boards under supervision has already had an impact on parents.

“If I’m interested in something that happens at the (É«É«À² District School Board), I can watch the meetings that are recorded and posted. I can read the minutes of those meetings,” she said. “With a supervisor, there’s a real concern about the loss of transparency around how decisions have been made, who was consulted and who had the opportunity to influence (the outcome).”

It would be “reckless” to remove trustees, said New Democrat MPP Chandra Pasma, her party’s education critic, calling what’s happened in other provinces a “warning sign.”

“Parents (will) have nowhere to turn but an out-of-touch minister at Queen’s Park, or inexperienced political insiders who don’t have our kids’ best interests in mind,” Pasma said.