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For many trustees there’s no election campaign |
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Written by Michael Swan, CR Staff
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Tuesday, 24 October 2006 |
TORONTO - A Catholic Register survey of 30 of Ontario’s 34 Catholic school boards and authorities shows 40 per cent of trustees who will take office this coming December will not have had to mount an election campaign or face a political foe to get the job.
Of 422 Catholics running for the office of trustee, 250 positions will be acclaimed. Many of those acclaimed into the job are among the 201 incumbents currently sitting on school boards and seeking re-election. The incumbents account for 47.6 per cent of all candidates for school trustee.
In a few cases — Atikokan Roman Catholic Separate School Board and the Red Lake Roman Catholic Separate School Board — entire boards have been acclaimed without an election.
Despite new provincial rules allowing boards to substantially increase compensation to better reflect demands on trustees (Toronto Catholic trustees will make $18,675 per year after the Nov. 13 elections), Catholics have not rushed to do battle for the only political office which relates directly to their faith.
“It could be perceived there’s a bit of apathy out there. Maybe there is. I don’t know,” said Ontario Catholic School Trustees’ Association president Bernard Murray. “We accept what’s there. The main thing that I see is that you get good people to do the job.”
According to Murray, a rate of acclamations that assures the return of experienced, incumbent trustees is good for Catholic education.
“I don’t think we would want 100-per-cent change in any one year,” Murray said. “If a trustee is doing his job and serving the people of his community then that’s a healthy sign.”
“It’s depressing,” is education economist Hugh Mackenzie’s take on the rate of acclamations. Mackenzie, who produces an annual report on Ontario’s education funding formula for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, believes would-be politicians may be shying away from the job because the current funding formula has squeezed all the meaningful decision-making out of the position of trustee.
Fine tuning the funding formula this year eliminated the provincial grant to boards for local priorities. That’s not really a loss because boards never really got to spend that money on any local priorities in the first place, said Mackenzie. Instead, they used it to make up for funding shortfalls in provincially mandated areas, such as transportation, special education and teacher salaries.
“If the school boards actually had the resources to do something, that’s one thing, but if the school boards don't have the resources actually to do anything one might wonder,” Mackenzie said.
With boards restricted to spending on provincial priorities — smaller classes, student success teachers to cut dropout rates, literacy education — the trustees have been reduced to referring parents to board staff when problems arise, according to Mackenzie.
“Trustees have been kind of maneuvered into a place where they act as kind of ombudsmen for the parents they represent,” said Mackenzie. “They really don't engage themselves in the big picture decisions that the board makes.”
The big picture usually comes into focus at budget time, and that's where trustees have to deal with the funding formula. Over the years the formula has become so complex that few trustees actually understand where their board’s money comes from, or what the trustees can do with it, said Mackenzie.
“There probably aren’t more than 10 people who don't work for the Ministry (of Education) that actually have a comprehensive perspective and understanding of the funding formula, and many of those are former employees of the ministry who are working for boards,” he said.
Murray does not believe trustees are overwhelmed by the complexity of funding issues.
“The trustees I come across in my position with respect to the trustee’s association, for the most part they are very knowledgeable. We are living in a time of change and that puts a lot of pressure on people to keep up with what the changes are and to understand it,” he said.
It’s the role of the OCSTA to ensure trustees across the province do know what they’re voting on come budget time, he said.
When it comes to trustees dealing with the complexities of the provincial funding formula, Mackenzie thinks the situation is sad. Other than helping individual parents navigate through educational bureaucracy, the lack of options leaves school boards with what Mackenzie calls “Howard Beal moments.” Howard Beal was the character in the 1976 movie Network who declared, “I’m mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more.”
Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board has had the most public Howard Beal moment this year, refusing to pass a balanced budget and inviting the province to take over financial management of its 141 schools serving 89,000 students. The Ministry of Education will pay Norbert Hartmann $1,500 per day to sort out budget complexities in Dufferin-Peel, where the Catholic schools are poised to spend $16.6 million more than they receive from the province.
Special assistance teams will soon report to Toronto’s Catholic and public school boards who face $34 million and $84.5 million deficits respectively.
For about 150 trustee positions across the province the final word on who will grapple with the complex funding formula still comes down to the voters. To vote for a Catholic school trustee one must be on the voters’ list registered as a Catholic and a separate school elector. There are 29 Catholic district school boards in Ontario, plus five Catholic school authorities. The 250 elected trustees on the boards operate 1,325 schools with more than 600,000 students under the tutelage of 36,000 teachers.
(With files from Vanessa Bertone.)
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