OCDSB Board of Trustees is Dysfunctional
CURRY AND DENLEY ARE RIGHT – THE
OTTAWA-CARLETON BOARD OF SCHOOL TRUSTEES IS DYSFUNCTIONAL
Cathy Curry (recently resigned OCDSB school trustee) and
Randall Denley are right. The OCDSB board of trustees is dysfunctional. The
trustees generate a tremendous workload for its professional staff through
endless meetings, ineffectual consultation processes, and a surfeit of
committees. While I don’t doubt that most school trustees are earnest and want
to do good for the students whose education they are required to provide, the
board as currently constituted is not capable of doing so.
What qualifications do you need to oversee a $700 million
annual budget spread over 150 schools and 10,000 staff? To run for office you need to be a Canadian
citizen, not be in jail or a judge, and be at least 18 years of age. No
experience necessary.
How are school trustees chosen? Trustees are elected every
four years at the fall municipal election. About half of the electorate vote in
municipal elections, and only half of these vote for school board trustee. So
most trustees are either acclaimed or chosen by 10 to 15% of the electorate.
How do they get elected? The biggest factor is name recognition which is why
incumbents usually get re-elected. Position on the ballot is another factor.
Since many people who vote for trustee do so without knowing the individuals or
the issues, a candidate has an advantage by being at the top of the ballot,
less advantage if you are second on the ballot, and a bit less if you are at
the bottom of the ballot. Those in the middle are disadvantaged. Since ballots
are arranged in alphabetical order, having a family name starting near the
beginning of the alphabet helps you get elected.
Being a school trustee at the OCDSB pays you $15,000, which
is not bad for attending two board meetings a month during the school year. But
most trustees turn this into the equivalent of a full time job. In addition to
the two decision-making meetings per month, there are ad hoc, advisory and
standing committee meetings. There is a trustee meeting just about every weekday
evening of the month. To be knowledgeable, you also have to read, understand
and absorb the hundreds of pages of documents generated by the staff every
month, be seen and involved by attending school council meetings in your
constituency as well as other school events such as concerts and graduation
ceremonies, and read and respond to hundreds of emails and telephone calls.
Although trustees have no individual authority (they exercise authority only as
a corporate body through bylaws passed in public formal sessions of the board),
they can exercise considerable individual influence both with school staff and
with senior officials.
Trustees elected to the conservative former Carleton Board
of Education, a board that relied to a large extent on provincial grants,
tended to act as a policy making body and left the day to day operation of the
schools to the professional staff. Trustees at the affluent and independent-minded
former Ottawa Board of Education, who,
with its rich tax did not rely on provincial grants, tended to get themselves
more involved in the application of the policies they passed, in other words in
administrative tasks. Since the amalgamation of the two boards into the
Ottawa-Carleton District School Board in 1998, with the provincial government
removing trustees’ right to set the local school tax rate and with the
government taking more and more direct control over funding, curriculum, and
contract negotiations, there has been less and less rationale for having school
trustees and less work for them to do. To compensate, trustees followed the
former OBE example and have taken on more of what used to be administrative work.
Denley is right – the past 14 years have seen more single
issue grass roots advocates elected to the board who have as their motivation
wresting control from the bureaucrats. This is not democracy, it is anarchy.
Hydro boards no longer exist. Hospitals, colleges and universities do not have
boards elected at large. The responsibility of providing education to 75,000
students is too important to be left to people who have no experience in policy
making, financial management, and who fundamentally do not understand or who do
not want to understand the role of an elected board to provide general policy direction
and oversight to the professional staff.
Given the monumental changes in public education in recent
years, a review of school board governance in Ontario is overdue.
Lorne M. Rachlis, M.Sc., Ed. D.
Retired Director of Education, Ottawa-Carleton District
School Board and
FormerSchool Trustee Candidate
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