The New Westminster District Parent Advisory Council will not re-vote on a resolution to ban teachers from running as school trustees, despite recently voting to do so.
The district parent advisory council, a district-wide parent group, sought guidance from the B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils on how to proceed with whether to re-vote on a controversial motion regarding prohibiting acting teachers from being school trustees.
The confederation asked John F. Noonan, a registered parliamentarian (someone who studies parliamentary procedure), for his opinion on whether the re-vote on the teacher ban could go through because the original motion wasn't rescinded; and whether teachers voting on the district parent advisory council constitutes a conflict of interest.
He responded by saying that the motion to ban teachers could not be rescinded because "it is too late," said a memo from New Westminster DPAC chair Wendy Harris.
Action had already been taken with the resolutions - they were forwarded to the confederation for discussion at its next meeting this month, and they had been made public, the memo said.
In a draft DPAC memo, he said that parents - who also happened to be teachers - should have abstained from voting on the motions.
In her memo to parents, Harris noted that "several" of those who voted or spoke in favour of a re-vote on the teacher ban were, in fact, teachers.
The process has been a "learning experience" for DPAC, Harris wrote.
The ongoing saga started a few weeks ago, when New Westminster's district parent advisory council voted to forward a resolution to the B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils to ask the Minister of Education to propose an amendment to the School Act that would disqualify school board employees, including teachers, from running as school trustees, unless the employee takes a leave of absence while running for office and resigns from the position of employment if elected. (Currently in B.C. school board employees are only unable to run in the school district where they work.)
DPAC voted on the motion via email and allowed members just one night to cast their vote. Tige Rains, a Herbert Spencer parent and Coquitlam teacher, was upset with the handling of the original vote.
She and other concerned parents attended the April 23 DPAC meeting to express their concerns on the vote. At that meeting, DPAC members voted 6-3 for a re-vote on the ban motion that was originally introduced as a way to avoid a potential or perceived conflict of interest on the school board.
"They are going to put this out to the PAC reps to consider and send all of their votes back to the chair Wendy Harris, and if there's a change - from yay to nay, she is prepared then to stand up at the BCCPAC meeting and try and withdraw it from the resolutions," Rains told The Record last week.
But when The Record called Harris, she had another version of events and said that the re-vote wasn't going to go ahead until they got "clarification" as to whether they could re-vote.
Responding to the decision to not revote, Rains wrote to Harris, asking, "Do you not want to be confident that the resolutions you are bringing forward (to the Confederation's meeting) - actually reflect the will of the majority of the voters in New West?
"Right now the optics are that a minority group are pushing through their private agenda to remove teachers from acting as trustees. This small group thinks they know better than the majority of people who voted in the recent school board elections who voted in three teachers by an overwhelming majority."
Currently, there are three teachers on the New Westminster school board.
