Kelly Slade-Kerr, a New Westminster school trustee, gingerly waded into the Vancouver School Board mess last week.
Slade-Kerr put forward a motion calling on the provincial government to hold byelections in Vancouver and the North Okanagan-Shuswap (the other board under public administration) before May 30, 2017. She made references to democracy, but fell short of lambasting the province for replacing the elected trustees with a public administrator.
The school board didn’t pick up the hot potato though, and, in fact, opted to move the motion to its November meeting.
The Vancouver school board was the most outspoken and openly political of current school boards. It drew a line in the sand and decided to fight.
In the past, New Westminster has come pretty close to the same position, but it has always stepped back from the full-on battle, or had administrators who could work the back channels and diplomatically negotiate matters.
It can be a very thin line between being an advocate or a steward for education.
In Peter Milburn’s “Forensic Audit of Board Expenses and Review of the Vancouver School Board” report released last week, he writes: “There is an inherent conflict in the outlook of an ‘advocate’ versus a ‘steward; advocacy is most successful when it can be demonstrated that more funding is required to successfully provide any defined program. On the other hand, stewardship involves the appropriate oversight, planning, and management of the available resources to successfully achieve the entity’s strategic goals. However, the more successfully the resources available are managed, the harder it is for advocates to demonstrate that more funding is required.”
Some might call this a “chicken and egg” quandary. If school boards did receive what they consider truly adequate funding, would they continue to be “advocates” rather than “stewards.” And if school trustees are elected based on their party affiliation eg: NDP or Liberal, with a baked-in position on education funding, how can they not call themselves partisan advocates?
Milburn writes, “There are examples of school districts in similar jurisdictions where trustees elected on a party slate successfully carried out their appropriate … responsibilities. It would appear that the most important determinant of success is the will of the trustees to work together.”
We’d like to think he’s referring to New Westminster. Only time will tell.
