Quote:
Originally Posted by SebC
Care to elaborate? What do you propose as an alternative?
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Well I just think that the board is ineffective, not transparent and virtually unaccountable. Frankly, many of the same things that I ran against three years ago are still going on today; which isn't to say that I was right about everything but to point out that basically no progress has been made whatsoever.
The CBE holds more meetings in private than they do in public; the ones that are public are moved to be during the day when parents with school-aged children can't even be there, let alone participate in a meaningful sense. The governance model that the board has adopted puts much of the power and control in the hands of administration, and thats actually not a concern in and of itself; but then why have a local board overseeing this? Why not just have a provincial board overseeing each board? Why do we need so many layers of bureaucracy?(I'm also in favour of amalgamating the separate and public schools, for much the same reason)
Then we have issues where a number of the trustees represent wards that they don't live in. Some say "whats the big deal?", and that's fair. But then why have a board in Calgary at all? Its not sensible to have dozens of school boards who are all administering the same programs to the same general population and elect them in wards which have no meaningful boundary.
When I see that (yet again) the admin budget is poised to increase, yet the number of teachers is cut, I fail to see how the priorities relating to teaching the students and working towards the best possible student outcomes are being considered. Last year school fees jumped for many parents because the board was short-funded by the province. Parents were not pleased, but we swallowed hard and wrote the cheque (on top of the dozens of other "asks" for money we see each year). Then the board recovers the funds from the province (you might recall this as a major slight to the Wildrose party who said that Redford was buying votes). Fair enough. That, at least in my eyes, put the board in a spot where they had collected millions in new fees, and at the end of the day received all of the funding they expected. Parents money ought to have been returned at that time....but obviously that never happened!
So why do I think they're unaccountable? Well I understand that there are elections every three (soon to be four) years. Thing is, most people don't even know what a school trustee is, never mind what they should do in their position. The average voter wouldn't be able to tell you a good trustee from a bad one! Its definitely the "other" ballot people get when they walk into the voting station, and these races get basically no coverage behind mayoralty and aldermanic races. An exercise in futility to say the least!
Calgary Education
