It's 10 o'clock. Do you know what your trustee is doing?
As a teachers' strike looms, Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»parents brace for the worst in a school district bleeding students. Back in 2000, 58,145 students attended Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»public schools. In 2012, enrolment sits at 55,994. Yet during that same 12-year period, the Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»School Board budget, paid by taxpayers, has ballooned from $357.8 million to $488.2 million.
"Bureaucracy," wrote late American author Mary McCarthy, "has become the modern form of despotism." The school board is a bureaucratic colossus, headquartered in a glassy building at Broadway and Fir, expanding far beyond its walls.
According to board data, roughly 3,700 non-teachers work in a district of 110 schools. That's roughly 33 non-teachers for every school. Nine board trustees from Vancouver's three major civic parties funnel taxpayer millions to plethora of programs. Mandarin bilingualism. Several aboriginal projects (and an upcoming aboriginal-only school). Arts programs and "outdoor schools" with skiing, ocean kayaking and rock climbing. According to the board's website, something called the Circle of Care refugee program serves the "settlement needs of young refugee children_ and their primary care givers."
With a program for every problem, there's never enough money.
In 2010, provincial comptroller general Cheryl Wenezenki-Yolland blamed the board's budget deficit ($17 million then, an estimated $14 million now) on mismanagement by bureaucrats and politicking by school board trustees who choose "advocacy at the expense of stewardship."
Simply put, parents, who pay the taxes and supply the children for Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»schools, have lost control of their public education system. But they're not alone.
In Alberta, as populations in Calgary and Edmonton climb, school boards grow exponentially with predictable results. "Finding out about the process, finding out where a parent has an impact on the process, all of those things are really kept close to the vest," says Larry Leach, speaking by phone from his home in northeast Calgary.
Last spring, when his child's school faced overcrowding due to a proposed nearby school closure, Leach, an advertising consultant, and a handful of other parents formed the Association for Responsive Trusteeship in Calgary Schools (ARTICS). The school was eventually saved, and thanks partly to ARTICS and a similar group in Edmonton, two weeks ago Alberta Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk promised a new era of transparency with "very detailed" school board expense reports posted online. Leach hopes provincial measures expose waste and trustee "secrecy" about board budgets. "That's the number one thing with parents and citizens in general-taxpayers, whether they are parents or not."
Speaking of taxpayer money. Back in Vancouver, this school year the Diversity Team, a five-person thought-squad established in 2005 to teach teachers "inclusive teaching" practices, will receive $862,884 from the school board. Of course, most parents don't know about the Diversity Team. It operates under the radar. In fact, following my 2008 column about the team, its web page disappeared from the board website.
Unlike Calgary's non-partisan school board, Vancouver's board is a partisan viper's nest ruled by two-term Vision chair Patti Bacchus who mixes partisanship with political activism. Last fall, Out in Schools, a program authored by gay advocates, included a website with graphic elements in its literature. Bacchus helped spin the situation, and in the end, censured two rival NPA trustees who dared note Out in Schools' lack of board oversight.
In July, despite protests from NPA trustees, Vision replaced fired school board communications manager David Weir with Kurt Heinrich, a former Vision operative whose past duties include attacking the NPA via Twitter.
Yes, it's all about control. But there's plenty of blame to go around. In Vancouver, the media rarely digs deep into school board business and parent apathy emboldens professional activists. The district includes a high percentage of Asian families who, in some schools, comprise the majority. Generally, Asian parents demand classroom excellence from their kids, and unless board mischief affects student grades, are unlikely to interfere. Reading, writing and arithmetic-that's what's important.
And therein lies the lesson. Get back to basics. Dismantle the bureaucracy, the kids don't need it. Fire this school board and begin anew.
Twitter: @MarkHasiuk
