School boards and parent councils will remain no matter what happens to elected trustees, Education Minister Paul Calandra said, offering some new clues on his plans to overhaul the system.
“For the last 50 years, governments of all stripes have continuously downloaded responsibility for education to school boards and trustees, who neither have the ability or the tools that they need to actually manage the system, and the province has to step up and assume responsibility for those things … and delivering a province-wide system of education that every parent can rely on is our responsibility,” he said on CBC Radio’s “Metro Morning” Friday.
“It’s time we stepped up and did that,” he added. “I’m not considering at this point … the elimination of school boards at all. But the trustees’ position is what I’m 100 per cent looking at — the elimination of the trustee position.”
Calandra also later ruled out rumours the system would be reduced to four centralized boards — English public, English Catholic, French public, and French Catholic — from the current 72 locally based ones.
Around the country, a handful of provinces have considered or implemented school systems without elected officials, though most have reinstated them, or plan to.
While trustees are still the most common model for school board governance in Canada and the U.S., in a handful of American jurisdictions — including New York City — the mayor is responsible and appoints people to run the system.
What could a system without elected trustees look like? Here are a few of the alternatives other jurisdictions have implemented:
Quebec: Francophone schools have 15-member appointed boards of directors in each of the 60 school service centres under reforms first introduced in 2020. The boards include parents with children in the system, staff and community members; each centre also has a parent committee comprising representatives from each school, and each school has a governing board. (Amid ongoing legal challenges, anglophone boards continue to be represented by elected trustees.)
Nova Scotia: The province eliminated elected trustees seven years ago in English boards, replacing them with “regional centres,” each with an appointed regional executive director. A 12-member appointed provincial advisory council was also created, and schools have an advisory council comprising parents, school staff and community members. However, given parental concerns about feeling left out of the system, the provincial government has promised to return to boards of elected trustees. (The French-speaking system still has elected trustees.)
New York City: In 2002, after a number of controversies in the largest board in the U.S., control was handed over to the mayor, with an appointed board of education/panel of educational policy, according to a state government evaluation of governance of city schools. Over the years, different councils have been added to give parents and students a greater voice and the chance to make recommendations, including on special education. According to the evaluation, questions around parents’ engagement remain, and there is no clear indication of improved achievement under this model.
In Manitoba, a move to eliminate elected trustees did not go ahead because of public outcry, said Alan Campbell, a trustee and president of the Canadian School Boards’ Association, noting that unlike Ontario there is one French board for the entire province.
“In terms of ensuring that individual school communities have a say over what’s happening in individual schools, there is no other level of local government that can offer this same sort of representation in any way, let alone more efficiently” than the trustee system, he told the Star.
Katina Pollock, an education professor and researcher at Western University — who is also a former Nova Scotia teacher — said based on her research for the school boards’ association, there are “less avenues for families to be involved in decision-making in public education at the local level” without trustees.
While the Nova Scotia government had an advisory council to address the need for public input, Pollock said it met twice in 2018 and that in her research she could find no other public records of meeting.
Parents who escalated their concerns often waited months for the education centre to respond, she added, “and that kind of responsiveness is not good enough when students are only in school for 10 months of the year.”
Calandra has addressed concerns around parent participation, saying if there are no elected trustees, he will make sure they can have an opportunity to provide input.
This “is all about making it better for students, parents and teachers,” he told the Star in an interview. “There’s absolutely no way that I won’t improve the system by which people can access decision-makers in school boards across the province.”
Pollock said the mayoral model wouldn’t easily work, especially in a big city like Toronto, where leaders already have enough issues to deal with.
“I would contend that most people who live in urban centre or even in rural centres would offer that their municipalities, both operationally and bureaucratically but also from a governance level, already have all they can contend with,” added Campbell.
Calandra has repeatedly said he won’t consider doing away with the separate Catholic and French systems.
Avis Glaze, a well-regarded educator in Ontario who was the province’s first chief student achievement officer, said a possible solution here could be a hybrid model, where some trustees are appointed for their expertise, and some elected, to preserve democracy. But educators must be a part of the discussions in shaping the new system, she added.
Having appointed leaders means “you can get the people with the skills you need to help the system improve, and then have a section that are elected by their communities,” Glaze added, “because the grassroots part of it is very important as well.”
