The Ford government is backing down from its threat to abolish school board trustees in Ontario and will, instead, add limits to their spending, cap the largest boards at 12 members and change how the bureaucracy is managed.
The Putting Student Achievement First Act, tabled by Education Minister Paul Calandra on Monday, changes how school boards in Ontario are run — but leaves elected trustees in place at the public, Catholic and French boards.
“Ontario’s education system must remain focused on its core responsibility: student success,” Calandra said in a statement. “In some school boards, that focus has been lost, and students are paying the price.”
Under the new system, trustees will have less power over the finances of the school boards they run.
The role of elected trustees has been a focus for the minister since he took over the education file last year, sidelining them at eight separate boards and musing about how he could remove them altogether.
At one point, Calandra said he could remove all English public board trustees in “one fell swoop” if he chose to.
The changes the government unveiled on Monday leave the existing system relatively untouched.
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Trustees will still be elected, but capped at a maximum of 12 per board, with five the minimum. The change, the government said, would only impact the Toronto District School Board, which currently has 22 elected trustees.
The honorarium for trustees will be limited to $10,000, with closer scrutiny of expenses. It would also ban school boards from paying certain fees for trustees to belong to certain organizations and for costs to attend “non-essential” conferences, and limit trustees’ discretionary expenses.
The proposed changes largely leave the role of trustees at French-language boards alone.
Within the English and Catholic boards, the government is also changing how the bureaucracy operates.
If the legislation is passed, a new chief executive officer would be in charge of financial decisions, while the chief education officer would handle school decisions. The former would require a business qualification, and the latter would need to have some kind of teaching education.
They would replace the director of education, who is the head of the board’s bureaucracy under the current system.
The new CEO would be in charge of drafting and guiding the new budget through, although elected trustees could still request changes. Officials indicated, however, if trustees made changes the CEO did not approve of, he could push back.
If trustees aren’t able to agree on budgets under the proposed changes, the minister of education could intervene to decide.
— with files from The Canadian Press
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