Trustees will be stripped of their powers, but they have no idea if they can attend board meetings, visit schools or meet parents. Some are wondering if they’ll still be able to access work emails and cellphones.
The province’s bombshell announcement Friday that it is taking over four school boards is prompting questions about what that means for the elected officials.
The crackdown comes after investigations into the finances of Ottawa’s public board, the Dufferin-Peel Catholic board and Toronto’s Catholic and public boards.
“I find this to be quite a bad day for parents and students,” said Markus de Domenico, chair of the Toronto Catholic District School Board.
“They are the ones that will suffer, frankly. They will not have a voice at the board. There will be virtually no board meetings. They will not have any way of asking someone to help them, other than to call the school principal and superintendent, which is fine, but they vote for trustees to be their voice. And that voice has been taken away.”
Similarly, Alexis Dawson, trustee with the Toronto District School Board, said the move “strips families and community of their primary resource to having a voice.”
“Trustees are such an important bridge between the community and the school board,” said Dawson, adding she’s helped many families navigate the system.
The supervisor takes over the authority held by the board of trustees. Trustees in the public system will no longer receive an honorarium. Trustees in the affected Catholic boards will receive 25 per cent of their full pay for the duration of supervision — which, for boards in the past, has lasted as long as two years — as they still have decision-making power over denominational issues. That means anything the supervisor is dealing with that could affect the religious side of education needs to be taken to trustees.
In the Thames Valley board, also recently taken over, the supervisor had cancelled almost all board and committee meetings for this year, but spoke at a recent meeting of a special education committee, the London Free Press has reported.
It is unclear how meetings will be handled in the newly affected boards, given trustees have no voting power under supervision.
The ministry-appointed supervisors are: Rohit Gupta for the TDSB; Frank Benedetto for the TCDSB; Robert Plamondon for the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board; and Rick Byers, who’s a former Progressive Conservative MPP, for the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board.
