On Saturday, some important decisions about B.C.’s public education system will be determined by voter preference. That’s the day for regional, municipal and school board elections.
The turnout will be low, perhaps less than 25 per cent of eligible voters. And that’s too bad, because a poor turnout will be taken by some observers at higher levels of the provincial government as an indication that it doesn’t really matter who is elected to run local school districts. People don’t really care.
So why bother getting up from breakfast and going out in the cold to vote for a political entity that has more or less been sidelined by a centralist provincial government?
Well, based on recent history, there are some good reasons to bother.
Trustees were shoved aside when it came to the recent imbroglio between the teachers’ union and government-appointed negotiators.
Perhaps things would have been no better had there been a stronger trustee voice on the B.C. Public Schools Employers’ Association. But it is difficult to imagine that the presence of trustees, many of whom are close to their community school systems and their teachers, could have made the tenor of those discussions worse.
But no. The government adhered to the now-discarded organizational idea that matters can be run more objectively by people who have no personal stake in the outcome. As a result, there was no meeting of the minds, and the schools were closed for a month.
Perhaps that gets to the heart of it. If local communities are ever to regain a voice in the future of their education systems, it will be done by voting in the candidates who have a significant personal investment in their communities and in public education.
They will not be the candidates put up by one of the unions employed in the education sector. They represent employee interests — that’s all to the good, but not for school-board priorities.
They will not be the folks who see being a school trustee as a stepping-stone to future political glory on a bigger stage.
Nor will they be the folks who are going to “fix” the system and everybody in it, no matter what the collateral damage.
No, the best candidates will not be difficult to spot at election forums.
You’ll know them by their reputations for past unselfish commitment to their communities. They’ll be people long held in community respect, whose sole motivation has always been to make the world and the education system better.
They’ll be the people whose passion for public education is apparent when they speak.
They will be the people who see that step No. 1 will be the re-establishment of a civil and more productive relationship between local government and the provincial government.
They’ll be people with something to contribute, such as the Saanich school board, which put serious money into the development of a better student-information system to replace the flawed government system, originally supposed to cost $16 million but which eventually ballooned to $97 million.
Saanich trustees invested $1.5 million, only to find that the government preferred to sign a 12-year deal with an offshore company, Fujitsu, to deliver a new B.C. student-information system at a cost of up to $9.4 million a year.
Trustee candidates should be asked questions about this kind of thing. But if the answers indicate a taste for further warfare and distrust between local boards and big government, or personal agendas or political ambition, they should be assigned to the “not yet ready” voter file.
“If you are elected, how will things in the education system, provincially and here in our community within the next three years, be better off because you were our representative?”
That’s the question all candidates should face, and their answers should be clear evidence as to why they want to be school trustees and what they will bring that will move the system forward.
They will be the people who make it worthwhile on Nov. 15 to get up from breakfast and go to vote for the future of B.C. public education.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
