‘When you dance with the bear, the bear decides when the music stops.” It is an old proverb expressing much the same sentiment as “you gotta know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em.”
The Vancouver School Board, as individuals and as a corporate body, clearly needed to work on its timing in its ongoing dance with the provincial government. As it was, they forgot that the bear in this case was the elected government and that you can only dance for so long around government.
To thoroughly mix my metaphors, it seems in retrospect that the cards the VSB held were not likely to be a winning hand. Not in the game they were playing, anyway.
That’s just what historians refer to as “realpolitik.” The term refers to pragmatism in politics and is sometimes used to imply that politics can be coercive, even Machiavellian.
So be it. Politics, as one B.C. premier explained years ago, is “the art of what works.”
So the Vancouver story will unfold, the assignment or reassignment of executive staff will happen because one individual “official trustee” cannot run a behemoth like District 39, and there will be hardly a ripple detected in the schools.
More important, there is now a significant role for the B.C. School Trustees’ Association to play if school boards are to survive as players in public education.
Like it or not when trustees assume office, they are required to take the oath of office that, among other things, promises: “I will abide by the School Act and I will faithfully perform the duties of my office, and will not allow any private interest to influence my conduct in public matters.”
The School Act, in turn, is pretty clear. Section 111 states that the board “must prepare an annual budget in the form and containing the content specified by the minister and … estimated expenditures in the annual budget must not exceed estimated revenues.”
There is an out for boards — a provision that permits boards short of operating money to run a referendum. Referendums in B.C. have been both notoriously expensive and unsuccessful, and I can’t recall anyone going that route.
So, back to the BCSTA. Perhaps the provincial trustee body should, at that time when various people sign up to run as trustees, publicly remind everybody that an oath of office is something to be taken seriously. More seriously than the temptation to play large “P” politics.
That reminder could include advice about the fact that school trustees are not the provincial opposition. The party that came second in a provincial election is usually the official opposition, and for municipal politicians to throw themselves under the government bus in opposition to some government action or policy doesn’t seem to accomplish much.
School trustees are free to protest as vociferously and as often as they deem worthwhile when they discover that the complex and vital responsibility they have taken on with public education is not funded adequately.
History has demonstrated that getting fired will not accomplish that, and that the government bus will roll on, hardly feeling the bump.
Vancouver might turn out to be a different story because the B.C. Liberal government does not have a firm grip on electoral success come May 9, 2017.
In the meantime, however, the Vancouver trustees, as a result of poor timing, have lost their platform and, presumably, access to the information they once had at their fingertips to demonstrate why their operating budget does not meet the need.
BCSTA might also consider the Trump phenomenon as they advise their members. Donald Trump, as an out-of-control presidential candidate, seems to be doing significant damage to the future possibilities for re-election of Republican politicians further down the ballot come Nov. 8.
By the same token, school trustees who insist on taking it over the edge and getting fired for playing large “P” politics instead doing the job they were elected to do — working with those they hire to improve education — might be taking down the whole notion of why boards of education exist at all.
There have long been those within government who ask that question, and the actions of the VSB have no doubt made it more difficult for the minister of education to convince others, maybe even the premier, that school trustees are an essential part of the public-education system.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
