Diary of a Mad Trustee November 4th 2009 Open Board Meeting

Our Trustee Eden

Principiis Obsta…Finem Respice

Resist the Beginning…Consider the End

Fortunately for the sake of my extremely fragile mental well being, I often find tunes running through my head which fittingly accompany whatever may be unravelling at the board table. Sometimes the score from the “Valachi Papers”, sometimes the closing orchestral swell from “Judgement at Nuremburg” or the enduring classic “Muskrat Love” when things have really taken a dive.

 It was tempting tonight to sing ‘We’re Off to see the Minister ‘along with a well stocked cast of drunken and degenerate munchkins but it seems we are not off to see the minister – at least some of us aren’t.

Board decision to ask for this visit, board letter request as I recall – somehow it never occurred to me some would stay behind. But it is already in the works possibly because the minister has no wish to see all our happy hopeful faces. She would like to see the really serious ones – the ones who understand the way the world works. Who can blame her?

The correct position for all trustees would be to stand on a principle; as we are all elected to act on behalf of community, we are all- according to the precepts of parliamentary procedure- equal and we all sought this meeting to further the aim of seeking full funding for our schools – we should all be involved in preparing for this meeting and we should all be in attendance rather than establishing an arbitrary division between those who should speak for Cowichan and those who should not.

The budget amendments (attached for your interest) were accomplished without too much blood shed. I am always looking for the line which eliminates the trustees as an unnecessary expense but so far it has not materialised(imagine my disappointment). Our secretary treasurer ingeniously found $127,569 by metaphorically hunting among the chesterfield cushions – a bit of assumed savings in energy use, an unspecified cut to our BCeSIS operation, a transfer of some maintenance expenditure for employee time to our seismic funding and I think we no longer have a machine that goes ‘bing’ and folds documents. We have someone (no doubt exempt staff) who can still make the ‘bing’ noise but the district will struggle to find the time to do the folding. Everyone will have to buy bigger briefcases.

What is clear if you examine the classroom situation for all kids and employees, our cleaning and maintenance regimes, our commitment to Aboriginal Education – is that simply put we are sliding further and further into educational bankruptcy. Staff can balance the books with skill but when there is a clear lack of resources backed up with a withering prospect of even worse to come – this latest amendment will not hold for long and we will be bailing with a slotted spoon. The time bought with the precious tweezed out $127,569 will not for instance do a damn thing to offset prolific examples of wild desperation like the 2 classes which have a 4/5/6 split in one elementary school.

Which leads us to the absolute final moments of the meeting – the last gasp before we all pack up and trudge to our cars spiritually wounded and in dire need of chocolate?

In all the years I have sat both in the gallery and at this table I have seen cut after cut; we have closed schools, hacked away at instruction time, slashed library and counselling opportunities as well as other classroom supports, eliminated programs which assist kids with challenges, we have carved away at occupational therapy and speech pathology, acceded to degradations in our bussing, our building maintenance and cleaning; we have gone along with charging fees which violated the School Act, tried crazy business schemes, endlessly badgered parents into bottomless fundraising for basic needs, expected our frontline employees to work for free and pay for student needs out of their own pockets and  ignored poverty. The district has been driven by government policy to all these devices to no avail and with no end in sight. But the one thing we have never done is look with even a glimmer of interest at the cost of administration.

Makes sense really – the ministry had asked last budget that school districts make cuts in administration and redirect this savings into the classroom but for the life of me I did not detect any reductions in our administration. In our district – between 2004 and 2009 the loss of enrolment has been deployed to reduce teaching positions by almost 9%.During the same period we have decreased our admin positions just under 3%. The ratio between teachers and admin has dropped by 6% – in other words we have over that time seen a 6% drop in teachers per administrator. Based on a five year summary  of educator data which the Ministry of Education publishes called ‘Teacher Statistics’  the trend is definitely towards employing more administrators(+7.1 %) relative to teachers( +.8%) in this province. Whatever else we might think, it is clear there is more fertile ground for savings among admin costs than classroom teachers or support workers. Yet – this has remained the best kept secret since JR was shot.

A motion was tendered as follows:

Whereas:

• We are informed it will become increasingly difficult to carry on resourcing our schools due to budget restraints
• The lion’s share of cuts have been assigned to clerical services, instruction time, programs as well as district operations
• We have pledged our intention to direct our limited funding to the learning and working environment in our schools

It is moved that:

The Board of Education, SD 79 instruct senior staff to provide a detailed outline of all administration and management positions and their cost to the district including all exempt staff , principals and vice principals.

Further it is moved that we review these positions and costs with the intention of achieving savings from these areas of our expenditure.

It is now winging its way to the next finance committee meeting on November 25^th having been referred there quite properly. It will be fascinating to observe how this all plays out.

 So the main event I suppose is the visit to the minster and regardless who goes or stays, it would be a fine thing to have something really pithy to say to her; something which will transform an entire ideological agenda in one swift phrase. I would love to know what you would say to the minister if you had the chance. I know what I do not want to say:

I do not want to tell her underfunding is damaging the prospects of our public schools and all our kids and is setting the stage for a very nasty and unfeeling environment. I do not want to supply a horrific catalogue of dreadful conditions and pathological miseries caused by lack of money. I do not want to observe that the government seems hell bent on becoming not a provider of public education for all but a purchaser of education on behalf of the most prosperous. I do not want to tell her that poverty stalks our district and her ministry is not doing one damn thing about it. I do not want to tell her these things because I believe she already knows. It would be a waste of her time and ours and besides we and other boards have already provided this litany .There is not one policy or practice which suggests the funding formulas are mistake or a misunderstanding. If this is all true – what can we tell her? Seriously…what exactly can the trustees of Cowichan say to the minister to change the shadow cast by the government?

I am asking you because I genuinely would like to say something fruitful. Perhaps I would ask her to change section 111 of the School Act (‘estimated expenditures in the annual budget must not exceed estimated revenues’) so communities are not bound by undemocratic limitations on their right to design the budgets that serve their schools.

This visit is not about  raising our spirits or patching up the car wreck we are watching – it is if anything about applying  democratic principles in order to re-imagine our commitment  to public education – If we charted the responses on the streets of our community to the question:

“Do you support full funding for our public schools as a critical priority?”- What would we hear?

That being said I think we should – with all haste – encourage the ministry to fund our public schools in a manner that reflects the deep regard the majority of people hold for their importance.

That is democracy.

Simple…

Your Trustee Pal

Eden