Council supports teachers

By Dan Hilborn
Published May 13, 2006


Burnaby teachers received a whole lot of sympathy but very little action on Monday night, when union president Marion Hartley asked city council to take a stand against the proposed restructuring of local school districts.

City councillors were virtually unanimous in their condemnation of the proposal that has gone under the various names of 'repurposing,' 'subsidiarity' and 'student-centred leadership'.

Hartley said the Ministry of Education proposal, which will be tested in pilot projects in the Prince George and Rocky Mountain school districts next year, will eventually allow newly formed school planning councils take over the budgeting and hiring responsibilities at all individual schools in the province.

"There will be devastating cuts, and harm to students," she said, noting that a similar plan in New Zealand led to a financial crunch that forced some schools to have to choose between building fences, buying toilet paper or buying textbooks.

"Reorganization won't solve the problem of underfunding," Hartley said. "Indeed, if the student-centred model is passed, then publicly elected school boards will no longer be needed."

Hartley said every school has different needs - for example, she said Edmonds community school is in a low-income area and needs more special learning resources than a school in a more affluent area, such as South Slope elementary - and it makes more sense to allow school boards to make the decisions rather than giving each school the same amount of base funding and telling them to spend it as they please.

The prospect of disbanding school boards was met with harsh criticism from around the city council table.

While Mayor Derek Corrigan, the husband of school trustee Kathy Corrigan, said he has no doubt that the Burnaby school board could defend itself, he also wondered aloud if the wide variety of different names used to describe the new school governance plan were made to intentionally confuse people.

"It's clear to me that the right wing clearly has control of the rhetoric," said the admittedly left-wing mayor. "These terms, I have no idea what they mean."

Former school trustee and current city council member Pietro Calendino said he's seen dozens of ministers of education during his time in public official, and "each one has something new and different to make life miserable" for school trustees.

Coun. Gary Begin, another former school trustee, said the troubles in the school system took a turn for the worse many years ago when the former Social Credit government took away the local school district's ability to set their own local school tax rate.

"Now they take whatever power is left and they give to the local schools," Begin said. "I don't support that. I think school boards should be an entity on their own."

When Begin suggested that Hartley might try to convince her NDP friends to give school boards the right to tax, the teachers' union president replied: "It's a good suggestion. Thank you."

Colleen Jordan expressed concern that parents and principals are being invited to join the school planning councils, but other school district employees, such as teachers and support staff, will not be allowed to join even if they don't work in that particular district. "It's very scary," Jordan said.

And Garth Evans said the government appears to be using "Orwellian newspeak" to create unnecessary change in the school system.

"I'm very upset to hear the provincial government may be changing things so we may have appointed people running our schools instead of elected trustees," said Evans, adding that he's usually one of the "biggest supporters" of the B.C. Liberals. "But when it comes to education and health care, they have disappointed me."