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| We might as well hold a lottery for the jobs of school board trustees |
News out of the Toronto District School Board this week was of the arrest of long-serving trustee Howard Goodman on charges of forcible confinement and criminal harassment, allegedly over a heated argument he had with board director of education Donna Quan — an employee who reports to the board. This news comes after a term filled with scandal that saw board chair Chris Bolton resign suddenly in June.
Over at the Toronto Catholic School Board, the news is also bad. A projected $292,000 budget surplus is actually an $8.9 million deficit, apparently because of previously undetected accounting errors. Now the board must scramble to balance the books without cutting education programs. This from a group that is no stranger to bookkeeping issues; between 2008 and 2011 the province took control of the board to deal with an expense scandal and budgets that didn’t balance.
You have to remind yourself, looking at these latest installments in an ongoing drama of menace and mismanagement, that we’re not talking about a class of particularly difficult students, such as the ones you’d find in a movie or sitcom, but with the elected officials charged with educating our children.
These latest developments, and the parading clown show that has preceded them for years, point to a much larger question: Why do we even have elected school board trustees? (more...)
School trustees: Do we even need them? http://t.co/dCeHpM7sBJ Food for thought. #TDSB #TOpoli #ONpoli #ONTed
— Sam Sotiropoulos (@TrusteeSam) November 15, 2014
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