On Thursday, Ontario Education Minister Paul Calandra increased the list of school boards he’s taken over, adding York Catholic and keeping Peel District under supervision “in response to serious concerns about infighting and long-term financial unsustainability,” the ministry said in a statement.
The two join six others over the past year, including public and some Catholic schools in Toronto, Ottawa and London.
Last fall, a new Ontario law gave the education minister more latitude to take over school boards. It arrived after high-profile cases of misspending, including one board’s approval of a $40,000 administrator retreat to Toronto and another’s $100,000-plus art-buying trip to Italy. Other boards have come under his fire for their financial decision-making.
For months, Calandra has repeatedly talked about eliminating trustees. Critics decry the minister’s actions as politically driven, saying most boards are struggling financially due to chronic provincial underfunding.
Amid renewed scrutiny of school board decision-making, CBC News asked education experts, past and current trustees across Canada about what trustees do and why the role is in the spotlight.
Trustees (also known as board members or commissioners in some areas) are locally elected members of the public who collectively make decisions to run a school board.
That typically means things like setting and administering an annual budget or boardwide purchasing.
They also determine local school policies, for example maintenance projects, equity initiatives, or hiring staff to support students with special needs, says Nokha Dakroub, a parent who was a Peel District School Board trustee for eight years.
They must be Canadians over 18 (although some boards have student trustees), residents of the geographical area covered by the board and typically receive an honorarium for their service, which varies across Canada.
Historically, trustees were involved in all facets of schooling, from hiring teachers to setting curricula, says Sachin Maharaj, an assistant education professor at the University of Ottawa.
Yet as provinces increasingly consolidate education, the role is “a lot more circumscribed than it has been in the past and it continues to be that way.”
Trustees today are “a nexus” between provincial governments and schools, he said, connecting with parents and community members and reflecting their concerns at the table, offering “local voice … into the decision-making processes of these large school systems.”
They also often make space for parents to speak, Maharaj said.
“The fact that these meetings take place in public… provides a level of transparency.”
“They do not set curriculum. They do not decide any collective agreements with teachers,” former trustee Dakroub said, noting “the big stuff is all decided” by provinces.
In her experience, education funding is earmarked to be spent in specific ways, so the budget that trustees have free rein over is actually “a very small amount” of the total received from the province.
Dakroub also said trustees can’t directly intervene in operational matters concerning an individual student.
“You don’t really want a system where you have a parent calling an elected official and an elected official calling a principal and telling them what to do,” she said. “There are checks and balances.”
Ontario school boards open parent support offices
Most jurisdictions have locally elected trustees to govern school boards, according to Alan Campbell, president of the Canadian School Boards Association, as well as a parent and trustee in Manitoba’s Interlake School Division since 2010.
Not every region has elected school boards, Campbell said, pointing to Nova Scotia for example, which dissolved them in 2018 and established regional education centres led by unelected directors who report to the province.
In Newfoundland and Labrador and Quebec, he pointed out, only the minority-language schools have elected boards.
In the past, Canadian education ministers have occasionally ousted trustees or put boards under supervision amid clashes over financial management, controversial decisions made or due to fractious relations within boards.
Dakroub believes a lack of guidance and clear definitions about the role are issues.
Educational consultant Avis Glaze, who drafted reports analyzing the school systems of Nova Scotia and Manitoba, agreed that more training would help trustees.
The role doesn’t require a particular skillset and people’s motivation for running may vary, Glaze said, from B.C., although she noted the majority want to improve the system.
Serving as a trustee today is indeed tough, noted researcher Maharaj, and challenges like reduced authority and increased complexity (given more schools in fewer boards) make it harder to recruit and retain them.
“The way the job is currently constructed, it’s just not attractive to a lot of people.”
Yet Maharaj thinks friction between provincial governments and particular boards is more often to blame when school board governance comes under scrutiny.
“Increasingly, provincial governments view school boards as an impediment to implementing their provincial education agenda.”
In Nova Scotia, where Maharaj has researched the dissolution of elected boards, people “feel like they don’t really have anywhere to turn to when they have problems,” he said.
People he interviewed described the school system as “less transparent, less responsive, and [they] wanted to have some form of local representation returned,” he said, noting that some places that removed elected trustees over the years — like Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick — later reintroduced them.
A proposal to overhaul Manitoba education in 2021, including replacing elected school boards, was eventually dropped amid significant public backlash, said Campbell, the Manitoba trustee.
“We elect school boards to have direct responsibility over what happens in public schools, just like we elect municipal councils to have direct responsibility for what happens with our local utilities and our local infrastructure,” he said.
What do school trustees do?
Dakroub, who ended two terms as a trustee in 2022, thinks the current system is flawed. Acclamation — when just one candidate runs — has kept longtime trustees in place, she said, while too few trustees have kids currently in the school system and elected boards aren’t necessarily reflecting the students impacted by their decision-making.
“The selection mechanism for the people around the table is not working, which is why we’re ending up with these lapses of judgment” in Ontario, said Dakroub, who would prefer trustees to be appointed.
Glaze, the education consultant, thinks a mix of appointments and elected officials could avoid simply “top-down” decision-making.
“We need to get people who know what improving systems are about … [appointed] based on their skills and their history and what they have done in their own organizations,” she said.
“At the same time, people want some sort of grassroots input. Why can’t we have both? It doesn’t have to be either/or.”
Glaze thinks a coalition of groups, including parents, teachers, principals, education researchers and unions, must be consulted for any reform.
Manitoba trustee Campbell rejects that an appointee is a better choice than an elected official.
“If [trustees] are making poor decisions, then they should be held democratically accountable by their constituents, 100 per cent,” he said.
But replacing elected trustees, “removes democracy from the equation,” he continued, noting that low votership has plagued municipal and provincial elections, as well.
Maharaj also favours elected trustees over government appointees.
One of the original reasons trustees don’t run under specific political parties “is because it was viewed that … schools should be somewhat insulated from regular partisan politics,” he said.
“That’s increasingly becoming less the case as school boards and school board trustees are diminished.”
