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Scott Stinson: Ontario plans to keep school trustees, but make them powerless

There have been so many cases of runaway spending that cutting up their credit cards was always going to be a popular option. Or at least not an unpopular one

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Anyone who is wondering why the Doug Ford government expects to have political cover for making sweeping changes to Ontario’s school boards, effectively neutering the authority of elected trustees in the process, need only look to one of the pages in the background document that was released on Monday.

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On it, under the heading “Holding School Board Trustees Accountable,” the government says that many trustees have run huge deficits and “wasted public funds” that were intended for the classroom.

Scott Stinson: Ontario plans to keep school trustees, but make them powerless Back to video

Then the kicker: At the Brant Haldimand Norfolk Catholic board southwest of Hamilton, trustees spent almost “$190,000 of school board funds in expenses related to a trip to Italy to purchase art.”

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At the Toronto Catholic board, it says, one trustee spent almost $7,000 in public money on “personal electronics,” including an iPad, Air Pods and “Europe SIM cards.”

Why, those do indeed sound like some trustees who need to be held accountable.

There are undoubtedly hundreds of school board trustees in Ontario who work diligently and attentively, guarding the classroom purse to ensure that every last pencil and eraser is properly sourced.

But there have been so many cases of runaway spending, with eight boards across the province now under ministry supervision until their finances are returned to normal, that effectively cutting up their credit cards was always going to be a popular option. Or at least not an unpopular one.

In the same way that former Conservative MP Bev Oda is instantly associated with a $16 glass of orange juice that was put on the taxpayer tab, stories of school trustees sending themselves to Italy or buying SIM cards — again with the travel to Europe! — are the kind of thing that voters remember.

And, so: “The role of a trustee is changing dramatically,” Education Minister Paul Calandra said at a news conference at Queen’s Park on Monday. In case there was any doubt that the potential for wasteful spending was being curbed, he said that trustees would have their duties “vastly reduced” under the legislation that he was introducing.

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Trustee honorariums would be capped, and trustees would no longer be able to claim expenses for items like “personal electronics” or “unnecessary” travel and hospitality expenses.

They will still be able to claim, say, mileage expenses for driving to a board meeting, but those board meetings better not be at a Muskoka resort. (Muskoka-area school boards, naturally, excepted.)

That’s the headline-grabbing stuff, but the proposed changes would limit trustee oversight over even the perfectly justifiable kind of education expenses. The current board position of director of education would be replaced by a chief executive officer, who would develop the school-board budget, with trustee input — but nothing more authoritative than that. If trustees did not agree with the budget as designed by their board’s chief executive, the matter would go to the education minister to decide. One guess which way that intervention is likely to go.

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Trustees would also be largely removed from the collective bargaining process between the province and teachers and education workers under the planned changes, with those duties handed over to senior school board staff.

Basically, if it’s an important job, trustees would no longer have control over it.

Given all that, the new legislation did leave an obvious question: Why leave trustees in place at all?

Calandra has in recent months sounded like someone who was inclined to scrap the trustee model entirely — and indeed the fact that eight school boards have been ticking along while their elected trustees have been sidelined is evidence that the education system wouldn’t collapse in a trustee-less world.

But keeping them in place does, in theory, provide some connection between taxpayers and those on their local school board. The trustees will, in Calandra’s telling of it, simply have much less ability to screw things up. (It is also true that eliminating trustees entirely might have brought legal challenges and other headaches that these changes seek to avoid.)

The education legislation comes at a time when the Ford government is already facing accusations of overreach. It plans to introduce the appointment of regional chairs in certain areas of the province, and, crucially, give them the power to overrule the whims of regional council. That has brought perfectly fair criticism that the premier is undermining democracy if one of his hand-picked regional chairs can cram through changes over the objections of elected local officials. He’s similarly been accused of meddling in local affairs when it comes to the expansion of Toronto’s island airport.

But not all overreach is the same. Will the influence of a school trustee be greatly missed? Voting rates in trustee elections are consistently smaller than those for local councils, which are already low to begin with. Most people couldn’t name their children’s school trustees if you spotted them the first couple of letters. And made it a multiple choice quiz.

They make vulnerable targets, in other words. Especially because of the whole trips-to-Italy thing.

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