School boards look at increased powers

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This article was published 23/03/2012 (5289 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba’s school trustees could seek sweeping powers that would let them suspend school board members for breaking rules or even have them booted off the board.

Wayward trustees could face severe discipline for disclosing confidential information, for their treatment of fellow trustees or for other violations of their code of conduct, oath of office, or conflict-of-interest or procedural bylaws.

The powers the Manitoba School Boards Association may ask Education Minister Nancy Allan to approve go far beyond trustees’ current limited ability to deal with members who get out of line.

School boards can now censure or publicly rebuke fellow members, but they cannot kick them off the board, nor can they deny their disfavoured colleagues access to meetings, information or board business.

A school board member conduct and board discipline report was circulated during regional MSBA meetings in January.

Sources said Tuesday it’s an attempt to muzzle trustees and to further keep the lid on the information trustees can disclose to the public.

“It’s not very far along,” MSBA executive director Carolyn Duhamel said this week.

Trustees are being cautious about the report, she said, and are getting feedback from Nova Scotia and Ontario, where school boards were granted more powers in 2008.

“We have concerns around confidentiality, about conflict of interest,” Duhamel said.

She said the Public Schools Act addresses conflict of interest involving financial gain, but that’s all.

“There’s nothing that addresses breaches of confidentiality.

“The conflicts of interest we see arising are rarely about the money — it’s about relationships and associations” between trustees and other individuals or groups, Duhamel said.

MSBA has made Allan aware it is considering the report, she said.

Under the report’s proposals, school boards could openly reprimand a member in public session.

They could revoke a trustee’s right to sit on the board for one to three months and could suspend a trustee’s “rights, duties, and privileges” for one to three months.

Finally, boards could recommend to the minister of education that the trustee’s seat be vacated.

Censure would require a two-thirds vote under the proposal, but the minister could also order a school board to impose censure on a trustee.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca