Vote for your local trustees

It’s the start of a new school year, but not just any school year. It’s also school board election year.

Nominations are public knowledge and close on Sept. 22 and, on Oct. 28, new or continuing trustees will be elected, re-elected or acclaimed. For the next four years the people chosen will make many of the crucial decisions that affect our children’s education. It’s a big deal (one-third of our children’s school lives).

As a former superintendent, I want to encourage everyone to get involved and, at the very least, vote.

At least two school divisions during the last round elected or acclaimed people who were openly residential school deniers and sexists, people willing to break the law, deny human rights and who defied their educators’, communities’ and government’s efforts to rein them in. They were community dividers, pitting people against one another and against children. Therefore, it’s important to vote responsibly, meaning voters need to familiarize themselves with their candidates.

Our local school boards have considerable powers under the Public Schools Act. They also have duties to match those powers — equitable and meaningful education for all children regardless of their home environments and life conditions; wise stewardship of public money raised through local taxation; and, not least, diligently representing the interests of those who elected them.

Education is a homegrown, home-fed activity and phenomenon. For that reason, I support school boards having a significant degree of local control over localized matters and the financial resources to respond as close to where people live as is possible.

A good friend of mine often argues, “The further a tax dollar has to travel before it’s spent, the lower the probability that it will be spent to enhance the welfare of those whose dollar it was.”

In a similar argument I have often declared that, “it’s hard to see Swan River from Broadway.” Our concerns coincide — they’re not as much about money as about responding to local concerns and needs.

To that end, I would hope that local municipalities and school boards maintain the right of taxation. For me, that’s even more reason for all of us to take voting in local elections more seriously. For education and democratic participation, local discretion and who gets elected are of utmost importance.

School boards, operating rightfully, are the eyes and ears (and sometimes the conscience) of their communities to the school system and to its educators. To that end, trusteeship is an awesome responsibility to represent simultaneously the privileged and the disadvantaged, Indigenous people and people of colour, recent immigrants and longstanding community members, as well as the individual learning challenges each child brings to school. Superintendents, principals and teachers rely heavily on the insights that trustee-neighbours can bring to a host of school situations.

Trustees also represent what it means to be elected. They are expected to be models of citizen excellence in both behaviour and action, not only examples to other adults but also to the children in schools. And they do so as members of the collective called the school board, the onus being to not only perform well themselves but also to help make boards more responsive and accountable.

Trustees are our most immediately accessible models of the rights, privileges and consequences of democratic participation — their examples are critical to our trust of governments.

Trusteeship implies public trust, elected people who can be counted on to support all children’s opportunities to be educated in inclusive, empathic and supportive environments — representatives who act civilly, respect diversity and uphold the rule of law. People who you can be proud to know and support and who can be trusted to act in the best interests of all.

Too many people in the past have been chagrined that they did not vote and inherited unresponsive and unaccountable trustees — people they cannot trust to be exemplars of close-by, democracy-in-action. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of trustee elections.

My best-case scenarios for this year would be full slates of candidates with no acclamations, meaning that those elected could be a conscious, majority choice and a record voter turnout — wins for both democracy and education!

John R. Wiens is dean emeritus at the faculty of education, University of Manitoba.