A trip to Hawaii, a trip to Italy to buy art, a conference in the hotel at Rogers Centre to watch a Blue Jays game. No, those aren’t my vacation plans, those are actual trips taken by school boards in the last little while.
Between this and some of the craziness allowed into the classroom, school boards are doing a good job of convincing more people they simply shouldn’t exist.
For years, there have been calls to eliminate school boards all together in Ontario or for the province to merge the multiple school boards into one for each geographic region. In cities like Toronto and Ottawa there are four school boards – English public, English Catholic, French public and French Catholic – and there are many people that would like to see fewer boards.
Do we really need more than 70 school boards in Ontario? Do we need any school boards in Ontario, or could we eliminate them and run everything from the ministry?
The ridiculous travel stories by the boards have definitely had people questioning why we need all these administrators and overhead. So far, neither Premier Doug Ford nor his government are at the point of saying they want to start shutting down or merging school boards, but they do want some accountability.
“Honestly, it’s appalling,” Education Minister Jill Dunlop said last week after news broke of the Hawaii trip.
“The premier has directed me to do audits of discretionary funding in the school boards, and we’ll be proceeding with that.”
The Lambton Kent District School Board spent $32,000 to send three staffers to a four-day conference in Hawaii last January. The expenses included hotel rooms that cost roughly $1,050 to $1,550 per night.
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But remember, we are constantly told that the province doesn’t spend enough on education. Why should we spend more? So that we can have more expensive trips by highly paid bureaucrats?
“Education is important, but the money’s got to be spent on students and on program spending,” PC MPP Bob Bailey told the Sarnia Observer last week.
He’s right, but the educrats who run the system don’t seem to be getting the message. They seem to think that the money we hand over to educate kids in the classroom is best spent on their big salaries, their travel and their crazy pet projects.
Last July, four trustees for the Brant Haldimand Norfolk Catholic District School Board travelled to Northern Italy, paying more than $50,000 for the trip, including a single meal that cost $1,610. The trustees were there to buy more than $100,000 worth of art for two new schools.
We saw the Thames Valley District School Board spend more than $38,000 for a planning meeting at the hotel that is part of the Rogers Centre, where the Blue Jays play. Documents obtained by the London Free Press show that 18 different administrators took part in the meetings, and watching Jays games.
The London District Catholic School Board seems a bargain by spending just $16,000 for 26 senior staff members to attend an out-of-town planning session in St. Catharines. It’s still a questionable expense given the never-ending claims that education is underfunded but seems reasonable by comparison.
Take all of this misspending by the various boards, and you start to have serious questions. Look at how boards operate outside of the fiscal side of things, and you will have more questions.
Field trips to protests where students are led in antisemitic chants and Canada is described as a criminal colonial state. Diversity, equity and inclusion conferences that humiliate a veteran teacher to the point of suicide. A shop teacher wearing huge fake breasts to school to show how ridiculous the system is, and the board did nothing. Teachers pushing political agendas such as insisting that 2+2=4 is racism.
School boards are supposed to be the closest form of local democracy. They are supposed to act as a form of control by the parents whose children are being educated.
For the past several years, they have been failing miserably at this role. If that doesn’t change, there won’t be an argument for keeping them around.