January 27, 2003
The governance of your average local school board has become almost synonymous with the word largess.
This time lavish spending by the Simcoe County Board has upset and enraged its students.
According to Roberta Avery in a special report to the Toronto Star, classmates at Barrie Central Collegiate are outraged that their board has spent $180,000, all to supply their principals and vice-principals with Palm Pilots.
"We have to share textbooks and our English books are so old that they fall apart," said Grade 11 student Jackie Budd. "But they are walking around with hand-held computers that cost all that money. It’s just not right."
"John Sayer, co-chair of the Barrie Central school council, shares the concern about the lack of funding for basic school supplies but says the bigger issue is the board buying hand-held computers, while reducing the number of vice-principals at two Barrie schools," Avery wrote.
The Simcoe County District School Board has announced that Barrie Central and Barrie’s Innisdale Secondary School will each lose one of two vice-principals at the end of this semester.
Sayer calls the board’s decision to spend a total of $180,000 on Palm Pilots and training for about 120 principals of its 177 principals and vice-principals is "very wrong".
Board spokesperson Debbie Clarke said the funding for the hand-held computers comes from a "non-classroom reserve fund" and is not linked to teacher salary or classroom supply budgets.
Slap whatever name you want on it, Ms. Clarke. It’s money from the public purse all the same.
Kathy Soule, the board’s superintendent of education, said the acquisition of the Palm Pilots will help principals cope with the "huge burden" of new provincial requirements for more, frequent and much more complex teacher appraisals.
God forbid that the province should try to see that our kids have the best teachers and teaching methods.
There seems to be an emerging culture from school boards to spend their way to largess. Given that the budgets of the school boards are larger than that of their municipal councils, this is a dangerous course.
Nor is the acquisition of Palm Pilots anything new in the bells and whistles accumulated by school boards.
Over the last 20 years, school board trustees have hit newspaper headlines for providing gold credit cards for their officials. School board trustees in North York once had their own in-house restaurant, with Trustee John Filion, now a Toronto City councillor, camped out in the board restaurant, having staff serve him with round-the-clock gourmet meals.
When the Toronto Sun sent a reporter down to then Toronto Board of Education College Street headquarters in the early 1980s, trustees were dining on scampi and imported goodies for coffee break leaving many to ponder what they were tucking away at dinner.
In those long ago days, trustees were blaming the province too.
The point is that nothing has changed. School boards are still ripping off the public purse generations later.
It is time for the province to go all the way on spend-crazy school boards. Making them a part of municipal councils would be a good start.
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