01 Why Trustees Are Useless

It ain’t easy being a trustee these days.

Here you are, elected in a real election but without the power of an elected person.

Trustees have a long history in Ontario that is noble in its own way.

About 180 years ago the British were trying to populate the area with mostly English speaking people. These people were expected to farm so that an economy could be set up that could support troops to defend the area against the Americans. As well, they were to procreate an English speaking population to offset Quebec.

Well, not all the settlers spoke English all that well. A good number were from Northern Europe, Germany, Scotland, Ireland.

Schools were needed to mold the population into the ideal that the empire needed.

And the settlers wanted schools for their children. No longer were farmers serfs who gave the fruits of their labour to a lord and master every fall.

These were all independent land owners who had to deal with an expanding market. They had to know simple math, how to read and write and some other things that could only be propagated by schools.

But how could they pay for a school house, books, slates and slate pencils and of course someone in their community to to teach.

Well they levied a tax on all land holders to support the school.

That tax had to be spent by someone in the way that the community wanted so there had to be a board to control the money.

And that is how it started. Probably, trustee elections were the first sign of democracy here.

Fast forward to 1982 when I was elected trustee.

We, at that time had the ability to change the property tax rate in our jurisdiction. If we wanted swimming pools in our high schools, we raised the cash from the population for that. The same went for parenting centres, buses, etc. It was our choice because we controlled the amount that we levied.

Now, today, we are living with the legacy of Premier Mike Harris who in 1997, the year I resigned, following a plan by the Ministry of Education that had been hatching for decades, ripped the educational property tax out of the power of the Boards and kept it all for the Province.

The Ministry now dictates, through a funding formula, what the Boards can fund so if there is no line in that formula for, say, Educational Assistants in the classroom, the Board could spend money on them but it would have to take it out of other approved areas like capital improvements.

And that is what the TDSB has done. It has used the capital money to finance the form of education that it used to have.

Now the capital line in the formula is not rich enough to support the 600 TDSB schools in the first place and combined with this shuffling of money there is now  a three billion dollar capital deficit. Roofs, windows, etc need replacing.

Eventually this funding shell game becomes a problem and Trustees are yanked back to the details of that funding formula created on high.

So, that is what has taken almost all the power away from the Trustee. Oh, they can say this or that school can remain open but they cannot say that no school will close. They can’t finance that idea.

And if they do stand up to the straight jacket of the formula and vote for a deficit, the province will fire their tushes and appoint a “Supervisor” to do the dirty work.

So much for elections.

Trustees are elected but do not have the power, role or, in my estimation, the respect of a democratically elected person.