By Tasha Kheiriddin and Katrina Matheson
Ontario’s education system is in crisis. Violence in the classroom. Program cuts. Declining standards. Misplaced priorities. The rampant dysfunction in the province’s schools is taking an untenable toll on children and families. And they feel powerless to make change.
But that dam is starting to break. Earlier this month, the Toronto District School Board ordered the transfer of principal Barrie Sketchley from Rosedale Heights School of the Arts. At age 82, Sketchley is one of Ontario’s longest-serving school administrators and is beloved by his students and the the thousands of graduates of the school he founded 33 years ago.
In response, students
, parents flooded Toronto District School Board (TDSB) trustees and staff with hundreds of emails and more than 2,800 supporters signed a petition demanding that Sketchley remain at Rosedale until his retirement, which he plans to take at the end of the next school year.
In a shocking development, parents learned that a majority of trustees voted against the report that recommended Sketchley’s transfer, only to be told by staff that their vote did not count, as the transfer was an “operational decision.”
Similarly, a recent trustee vote against increasing class sizes for special education was dismissed by TDSB staff, who chose to bump class sizes from eight to 10 students — a significant increase when dealing with kids with complex needs and challenges.
Parents and students also protested the TDSB’s decision to close Grade 9 enrolment at Heydon Park Secondary School, its only high school for developmentally disabled girls. Staff claimed that not enough students applied to justify the class, but
that the board’s failure to promote it factored into this year’s low numbers.
Meanwhile, a
by the TDSB for a social media post criticizing his daughter’s school, which he claims failed to provide his child’s class with proper math instruction for more than five weeks. The local superintendent sent the parent a letter demanding that he remove the post or face consequences under the TDSB’s Code of Conduct, which could mean banning him from school property.
The TDSB’s handling of all these issues reveals a deeply dysfunctional system. Parent voices are silenced or ignored, trustees rubber stamp bad staff decisions and boards pit themselves against the provincial government. None of this is helping Ontario’s children learn, grow or acquire the necessary skills for their future careers.
Enter the Ministry of Education. The new minister, Paul Calandra, has vowed to fix what ails Ontario schools. He recently appointed a supervisor to take over the Thames Valley District School Board due to financial mismanagement and commissioned an investigation into the finances of three other boards.
He also introduced Bill 33, the supporting children and students act, which would allow the government to take over boards for any reason that serves the public interest — a catch-all that could include governance issues like those at the TDSB.
If the province does step in, it must do more than make cosmetic changes. One goal should be to empower parents to participate directly in school-board decision-making. The current “parent concern protocol” requires parents who have an issue with their school to go through four layers in sequence: the teacher, the principal, the superintendent and the trustee. This process means that problems often take far too long to resolve — or get blocked and never addressed.
Legislated channels for parent engagement already exist under the Education Act, by way of parent involvement committees. The minister must ensure that those channels can no longer be stymied by staff. They should be strengthened to ensure that parents have a real seat at the table, whether it is set by boards or by the government directly.
This government, and this minister, have shown they are willing to act. The time has come to confront not just mismanagement, but the structural failings of our educational governance model. As the fight for Barrie Sketchley makes plain, people should come before process. It’s time to give parents a voice in Ontario schools.
National Post
Tasha Kheiriddin is vice-chair of the Rosedale Heights School of the Arts School Advisory Council and Postmedia’s national political columnist. Katrina Matheson is chair of the Rosedale Heights School of the Arts School Advisory Council and a PhD candidate at York University.
