The Invisible Education Minister MacDiarmid
The following quotation is a response by Vancouver Board of Education chair Patti Bachuss to an ill-considered comment accusing school trustees of not being willing to work with the minister of Education. This content was borrowed from the comments section of Report Card, Vancouver Sun education reporter Janet Steffenhagen's weblog, referencing a story about the chilly reception given to Education Minister Margaret MacDiarmid at the recent B.C. School Trustees Association meeting. Be sure to view the video, because catching Minister MacDiarmid talking to any trustee is something of a rare event indeed.
In response to John Puddifoot - On the contrary John, trustees make extensive efforts to work with this Minister but she doesn't seem to want to work with us. We met with her last summer and briefed her on budget issues, past, present and projected. We showed her where our costs would be going up and made sure she understood and we welcomed any questions she had.
We asked where our overdue AFG funds were as the work was being carried out as we met. She said it would be along soon.
A few weeks later we got a letter late on a Thursday advising us our AFG funds were being completely cancelled and they were clawing back $400,000 in holdback funds they'd allocated to us in June. Not a very cooperative way to work together.
We've been asking for a meeting with the Minister since late 2009. She finally agreed to me us last Friday, but cancelled a few days before we were to meet. We've sent her many letters about our challenges and I've left her phone messages that remain unanswered.
Her Ministry asked our district to work together on the possibility of shared services and we agreed to and that is underway.
We've sent the Minister all our budget documents and invited her to attend any or all of our public budget meetings (our offices are three blocks apart and she lives less than five minutes from our head office). She has not attended any meetings nor responded to our invitations.
While these quieter attempts at working together don't make the 6 o'clock news, they will continue. However when the diplomatic approaches are met with indifference or not even acknowledged, we have a responsibility to our students to stand up for the supports and services they need, and it is time for some slings and arrows.
Her response to that is to send in a Special Adviser who is now hampered by Terms of Reference that will severely limit any meaningful review that could result in something positive for our schools, although we're cooperating fully and hoping very much that we'll be pleasantly surprised by the outcome. Fingers crossed.
Just this weekend the Minister demonstrated her unwillingness to engage with trustees to address the very real challenges facing school districts. After her disappointing speech at the BCSTA AGM, the minister took only three questions from the hundreds of trustees gathered, several whom were lined up at microphones waiting to ask questions. She said she was too busy to take more but then walked over to the news media scrum where she took the time to answer seven questions from reporters.
So John, who do you think isn't willing to work with whom?
Patti Bachuss, Chair, Vancouver Board of Education
