Editor, The News:
Re: Trustee does 180 on budget conflict (The News, Feb. 25).
On Feb. 23, school board trustee Mike Huber voted for the 2010/11 Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows School District budget despite of his wife being a teacher on call with SD 42. Trustee Dave Rempel, who is in a similar conflict, ensured he was absent from the meeting, while board chair Ken Clarkson abstained from voting on the portion of the budget pertaining to teacher salaries because his son is a teacher on call with the district.
Mr. Huber, who had abstained from voting on the teacher salary budget in the past, explained his turnabout as follows: “Every decision we make comes back to the dollar, so I would have to remove myself from every decision.”
I could not agree more: for trustees in such fundamental conflicts, ad hoc abstentions are meaningless. The only logical, sensible solution is for the Ministry of Education to prohibit anyone who has a close relative employed by a school district from serving on the school board in the first place.
Sadly, B.C. school trustees in such conflicts have resisted calls for reform with the spurious argument that prohibiting such persons from serving would leave no one to serve on school boards –a justification as ridiculous as it is self-serving. Teachers and other school district employees in B.C., who already have considerable bargaining leverage through their labour unions, have for too long been allowed to install their proxies on school boards across this province.
If that were not bad enough, there is mounting evidence that the B.C. College of Teachers is also acting in the interests of teachers rather than protecting the interests of the general public, as it is charged to do.
As Mr. Huber acknowledged, only the Ministry of Education can clean up this embarrassing mess once and for all. Let us hope it does so sooner rather than later to ensure that the public interest is served by school boards across our province.
Kirk Brown
Maple Ridge
