The South Shore Regional School Board (SSRSB) chair is worried about what comes next for schools in the region.
The province’s English school boards will be dissolved by the end of the month and Theresa Griffin says she’s not confident rural communities will have a voice in the new system.
The province says School Advisory Councils (SACs) will provide that voice but Griffin argues, not all SACs have the time or ability to advocate for themselves.
“Some school communities don’t have strong voices, they don’t feel comfortable with their capacity to negotiate their way through a beuracracy.”
She adds that there are some communities where it is difficult to fill SACs and that shouldn’t mean less attention is given to those schools.
The province is dissolving the school boards as a part of their implementation of around half of the recommendations that came from an independent review on education.
The move away from elected school boards is a move away from a democratic system to one mainly run by bureaucrats says Griffin.
She believes school boards provide a regional outlook on their school system, which can’t be done from Halifax.
Griffin is also unsure how eliminating boards will help, given the boards were tasked with implementing provincial policy.
Over the past several years, SSRSB has had to make difficult, and sometimes controversial, decisions including school closures and staff cuts.
But Griffin says those decisions were often dictated by provincial guidelines and a budget crunch that left them few choices.
“We were the mechanism for implementing the provincial policies and often those policies didn’t work in the best interests of communities and espeically the best interests of communities in rural areas.”
That turned them into ‘scapegoats’ according to Griffin.
“We became the scapegoat … the mechanism for deflecting blame for those decisions that were really decisions of the provincial government as reflected in their provincial policies and regulations.”
Griffin says funding and school space utilization formulas need to change in rural communities and that boards have advocated for that in the past.
She hopes to see the province follow through with recommendations for wrap around school models and partnerships with communities with the incoming legislation.
“We really do need a strategy for schools in rural Nova Scotia, we have been asking for this for some time.”
The board is in the process of working with the South Shore Public Libraries to possibly create a community library at Bayview Community School in an effort to provide the school and community with better access.
“The school board budgets have not enabled us to renew and refresh our library learning commons,” says Griffin. “Those are pressures on the budget and there are never enough resources to go along.”
The town does not have their own library and the school saw library staff cuts, along with half of the school board’s library staff last year.
Griffin is concerned about what she calls a lack of consultation from government in the implementation of the recommendations from the Glaze Report.
She believes the report is flawed and moved through to the legislature too quickly.
“(Dr. Glaze) does not understand the historical context or the social context of the province,” she says. “Yet the province took a report and decided immediately that they are going to implement all of her recommendations without consultation.”
Bill 72 – The Education Reform Act, has gone through its second reading in the legislature and has now moved on to the law amendments committee.
Griffin is attending the law amendments committee meeting Monday to voice her concerns.
