For many of us the cycle is the same when it comes to casting a vote for school board trustee.  We don't know anything about the school board, we know less about the candidates and even less about the issues surrounding public education.  Typically we scan the names blankly and reluctantly mark the one we like best. It feels like a mockery of democracy.  Then we never hear anything about it for four years and there is another set of names and we repeat the process.  

​

This disassociation has led us now to the precipice of an existential threat to the public having the opportunity of having a say in how the children in their community are educated and how that same public has its own money and resources deployed towards the education of the children in their community.  The politicians who have sought these trustee roles in the past have thus far failed to inform their public and engage them on the working of their district school boards.  They have been satisfied rather with attending their meetings and going through the terrible work of who or what gets left out of funding in a chronically underfunded system.  It is a heart breaking task for anyone and I do feel for them.

​

The path forward as I see it is to spend much more time engaging the community as a whole and not just the parents of active students.  The community as a whole is paying just as much money as anyone.  The community as a whole also has to live side by side with the graduates of their education system in the community.  That is a lot of skin in the game by any measure.  How to we harness it?

​

Keep them informed.  As trustee I won't disappear for four years returning only to seek re-election.  I will work on a daily basis to build an electronic mailing list and transition this website to an information commons.   Recipients on this email list will receive a regular news letter of sorts keeping the community apprised of specific details as well as information and related articles.  Additionally I will provide times and places at the Painswick Library, Allandale and Holly recreation centres where I will be there with my laptop preparing for an upcoming meeting and anyone can drop-in for a chat, maybe even a group chat.  I offer truth and difficult answers free of spin while simultaneously offering information, all with the hopes of engagement good or bad, its no matter to me if it gets people engaged.

​

For the parents of active children in our system I will go right to your school council meetings and provide the same: truth and information and I will take the good with the bad.

​

Why hasn't anyone else proposed this approach?  In my experience it's because politicians hoping to cling on to their seat are fearful of an informed and engaged public.  The more people who know just as much as the politician does are much more likely to run against you in the next election.  Sitting politicians would very much like to avoid this and prefer to be the keepers of the information, control its dispersion and essentially position themselves as the light in the darkness.   Also community engagement can be rough and tumble and is not for everyone.  Far from the throngs of adoring fans, it is fraught with debate and strong counter opinions. In many cases it also exposes the politician for knowing a lot less than they are pretending to know. For all these reasons building community engagement is not in the best interest of an aspiring career politician.

​

For myself the community empowerment element of my candidacy is only about building up the public so they can stand up and be heard in the fight to defend public education. The goal is to build 500, 1000 maybe even 5000 people in Holly, North and South Painswick, Allandale and Tolendale to know much more about their role in the education system than they did before this election.  The goal of which is to enlist an informed and engaged community in the continuous growth and improvement of their own education system. 

​

What is happening right now is that the Ontario government has legislation in place that seeks to replace school board trustee functions with a single person, a CEO who is not elected.  We absolutely don't have to care about the trustees themselves, but what we should care about is the "elected" part  of it and having fundamental decision making taken away from the public in favour of a single bureaucrat who will not be accountable to local voices or voters anywhere.  I am not calling for a fight with this legislation, but rather with what time there is left, I am trying to generate a community interest in the current elected system by doing it the way it was always meant to have been done.  Community members participating, engaging and seeing the value of being able to directly hold a trustee's feet to the fire and insist upon a direct democratic accountability within the education system.  If i can successfully demonstrate this value proposition for our community, rebuild the bond between community and education, generate interest and advocacy, then we can use our collective voices to possibly stave off the existential threat that is looming for democratically elected representation of our community's children and the considerable money we pay for education.

​

​