Mountain View School Division’s (MVSD) Board Chair is voicing some of his concerns with the drastic overhaul of Manitoba’s education system announced by the provincial government this past week.
On Monday, Manitoba's Education Minister Cliff Cullen provided the details of Bill 64 — a piece of legislation presenting some dramatic changes to education in the province.
Part of Bill 64 would remove the role of school trustees, eliminating elected school boards in 37 school divisions and replacing them with one centralized board of appointees.
MVSD Board Chair Floyd Martens says going from the elected board to an appointed board is a huge shift with big implications.
“The ramifications of that are not fully understood,” he says, adding he finds it hard to envision how schools within local communities will have a greater voice when the decision making is turned over to this one appointed board within the province.”
“When you have unelected representatives, they’re not accountable to those who elected them, they’re accountable to who appointed them — and that changes every dynamic within the system.”
Floyd Martens is Chairperson of the MVSD Board of Trustees | Photo courtesy of MVSD.ca
Martens discussed other problems he sees with Bill 64.
“The legislation has a host of issues with it that we’re just beginning to unravel. Obviously, it’s huge in its scope. It takes a number of Acts that have existed for decades and decades and rewrites them pretty much in their entirety. It creates lots of challenges for the system as we try and navigate what this means over the next several months.”
Martens says the first thing parents should know is the MVSD Board of Trustees is still in place making decisions and working with their communities "for as long as we are able to be."
A comprehensive review of Manitoba’s education system was launched in January 2019, with a Commission drawing 75 recommendations to improve education in Manitoba — a province that spends among the highest in the country on education but posts among the lowest student achievement results.
Martens says Bill 64 ignores some of the key recommendations from the K-12 review, for example, the recommendation there be somewhere between 6 and 8 school boards that would be elected and appointed.
“That recommendation was not included in Bill 64.”
As for a timeline, Martens says the legislation, Bill 64, has school boards not existing as of July 1, 2022 — at which point there will be one school board for most of Manitoba, and one school board for Francophone schools in the province.
“This is a big issue. There will be lots more discussion with the community in the days and weeks to come. As a Board, we meet on Monday and will talk more about how we respond and move forward from this point, and how the community can be engaged and so on. So stay tuned for those messages.”
Martens says that parents and community members should know this is a piece of legislation, so there is an opportunity to speak to it, "whether it’s to write submissions. Whether it’s to write to those who are making decisions in the legislature — our MLAs. I encourage our communities to do that."
