Dear newly elected Chilliwack trustees, please make school board boring again

Hoping the board focuses on the important work in the job description and skips the salacious nonsense

(An op-ed I wrote for the Oct. 21, 2022 edition of The Chilliwack Progress with a tongue-in-cheek admonition to the new school board. We spilled hundreds of inches of ink on stories about religious right wing school trustees clashing with staff and those on the left over subjects that should not be the purview of elected school officials - PJH, December 2024)

I have a request to make of the newly elected Chilliwack Board of Education: Please, make school board boring again.

Those of us who have covered community news for many years are always on the lookout for good stories. Things out of the ordinary, scandalous, surprising, exciting, controversial. In a word, newsworthy.

Of all the branches and levels of government, from Parliament in Ottawa to the legislature in Victoria to local city councils, school boards are usually the most uninteresting from a public interest perspective, and there is good reason for that.

This is in no way to downplay the importance of the work done by school trustees. In Chilliwack, they oversee a $100-million-plus budget, dozens of schools with hundreds of teachers and thousands of students.

But the role of a trustee, the job of a member of the board of education, is not – or should not be – particularly newsworthy or exciting or out of the ordinary.

Lately, way too many column inches have focused on topics involving Chilliwack school trustees that should never have had to be written about. For the last five years, we have been mired in ideological nonsense starting with Barry Neufeld’s infamous October 2017 Facebook post that included the caveat “At the risk of being labelled a bigoted homophobe….”

Then there are the more recent tirades for and against banning certain books in schools from Heather Maahs, Darrell Furgason on one side, Willow Reichelt and Carin Bondar on the other.

What is the role of a school trustee?

The specific duties of trustees are outlined in detail in the School Act, but generally, according to the B.C. School Trustees Association (BCSTA), the job is to be financial stewards, establish strategic direction, and represent the employer. They are tasked with acting as community leaders to ensure students have opportunities to reach their potential and their goals.

According to the BCSTA the primary functions of boards include: “Setting local policy for the effective and efficient operation of schools; Employing the staff necessary for school district operations; Establishing conditions of employment for employees; Preparing and approving the school district’s operating budgets and capital plans; Hearing appeals from parents and students.”

Extremely important work, but much of it should not be newsworthy, at least most of the time.

It is the Ministry of Education at the provincial government level that sets the direction for K-12 education, including curriculum and teaching resources. Not school trustees, particularly individual trustees with an agenda to fight anti-bullying resources aimed at helping LGBTQ students.

Before the election, Neufeld told Rebel News that voters need to know why school boards were invented.

“They are supposed to be representing the members of the local community to ensure that the public schools would reflect the value of that community” Neufeld said.

Even if that was true, which it is not, I hope Neufeld has learned a lesson that his opinions are not representative of the community. To paraphrase a much-maligned, if accurate, Trudeau expression, Neufeld’s are the unacceptable views of a fringe minority.

On the other side of things, some of the so-called progressive trustees, Bondar and Reichelt in particular, all too often took the bait and responded to what should have been the irrelevant ramblings of an old man on the way out the door.

And we are not off the hook. I admit that this media outlet in general, and yours truly specifically, are somewhat complicit in giving ink and oxygen to school trustees talking about things they shouldn’t have been talking about.

But some things we can’t ignore.

Moving forward, when a new school is built, we will be there. When there is controversy over busing fees, give us a call. When the district has a dispute with the teachers’ union, we’ll cover it.

But for the most part, I really hope this new batch of trustees focuses on the important work ahead of them, and that includes making school board boring again.

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