Rocky Mountain Goat News

The Rocky Mountain Goat Newspaper asked trustee candidates to respond to four questions. I thought I'd publish my responses here as well as to the paper.

Here are their questions:

1. What makes you a good candidate?
2. What are the big issues facing the school board and Robson Valley?
3. What is your vision for rural schools?
4. Anything else you want to add?

Here are my responses:

1. I have high expectations. For the last three years I have tried to raise the game for everyone involved in student success. I have worked for healthy caring schools and good relationships between all partner groups. I talk regularly with teachers, principals, other staff, and parents about what it going on in the district, especially where there is dysfunction. I have fought for transparent governance, asked tough questions of management and others, and refused to simply rubber stamp motions. Although I respect my fellow trustees, this usually puts me in the minority, often 1 out of 7.
2. Main issues: A) inclusive decision making - a Strategic Plan is coming up, I would like to see this be an open-ended consultation about the future, not a confirmation of what has already been decided. B) high expectation for leadership - the board needs to assert its right to set more directions in the district: budgets, programs, and hiring of management. Both the board and senior administration need to do more to follow-up on problems and opportunities. C) infrastructure improvements - many of our schools are in need of big repairs, environmental upgrades, and playground renewal. We should invest in geothermal heating, solar power panels, and planting more trees. Technology infrastructure needs attention, too, including the many restrictions that schools face on purchasing.
3. For rural schools, I would prioritize site-based management. Too many aspects of budgets and program direction are controlled centrally, with the result that rural school needs are sometimes put on the back burner and the "conversation on rural education" takes forever. My impression is that we use temporary measures to equalize opportunities for rural vs urban students. What we need is for rural communities to develop a more long-term site plans including better distributed learning and for the school district to support them.
4. Trustees are expected to be advocates. I am in favour of a more aggressive yet still respectful stance towards the government, more than just strongly worded letters. We should be building a restoration budget to be submitted along with our balanced budget to show the province what sustainable funding looks like. Our district and region is an awesome place to live and go to school. School boards need high expectations, strong voices, good listeners, blunt honesty, and caring leadership to ensure that we meet student needs in the future. That's what I offer.

Issue #4 Support for Rural Schools

I think I got this one covered below. The "Dunster Affair" was very interesting, both on its own and also what it says about "histories" in our school district. I still can't believe the school board office made the parents buy back the land that the community donated to the school district in the first place! I sure hope the Dunster school thrives in its new arrangement.

The Learning Agenda

On a facebook forum for rural schools solutions (CORES), one of the trustee candidates brought up the BC government's plans to transform education and our school district's endorsement. 21st century learning, personalized, flexible, empowered by technology, better teachers & standards, allows parents to choose what, where, how, and when their kids learn. In response, I'd have to say that the "Learning Agenda" needs to be seen in more detail. "21st Century Learning" means too many things to be at the centre of a plan. For some, it means critical thinking and problem-solving, or collaboration and creativity, for others it means more distance education and use of technology. Some of those things belong in any century, and are already "normal" in our schools. The where/when part speaks to the goal for more distance education, phased in as students approach Grade 12. As a parent, I am not interested in having my child learn about math or social studies by staying home and looking up helpful websites on a cell phone. This would be a difficult option for working parents. I want my kids to learn, websites or not, in the presence of a teacher who can guide & instruct and other students with whom they interact. There are some successful "blended" models for delivering distance education, but we're not there yet in SD57, our correspondence courses have very low success rates. Making improvements there is very much needed if distance education can be used to support rural communities. Our schools and teachers are not always perfect but squeezing out the students for distance courses as they approach graduation will not make them better. More parental involvement sounds good but the reality is that most working parents are quite content to send their kids to school and trust that they are learning. Do many parents (outside of home-schooling) actually want to design their kid's educational experience? Choosing a school or program (like Montesorri) yes, but curriculum and learning activities? Our teachers are already very good at this. I am absolutely committed and deeply involved in my kids' education, but I have more than enough opportunity to interact with their teachers and affect how and when they learn. I think the "Learning Agenda" is not so much flexibility as it is privatizing education. It seems to be a recipe for downgrading public school until we end up with a two-tiered education system. There are some really good things that can come from changes to the system, but our own district has a big problem in that many of the "21st Century Learning" ideas that teachers want to pursue are stopped by board office policy. The disconnect between the teachers and the board office has deepened over the last few years and is quite obvious during the current job action. Sorting out and bringing in the "Learning Agenda" will not succeed unless this disconnect can be addressed. This will be a hard task for trustees, but it needs to be on the agenda. I look forward to the challenge.

Rural Schools

Rural schools have traditionally been at or near the beating heart of small town Canada.  Along with churches, community spirit, and rural jobs, these schools have helped sustain agricultural and resource towns through boom and bust cycles. While some rural communities seem too small to support a school, the PG district includes towns and non-urban areas that are still vital and help remind us that we can't exist simply on service industries and urban jobs... we need food from farms, and sustainably managed resources. If we abandon rural schools, we are losing our ability to provide for ourselves and we become dependent on foreign producers to feed and equip us. In other words, rural schools are not just a part of our past, they need to be part of our future. The average age of rural Canadians has grown, as has urban migration, resulting in fewer rural residents with higher living and transportation costs. Statscan's Rural Analysis and the Office of Consumer Affairs (see sec. 3.4) have good data on this. If we ever want to take ideas like the 100-mile diet or resources sustainability seriously, we can't simply be an urban society that sees the hinterland as a place to extract raw resources.  School districts have an incredible responsibility to be one of the pillars of community stability, and this must include rural communities. Our decisions about rural schools affect transportation and living costs, and the carrying capacity in our region (the ability of cities to be sustained by their local area). People live in "the country" for a reason: air quality, jobs, lifestyle, etc.... and their schools makes it possible over many generations. Our District 57 has a mixed track record in its support for rural education. Efforts to engage the Regional District came slow and only after pressure. The creative and passionate effort of the Dunster community to save their school was met by resistance and unnecessary conflict. Giscome/Willow parents have had a long struggle to be heard and understood. We've heard years of talk about how 21st century learning and technology could help in rural settings but the board office is very slow to act or experiment. Hixon was spared, but Salmon Valley, Shady Valley, Mackenzie and others did not fare so well. Still, some creative solutions came from the process... like the land/school deal in Dunster and the modular units proposed by the Giscome PAC and finally taken seriously by the trustees. Send me an email or leave a comment about what we should do for our rural schools. How do we provide meaningful learning for small multi-age groups? Can we use project-based learning, itinerant teachers, blended learning (mix of technology, face-to-face, and distance education), or shared-use buildings? What do we experiment with first? Check out the CORES group (Coalition of Rural Educational Sustainability), they are also working on this... I've found their facebook page and I'm looking forward to seeing more of the discussion and their work.