The spotlight has recently shone on newly elected Green Party of Vancouver school board trustee Janet Fraser as she’ll hold the deciding vote on issues that split the four Vision Vancouver and four NPA trustees.
As the Courier detailed earlier in the month, Fraser wants to make the board feel less distant to parents. She wants the board’s revised sexual orientation and gender identities policy fully implemented, more action on making the district environmentally sustainable and additional support for poor and aboriginal students.
But what are the personal priorities of the other four newbies? One is from Vision Vancouver, which lost its majority on school board Nov. 15, and the other three are from the NPA, which increased its share of seats at the school board to match Vision. The four newcomers and fellow first-timer Fraser will be sitting at a table with four veteran incumbents, including current chair Patti Bacchus, they’ll have a lot to learn in the coming months and years. It’s time to learn a little bit about each of them in turn:
Joy Alexander, Vision Vancouver
A parent, retired teacher and school psychologist, Alexander, who holds a doctorate in educational psychology, wants the VSB to engage doctoral students in measuring and setting baselines for new programs and to carry out research that could be used to improve them.
“We put in a program for aboriginal children at Macdonald [elementary]” she said, as an example. “Get baseline figures in there to see how you can track it to see how you can tweak it, how you can make it even better.”
Alexander is concerned about funding for the school district and wants to ensure students with special needs and aboriginal children receive adequate attention and support.
Penny Noble, NPA
Noble, executive director of Bike to Work Week B.C., a former teacher and public relations and marketing veteran, is most concerned about funding. She wants to make sure the board maintains a positive relationship with the provincial government and wants to look at additional sources of funding that include grants and donations.
“It’s done quite successfully in a couple of other school boards and I’d just like to look at that model and see whether we can apply that to Vancouver,” she said.
Noble believes the board’s public solicitations and advertising in schools policy needs to be reconsidered with input from parents, students and teachers because “it’s fairly vague.”
“There certainly are some really great opportunities out there that do not impact at all on curriculum or require any branding, or anything like that, that can be looked at, and that includes not-for profit organizations, charity organizations, foundations and individual donors,” she said.
“We need more of a proactive system of reaching out to them, but within the framework of a policy and guidelines as to how that all happens.”
Stacy Robertson, NPA
Robertson, a lawyer and enforcement counsel at the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada, wants to focus on using vacant school spaces to offer childcare and raising money to serve breakfast and lunch to hungry kids.
“The key there is there’s areas of common ground where I think that we can accomplish something,” he said.
Robertson also wants to shorten assessment times for students with special needs.
Robertson has been involved in the Hastings Park Conservancy, a community group that promotes the greening and public use of land at Hastings Park and the PNE. He is a coach for Hastings Little League.
Christopher Richardson, NPA
A former Vancouver park board commissioner, current president of the Mount Pleasant Community Centre Association and a chartered accountant, Richardson wants to make sure the learning needs of different students are assessed and attended to as early as possible, without taking money away from other support for students. His youngest of two sons is severely dyslexic and Richardson says it took the public school system two years to even start to address his difficulties.
Richardson wants to help relieve the anxiety of students and their families.
“And to identify the issues, identify the resources and apply them as soon as possible, which might make sense from a budgetary point of view, as well,” he said.
Richardson subsequently sent his youngest son to private school Fraser Academy. The son is now in third year history studies at the University of B.C.
The new trustees take office at a board meeting Dec. 8.
“We need more of a proactive system of reaching out to them, but within the framework of a policy and guidelines as to how that all happens.”
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