University of B.C. education professor Charles Ungerleider will tell you that people have no idea what the names of their school trustees are until those trustees decide to close their child’s school. Then they remember the names all the way to the polling booth.

Don’t doubt that was on the minds of the Vision/COPE majority-controlling Vancouver school board when they dodged the school closure bullet last Sunday. Moments after a staff report on school closures was posted on the school board’s website, board chair Patti Bacchus and her posse were telling the world they supported the report’s main recommendation: delay any decision to close the five Vancouver schools under review until March of 2012. That would be well after the next election.

The report was supposed to be officially unveiled at a school board committee meeting this week, on Tuesday evening, by school superintendent Steve Cardwell. It will be sent on to the board for consideration next week.

That pre-emptive move took so much steam out of the issue that on Tuesday evening only a handful of folks turned up in the gallery.

The official reasons for the delay on closures are fairly straightforward. The damage caused to communities by boarding up five schools would be far greater than the $1.5 million that would be saved. Besides, that is only a small percentage of the approximately $10-million deficit the board is facing for next year’s budget. The staff and board want time to figure out alternatives.

Ungerleider would say the decision to defer closures is prudent and allows the board to look more generally at issues of population growth, planning and educational needs right across the city.

But there’s something else worth noting about what is going on. There has been a clear strategy shift by the majority on the board when it comes to the provincial government. The strategy—yet another pre-election move—was worked out with help from the mayor’s office and Vision party advisers.

Recall not many months ago Bacchus and the board were at war with Minister of Education Margaret MacDiarmid. MacDiarmid dispatched an auditing crew to investigate the management practices of the board. Their report found the board wanting as managers and there was a great deal of fist pounding from Bacchus. It was all the province’s fault. Funding cuts were destroying public education.

Much of that rhetoric has been dialed back now. Bacchus seems more conciliatory. Yes, she’ll talk about provincial funding levels but, also part of the staff report, the board will look for alternative funding sources, and partners at city hall may help with better use of facilities. They’re looking at methods to reduce costs and are expressing a willingness to work with the province.

And now that MacDiarmid is back in the education portfolio, although she still insists there is no more money, she has stopped throwing rocks at the Vancouver School Board. She’s even saying the odd nice thing about plans to make schools neighbourhood education centres that provide a wider variety of educational services.

MacDiarmid’s change in tone can be attributed at least in part to the fluid state of the government. Everyone is hanging back on plans as the Liberals select a new leader who will issue his or her own set of marching orders.

And that opens up an opportunity for the school board to lobby for, among other things, a commitment for regular schooling for children as young as three or four years old. Do that and you’d see a lot of those empty spaces schools are now experiencing quickly filled, to say nothing of more operating funds.

Yet while cooler heads may prevail and some schools have been given a reprieve, as superintendent Cardwell reminded the board this week: “It is still not over.”

agarr@vancourier.com