The mass exodus of senior Vancouver School Board staff on “medical leave” this past week could have been avoided. All it would have taken was for Premier Christy Clark’s education minister Mike Bernier to simply follow the law and fire the school board last summer when it refused to deliver a balanced budget.
Of course, that would have meant the province and not the board would have had to carry the political burden of cutting school programs while closing (mostly East Side) schools. And, in an election year, our most political premier was not willing to do that.
So things were allowed to fester, although Bernier did appoint a “special advisor.” Meanwhile, the Vision school trustees held the board majority on the issue of school closures, thanks to the support of Green Party trustee Janet Fraser, while they continued to draw out the consultation process. (There are four Vision, four NPA and one Green trustee.)
But Vision, along with Fraser, were no more keen to take the heat on the matter than the province.
And they undoubtedly frustrated senior school board staff by sending them back to the drawing board to reconsider their latest recommendations on closures. That to-and-fro finally collapsed, first with Superintendent Scott Robinson, and then secretary-treasurer Russell Horswill, calling in sick. They were followed by three associate superintendents, Julie Pearce, Nancy Brennan and Murray Doucette taking medical leave. And finally David Nelson, the project lead on long-range facilities planning — which is to say school closures — also caught what was going around and took to his bed.
All, by the way, but Nelson, were new to the staff; all were hired by Robinson after he, too, recently was hired to replace Steve Cardwell who was off to work at UBC.
But that many external hires, virtually the entire senior management team, speaks volumes about the VSB’s failure to do any effective succession planning.
And alarm bells should have been going off about the board’s reputation as an employer more than a year ago when they tried to hire Greg Frank out of the Burnaby School Board to take over as their money man in the position of secretary-treasurer. Frank actually accepted the job and even signed a contract before backing out. He would end up in Surrey.
Then, shortly after the rash of medical leaves, there was another extraordinary event: The B.C. Superintendent’s Association fired a letter off to the Minister of Education, which described a VSB working environment of harassment and bullying. They wanted Bernier to intervene.
The letter noted in part, “The Vancouver School Board work environment continually and cumulatively creates a toxicity which fosters fear and a lack of a sense of safety for those lead educators as the expectations requested of them are unmanageable.”
And once again, sensitive to the political nature of the season we are in, Bernier passed the request to WorkSafe B.C., which deals with these types of complaints in the workplace.
(Ironically, the VSB professes a zero tolerance for harassment and bullying, the very activities they are being accused of fostering.)
Meanwhile, Cardwell has agreed to sit in as “acting” superintendent and former secretary-treasurer, Rick Krowchuk, has come out of retirement to take up his old spot, also “acting.”
On Monday, Cardwell presented a proposal to the board that all work on determining school closures be put on hold. Given the number of senior staff fleeing the building, there was no longer the staff capacity to proceed with this project. It passed with the NPA abstaining.
One can only speculate, in the absence of that whole raft of senior managers, what business the board would be capable of carrying out in the near future while WorkSafe B.C. investigates to see what merit there is in the charges made in the superintendent association’s letter.
Then, there is the matter of the provincial government’s response. How long, I can only wonder, will it take for WorkSafe B.C. to report after investigating the school board’s working environment which, for all intents and purposes, is now paralyzed?
And, with an election still eight months away, how long will Clark and Bernier be able to continue to dodge the bullet of any possible negative political fallout and fire the Vancouver School Board — if and when these charges are proven?
@allengarr
