Only 80 people attended the Vancouver District Parent Advisory Council’s school trustee candidates forum, Oct. 23. At least half of those who attended were PAC leaders.
“We thought it would be full because of the strike,” said disappointed VDPAC chairperson Melanie Antweiler.
Former COPE trustee Jane Bouey, now a candidate with the new Public Education Project party that’s focusing solely on education in the Nov. 15 civic election, earned the most vociferous applause of the evening when she addressed supports for students with special needs.
Bouey became a public education activist in 1993 when it took her son two years to get his learning problems assessed and then she still had to struggle to secure support. She says every time she succeeded in securing help for him, support was removed from another child.
“It was a question of underfunding,” she said. “Now things have got worse. The Liberal government’s stripping of contracts made a huge difference in terms of who is directly impacted by cuts in special education… It’s disproportionally students with special needs… So I’m going to agree with COPE. It’s time that we stop being complicit…We won’t continue to cut the supports that students need the most.”
Twenty-two of 29 candidates for nine trustee positions appeared and responded to questions from a VDPAC moderator at John Oliver secondary school.
Both Green candidate Janet Fraser and Vision Vancouver candidate and two-time trustee and VSB chairperson Patti Bacchus said trustees need to lobby the provincial government for more money for education.
Bouey said trustees need to work with the broader community to persuade the provincial government to better fund education, a tactic that worked when she was a COPE trustee in 2005 and there was a provincial election.
“There’s an increasing reliance on private funding, on donations, on parents anteing up. It’s a dangerous erosion of public education and we completely and totally oppose that,” she said.
Non-Partisan Association candidate Penny Noble says trustees need to work collaboratively with the provincial government and to seek other sources of funding.
“There are a lot of other opportunities out there that we can be looking at,” she said. “That is something we see as a huge, huge opportunity that’s been done extremely successfully in a number of other school boards around the province.”
Expelled former NPA trustee Ken Denike, who is running with a new party called Vancouver First, also said trustees need to seek funding beyond the provincial government. The five-time board chairperson outlined how he secured federal funding for settlement workers in schools. His party-mate Sophia Woo said trustees wouldn’t need to make any cuts if they set the board’s priorities correctly.
PEP candidate Gwen Giesbrecht and COPE candidate Ilana Shecter refused to consider cuts they would make as trustees.
“The cut that I would like to see made is the cut to the funding that goes to private schools to fund those [public] programs,” Giesbrecht said.
Shecter suggested COPE would deliver to the province an unbalanced budget. She said when the party did so in the 1980s, funding was restored and COPE was reelected with a majority board.
Denike said he and Woo would continue acting as opposition on the board, raising issues that need more parental involvement.
He received enthusiastic applause from the same parents who told the Courier they’d attend the meeting because they remain concerned about the board’s revised gender identities and sexual orientation policy that passed in June.
Noble worked to shine positive new light on the NPA.
“We are not your grandfather’s NPA. We are your daughter’s NPA and we, ourselves, are looking for change,” she said.
VDPAC intends to post questions and answers on its website at vancouverdpac.org.
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