Halifax Politics dot ca

Tonight, the Imagine Our Schools process will unveil the first draft of the new capital plan for Halifax peninsula. The consultants were hired in September and given until March, all of seven months, to produce a proposed capital plan.

This was mandated by the Department of Education to address the lack of community consultation in the Halifax Regional School Board’s previous capital plan, which was rejected. That proposal was for all of HRM. The new consultants process is for all Darmouth/Cole Harbour schools, and the Halifax peninsula.

Some ideas were revealed at a so called “community focus group” meeting last week. Two draft proposals were floated, one which would see just six, 650 student, P-9 schools on the peninsula, and another that would see eight P-6 schools, about 350 students, and just two 550 student junior highs, grade 7-9.

The nearly universal response from parents and many administrators to these grand proposals? A resounding silence. A “Meh” if you will, of grand proportions.

“What is the problem now” you ask? For a change, the issue relatively simple.

Leave aside the poor consultation, where parents and community members had a bare hour to respond to a 14 page questionnaire.

Leave aside the fact that the enrolment projections continue to be questioned by, among others, HRMs own planning department.

Forget, for the moment, that the proposed process presented by an embattled and battered HRSB administration in June of 2007 was not at all what went ahead, when the School Advisory Councils were marginalized the last voice of actual elected people was removed completely from the decision making process by October 2007.

The issue is far simpler than that. The problem is that the two proposed and far reaching ten year plans would require a massive capital infusion, something in the range of $50-80 million dollars, JUST ON THE PENINSULA, to completely reconfigure the school system. This when we need maybe that again in Dartmouth, and again in Cole Harbour, not even mentioning Hammonds Plains and Kingswood.

It is hard to get excited, whether you are for or against a proposal, if you think it will never see the light of day.

On another level, participants, especially engaged and informed parents, find the process exhausting, because the whole system is stupid. HRSB is so undefended by the province that it cannot and does not maintain its schools adequately.

The total maintenance budget for about 150 buildings is nine million bucks. That is about $60,000 per building. No wonder they are falling down!

HRSB is desperately under funded, for maintenance, for special needs, for enrichment, for ASL, for core programming, for support staff. The Province needs to provide adequate funding for all theses things, and ultimately, the buildings maintained and built by an adequately funded school administration.

November 22, 2007

Dear Mr Windsor,

I am writing to you today regarding your request for opinion regarding the HRSB’s upcoming application to the Utility and Review Board Regarding Number and Boundary of Electoral Districts.

Speaking only for myself today, while reflecting on my recent fourteen months experience advocating for my community and quality education in the Halifax Region, I would like to outline several thoughts regarding the opportunities and pitfalls this review creates. Specifically, I would like to address four areas: the selection of the Board, the composition of districts, the size of the districts, the naming of the Board.

Selecting the Board: I agree with the parent who presented to you yesterday night, electing the Board does not work. We have had about two decades of experiment with elected Boards, and the results are poor. As Canadians we don’t elect sheriffs, judges, or the water commissioners, nor should we elect a school board. Education is a service. The Minister of Education is responsible for the service, and he or she is elected. The Board has little of the power normally associated with an elected body, as it cannot sign contracts with its workers, or set tax rates. Why elect this group?

Other jurisdictions, such as Ontario, are toying with returning to appointed Boards, or turning education over to the municipalities. HRM running HRSB would go against the very foundation of the Haywood Report and the entire provincial direction of social services provided from the provincial tax pool and property taxes paying for property services, and I cannot support such a model.

I suggest that a model based on the metro university governance, the Nova Scotia Community College, or even the Water Commission would be far better. There are plenty of precedents and models that are already in use in the province. 4-5 Provincial appointees, 4-5 people recruited by the elected Board, 2 HRM councillors, 2 elected staff reps, 2 elected student reps, and 2 elected SAC reps would be a good place to start. Appoint them for 4-5 years, stagger the terms, recruit the very best people you can guilt into serving (as you yourself were not doubt asked to come out of retirement and serve for the greater good). This would actually be larger than the current model, but I am sure with the right mandate from the minister and the right leadership that we could see our community served better than it has been since 1996.

An appointed board aided and enhanced by more regularized “Super-SAC” meetings would better serve the public good.

Composition of Districts: In the event that the Board continues to be elected, districts will remain an issue. The current status quo is that each district of HRSB includes two districts of HRM council. This means the district size and shape is not reflective of actual educational service delivery areas. There has been a proposal that each family of schools should be a district. Proponents of this suggestion had also suggested that each school district Super-SAC elect a representative to serve on the Board. While the later may not be something that is available under the act, the former may. This would give HRSB a council of 14. Regional factionalism and NIMBY syndrome may occur (it was occurring anyway), but this model may allow for the reconnection of the Board members to organized and active constituencies, keeping the elected Board grounded in this educational reality. Perhaps a recall provision could be considered, as well, to allow the electorate to enforce good behavior.

Size of Districts: I don’t think having a smaller Board will address interpersonal issues the last elected Board faced. Far too many of the Board members have been elected unopposed, and while we all hope that this might change in the next election, there is nothing to say that we might end up with 4 or 8 people who win by acclimation and still lack the personal and professional ability to be successful Board members.

The elected Board members, paid only $7000.00 a year, are essentially volunteers. Having to do the job of a Board member in their spare time while holding down a day job is very difficult. When the Board grew from the size of Halifax, or Dartmouth, to be HRM wide, the elected members were no longer able to rely on their innate sense of “what needed to be done” in their community. A Board rep in the old city of Dartmouth “just knew,” or at least had an idea! The Districts are already far to big for that. Fewer districts, representing even more schools, will not create a more tenable situation.

Naming of the Board: This may be beyond the scope of the URB, or the HRSB, but I strongly recommend that the elected or oversight apparatus of the Board be renamed, or the rest of the Board renamed, to clearly outline the difference between the decision making body and the staff and admin. Halifax Regional School Trustees? Halifax Regional School Administration? The Cabinet is not the Province, or Council is not HRM, so the Board should not be the Board.

Why is this important, you ask? For one, it causes a lot of confusion amongst the public, and needless concern and worry for teachers and principals. “Is he criticizing my employer again?” Criticizing or critiquing the elected board is okay in everyday discourse, this is fair comment, but treating the overall staff and Board admin in the same fashion would rarely be acceptable! The fundamentally political and representative role of the Board, elected or not, requires rigorous public discussion, debate, and sometimes more! Clearly separating oversight from admin would help greatly to reduce confusion and increase the quality of this debate.

I thank you for your time, and commend you for all your hard work,

Yours,

Waye Mason
Parent of Emma, 8, and Rhett, 13

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please feel free to circulate and distribute under this license.

I have almost climbed to the top of the mountain of work and hopefully weekly missives will return soon. Until then, a picture of my new Brentwood KHS Comfortride bike that I bought to commute to Dartmouth.

It has not been a good year for those that sacrifice themselves to lead the energetic arts and culture sector in Halifax. There is a growing feeling, hovering somewhere between ennui and abject despair, and it is expressing itself throughout the province’s creative continuum.

Halifax has never been an easy town to love if you are a creative person, or as the bureaucrats call them, “cultural worker.” The city and the province it is capital of have never had particularly good support for the arts, and if anything, the gap between expectations and support has never been wider.

In fact, many worry that the limited success we have had in the absence of adequate funding and resources has in fact made it even harder to convince government that more funding is desperately required.

Arguably, Halifax’s reputation as an international centre for art has its roots in the incredible experiment that was NSCAD in the 1970s. For a time, our humble art college was THE world leading institution in art and design.

Garry Neill Kennedy lead the college to unimaginable heights, but the support to continue this momentum, for growth and international leadership, was simply not forthcoming from the Provincial or Federal funders. Don’t get me wrong, NSCAD is still a good institution, and probably better than we deserve, but like most things in Nova Scotia the raw potential of the organization is not being realized due to insufficient leadership and lack of funding.

The situation with NSCAD can be used as a template or referent for the challenges faced by virtually every other arts agency, institution, or business in the province. From craft to film to music, from higher education to art galleries, the potential for greatness is there, but not realized.

Provincially, funding is stagnant. The current government promised to double funding during the election, and then increase the $7 million dollar budget by just $450,000. Vital organizations from the Tattoo to the Writers Federation have not seen significant increases in funding since the 1980s.

Costs continue to rise, funding does not, and the end result is decreasing programming and slashed services. Depending on who you speak too, Nova Scotia’s funding is either the lowest or the middle of the national pack, per capita. How can we lead the nation with anything less than top notch funding?

On the municipal level, the much vaunted “culture plan” has yet to result in concrete action or funding. The HRM has, I am told, over 2200 pieces of art in storage. The city has an entire museum, the Dartmouth Heritage Museum, in storage. The city has finally, after 23 months, reposted the cultural officer job that has been empty since Keith McPhail fled the position is despair in 2005.

There may be meetings underway, there may be “multi-stakeholder committees” meeting and discussing plans, but at the end of the day, the council has yet to commit serious and even adequate money to funding culture.

The most depressing example was told to me at a recent brainstorming session for Symphony Nova Scotia, where we were told that Halifax funds our symphony the least of all municipalities in Canada, with $15,000 a year. The next lowest, you ask? Edmonton at $100,000, and the support rises rapidly in other cities from there. Halifax wants world class art and music? Show us the money!

The creative energy in Halifax has never been stronger. The raw potential is there to have a cultural powerhouse, to be a centre, if not the centre, of independent arts and culture production in English Canada.

The people who sacrifice to stay in a city they love, to create and live their lives, do so in large part because they perceive that things will change for the better. They think that society wants art, wants creativity, and is willing to fund opportunities, and also, to fund not just good or adequate institutions, but amazing and world class institutions and agencies.

Halifax has the potential to be better than average. Halifax can and should be great, but the question remains, will leadership, vision, action and money come in time? Will it come before the current batch of cultural leaders end up packing up and abandoning the city in frustration, and exhaustion? Time is running out.

—
Waye Mason is music and festival promoter, business consultant and activist in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please feel free to circulate and distribute under this license.

Short bullet posts seem order of the day today.

* I am amused how many dear old friends are suddenly on myspace… when Ben and I created our personal and HPX pages everyone was younger than Ben, and he was 23 at the time. Then slowly the core mid to late twenty set of volunteers and coordinators all registered, then nine or ten months ago, people in their 30s started showing up. Now pretty much everyone I know no matter what their age seems to have a myspace page. Except my 14 and 18 year old cousins, because Myspace is lame, they are all on nexopia and think I am sucker for being on a site owned by News Corp.

* We appear to be winning this phase of the battle at the old HRSB. I will donate $250.00 to the charity of Doug Hadley’s (spokesfella for HRSB) choice if the new school is built as planned. HRSB staff are in fact open and maybe excited to do consultation now, I think, just as long as we/I/us collectively live up to the promise to be there to put massive pressure on the Province to fund and build what results from the process. Stand by DOE and cabinet, here we come… softly, softly, and carrying a big stick. Thus, the next note:

* I am working hard to establish a Citadel wide school association, to formalize the political representation of the whole peninsula. This will hopefully take us from the “perceived as rich and taken care of” to where we really are “no new schools in 40-50 years except St Agnes (because it burned down)”. If anything central Halifax has one of the biggest infrastructure gaps in HRM, though Dartmouth has a massive pile of crappy 1960s and 1970s schools AND the problem of massive drops in the student population. One parent told me the politics of the area going back to the end of the catholic and parochial school divide, giving my a nice historic view of how we got here. It is now time to get everyone at the table and set out a bold plan for the future… or some crap like that.

* I am meeting MC J today, of Halifax rap group MC J and Cool G. He is going to be on the Halifax Pop Explosion African Nova Scotian Advisory Committee. I am going to facilititate and provide resources to a committee of people from teh community to establish programs for ANS youth. The idea is to tie together summer employment, mentorship and the high school coop program to develop skills and leadership in the young black music community. IT IS VERY EXCITING.