School Boards, District Consolidation,
and Educational Governance
in British Columbia, 1872-1995
T. Fleming and B. Hutton
Department of Communications and Social Foundations
Faculty of Education
The University of Victoria
EMAIL: tfleming@uvic.ca
It was not surprising to see that Education Minister Art
Charbonneau's November 17, 1995, plan to "reduce significantly
the number of school boards" in British Columbia was greeted with
a certain amount of skepticism both within and outside the
educational community.1 Criticisms of the NDP Government's
proposal to restructure educational governance in the Province by
reducing the number of school boards from 75 to 37 were immediate
and largely predictable in nature. Reactions ranged from
arguments that district consolidation invariably diminishes
community representation to accusations that the Minister's plan
is flawed because it panders to the public's growing distaste for
bureaucracy.2 A Times Colonist editorial, published the morning
after the Minister's news release, depicted the government's
reorganization scheme as "a crude plan [which] does a massive
disservice to education in British Columbia."3 Further to this,
the editor charged that CharbonneauOs initiative failed to
consider the "educational needs," of children, and alleged "that
parents will lose their voice in how their children are
educated."4 Judging by the press coverage that followed the
government's announcement, few critics were prepared to accept
Charbonneau's assertion that "restructuring will
assist . . . in cutting costs while preserving the quality of our
public education system."5
Unfortunately, these reactions to the government's
consolidation plan seem limited in their grasp of the educational
past. They assume that there is something about a local
governance structure comprised of 75 school districts to which
the Province is historically bound, something that is durable,
constant, and that should be beyond question. Criticisms of the
government's proposal also seem to assume that the concept of
local representation in educational governance is meaningful to
the community at large and that school boards continue to play a
vital role in public education. Some responses to the
government's plan likewise associate the creation of larger
governance units with a decline in educational quality, while
others portray the proposed change as an issue that can somehow
be examined by itself, apart from other important educational
issues.
This paper will examine these assumptions as it reviews the
historical record pertaining to school governance in British
Columbia. It will attempt to establish a context in which to view
the government's current consolidation proposal, as well as
outline some of the major factors that have conditioned the
Province's governance and administrative traditions. Accordingly,
it will describe the legal foundations of public schooling, the
traditions of central and local control that characterize the
educational past, the status and responsibilities historically
assigned to trustees, and the effects of early and recent
consolidation efforts in British Columbia and elsewhere.
School Boards as Creatures of Provincial Authority
The defining moment in Canadian history--and, indeed, the
defining moment in the history of Canadian school
governance--was Confederation. Passage of the British North
America Act in 1867 (renamed in 1982 the Constitution Act,
1867) established Canada as a nation, and set out the legal
framework under which public institutions were to develop.
Under the terms of this legislation, provincial legislatures
"assumed full legal responsibility for education" within their
jurisdictions.6 "For various reasons," as Enns has pointed out,
"they chose to implement systems which were partly centralized
and partly decentralized. Centralized functions were placed in
the administrative charge of departments of education, while
decentralized functions were delegated to locally elected or
appointed school boards."7 This decision, in large part,
acknowledged the pioneering activities of local authorities to
organize elementary and grammar schools in Upper and Lower
Canada in the 1830s and 1840s.
The British North America Act, in essence, furnished the
legal basis for the centralization of school governance. In
British Columbia, the passage of the first School Act in 1872 and
subsequent legislation enacted over the following one hundred
years embodied the idea that only a strong, central, and secular
authority could provide the vision and control necessary to
establish a school system in a vast territory with a diverse
population and uncertain economic prospects.8 As Fleming has
written:
A century of school law was, therefore, written in such
a way that the government minister with the educational
portfolio was charged with the ultimate policy and
decision-making authority in schooling and empowered to
intervene in any matter, at any level, for the good of
the system. This body of legislation also made it clear
that government officials and their staffs in the
Education Office would be liberated from the problem of
actually delivering school services; this
responsibility would accrue to local trustees who were,
in the final analysis, 'creatures of provincial
authority' and ever 'subject to the constant scrutiny,
and if warranted, intervention' of provincial officers.
Thus free, the government's men in education could walk
the high ground to organize, manage, supervise, and
inspect the operations and policies of a system others
maintained.9
In short, although senior governments maintained overall
responsibility for providing public schooling within their
provincial jurisdictions, the actual task of delivering school
programs and services was assigned to local boards. Amid the
welter of social change transforming Canadian life in the closing
decades of the nineteenth century, centralized control seemed a
small price to pay for a governance and administrative structure
that promised "free" common schooling for all, as well as a sense
of social and educational order at a time of turbulent national
growth and expansion.
Across the continent, the school legislation enacted by
senior governments commonly held that state and provincial
authorities, alone, would determine the number and type of school
boards within their jurisdictions, the number of trustees to be
elected by communities, the size of local territorial or district
boundaries, and the frequency of school board elections.11 This
legislation gave state and provincial authorities absolute
control over the most important aspects of public schooling,
namely=A5the curriculum to be taught; the level to which schools
were financed; the training and certification required of
teachers; the methods of assessment and standards for student
testing; the establishment of school boards; the design and
distribution of curriculum materials; and criteria for opening
and closing schools.
British Columbia's first school legislation in 1872 made it
clear that local boards of education would be restricted in their
powers. As Johnson has observed:
An annual school meeting had to be held in each school
district to elect the trustees and to hear their report
on school business. It would seem, after considering
the very extensive powers of the Provincial Board of
Education, that there could be little left for the
local boards to do. They were, however, charged with
the responsibilities of accounting for all school
moneys and disbursing the salary grants to the
teachers. In their hands was placed the custody and
safekeeping of all school property, its repair and
maintenance. They were also empowered to visit their
school from time to time to see that the school laws
and regulations were being carried out. Annually in
January each local board was to send a report on its
school district to the Superintendent of Education.11
Enforcement of provincial laws and regulations rested
chiefly with the school inspectors, who served as the principal
agents of central control. The inspector's duties in British
Columbia were described in the following way by Hindle in 1918:
In practice, each room or division of a graded school
and each non-graded school is visited twice a year by
the official inspector, who usually spends half a day
in the room, during which he examines the order,
discipline, methods of teaching, etc., and reports on
these and the general progress of the school. It is his
duty to discuss with teachers all matters which may
promote their efficiency, and the character and
usefulness of the school. Furthermore, it is his duty
to furnish teachers and trustees with such information
as they may require regarding the Public School Act and
the performance of their respective duties. In addition
to the work of inspecting schools, the inspector must
render aid and direction to new school districts in the
process of formation. He is often detailed to visit a
locality petitioning for the establishment of a school
district, or an assisted school, and the fate of the
petition depends almost wholly on this report. It is
his duty to encourage the establishment of schools
where none exist by holding public meetings in the
localities. He has power to appoint trustees in all
cases where the rate payers have neglected to do so at
their annual meeting.12
In all but the major centres of the Province, school boards
remained dependent on the Department of Education=A5and the twice-
yearly visits of its inspectors to expedite educational matters
on their behalf until 1958, when the provincial inspectorate
closed. With the subsequent establishment of provincially-
appointed district superintendents, professional school officers
began to work more closely with local boards, a development that
led, in 1974, to the advent of complete local control over
senior appointments and the creation of district
administrations.
The Shadowed Status of Local Authorities
Even before Confederation and the passage of provincial
school legislation, the trustee's status had been shaped by
public and professional perceptions. Trustees' lack of
scholarship--that is to say their modest levels of formal
schooling-- and their inexperience in school management were
sometimes cited as reasons why early school board officials were
incapable of providing the stewardship that schools required. In
1823, trustees of the board of education for the "Home" district
of Upper Canada were asked by community leaders not to choose
teachers for their own district: "The board was declared
incompetent by the district authority to carry out its task."13
Later, in Ontario, the Province's first superintendent, Egerton
Ryerson, criticized trustees in Haldimand for selecting an
unqualified teacher.14 Such instances may have been among the
first recorded criticisms of trustees but certainly not the
last.15
Much of the historical concern about trustee effectiveness
has to do with the alleged susceptibility of locally-elected
officials to community pressures. Curtis, for example, has
observed that a movement to place the schools "above politics"
originated in Ontario as early as the 1840s and served to de-
localize educational control:
The education office attempted to make the sphere of
public instruction a neutral sphere, a sphere above
politics, where the rich man and poor man (and women)
would be on conditions of equality. This meant the
elaboration of a set of common conditions to which all
students in the educational sphere would be subject. A
common curriculum, a common pedagogy, and a common
Christianity would form the substance of educational
treatment, and this formally equal treatment would
create conditions of social harmony.16
During the Victorian Age, it was believed that
pursuit of these objectives could not be left to small thinking,
village politicians. Governance, as the Victorians saw it, was a
task for provincial politicians and civil servants shielded from
the pull of local politics. Local school government, they
believed, simply could not represent the larger public interest,
a point made bluntly again in 1905 by the Vancouver Province's
editor when he wrote: "the interests of the province at large are
safer in the hands of a central administration than when placed
in those of the municipal boards."17 Although educational
officials at the provincial level have not proven immune to
political pressures, public sentiments, even in recent years,
continue to favour traditions of central over local control as
Ontario's 1994 royal commission report on learning suggests:
For many people, boards are the unknown components in
the system. Trustees are elected by a tiny proportion
of the electorate, if indeed they don't win by
acclamation. It might be embarrassing to discover how
many constituents know their trustees' names. Board
agendas too often reflect matters that are light years
away from what happens in their schools; anyone who has
sat in on a meeting of a school board knows that it can
be a truly surrealistic experience. The line between
trustees as determiners of policy and administrators as
implementors of policy is often anything but self-
evident. On the other hand, trustees sometimes involve
themselves too intimately and inappropriately with the
direct lives of their schools.18
Ontario's commission noted further that "the primary
responsibility of school boards" should be to "translate general
Ministry guidelines into viable local practice."19 Or, as the
commission put it: "Their job is to make local policy consistent
with both provincial policy and local realities. They set clear
expectations and guidelines for their schools and work with them
to make sure they're progressing toward those ends."20 Trustee
status has thus been overshadowed for more than a century and a
half.
The Illusion of Local Control
Although school boards were granted responsibility in law
for managing schools within their district, supervising school
construction and maintenance, setting tax assessments rates on
residential and, sometimes, commercial property, and hiring,
promoting, and dismissing teachers and administrators, this
control has proved, historically, to be more apparent than real.
Since 1872, when public education began in British Columbia,
provincial authorities in Victoria have greatly circumscribed the
scope of local authority by controlling capital expenditures,
defining cost-sharing formulas, and enforcing regulations over
virtually all aspects of schooling. Even in the area of staffing,
supposedly a local responsibility, the long arm of the Province
intruded throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century
and the first half of the twentieth century. Despite the fact
that boards could, in law, hire and fire teachers, trustees were,
in practice, guided by inspectors' views about teacher
competence, and reluctant to challenge an inspector's report.21
Nor, indeed, was the inspector's influence confined to teacher
selection. In municipalities with large schools, few appointments
or dismissals of principals took place without senior
government's tacit permission.22
What this meant was that trustees enjoyed latitude in but
few areas, notably over such things as determining who would
supply water and wood to the school, who would supply "slates"
for children to write on, or provide other furnishings, and what
social uses would be made of the schoolhouse when instruction
ended for the day. In other words, school board influence over
core elements of schooling has remained largely illusionary in
character.
Board authority was, perhaps, most pronounced in the control
individual trustees exercised over the social lives of the
usually-young female teachers who staffed the majority of the
province's schools from the late-19th to the mid-20th century=A5and
the trustees could, and did, insist that teachers adhere to
locally-set standards of behaviour.23 Often, teachers found
lodgings with the family of the board chair, with the family of
the secretary treasurer, or with someone else of standing in the
community recommended by the trustees.
Robert Harris' celebrated painting, "A Meeting of School
Trustees," illustrated the relationship between school trustees
and teachers in rural Canada from Confederation to World War II.24
In it, Harris portrays a young female teacher, frocked, one hand
on a school desk and one hand outstretched and raised upward,
standing in front of four bearded, seated, and somewhat stern-
looking, male trustees. The teacher appears to be making a
presentation to them, or is involved in some form of explanation.
In any event, Harris' portrait of the board pointed to several
enduring educational themes=A5the tradition of lay control over
professional staff, the lines of teacher accountability, and,
last but not least, a governance structure in which one staff
member was supervised by, what would later seem to some, an
excessive number of trustees.
A Tradition of Restructuring
In light of the circumscribed legal powers granted to school
boards, the questionable public status held by trustees, the
historical pattern of strong central control, and the fact that
school boards have not always functioned properly, it is
understandable why provincial authorities have proved
historically disposed toward reorganizing school governance
structures as circumstances seemed to require. Even before the
end of the 19th century, questions had been raised about the
efficacy of small school governance units. British Columbia's
second school superintendent, Colin Campbell McKenzie, wrote in
his 1883 report on the Province's schools:
The question of the number of trustees for a school
district was discussed, but though some advocated an
increase from three to five trustees it was argued that
the former was more workable. . . . The opinion was
also expressed that in the course of time it would be
advantageous to amalgamate adjacent districts, and as
an instance the case was given of the three districts
in the Saanich Peninsula with nine trustees which could
be amalgamated into one district with three trustees.25
Small districts of the kind McKenzie mentioned grew rapidly
in the closing decades of the Victorian age as the Province
became settled, and as demands for mass public schooling
increased. The 24 school districts visited in 1872 by the
Province's first school superintendent, John Jessop, had grown to
257 in 1902, and, by 1932, numbered an all-time high of 830.26
Significant, of course, in this growth was the fact that these
830 districts were comprised of only 1,163 schools, more than
1,000 of which taught only the elementary grades.27 To meet
provincial operating standards, these small schools required an
enrollment of 10 pupils to remain open, a number "fudged" on more
than one occasion by kindly inspectors who counted the noses of
all in attendance, including infants and family pets.28 Indeed,
most late 19th and early 20th century school districts in the
Province consisted of no more than a three-person board who
exercised jurisdiction over a one or two-room school, usually of
simple log or frame-construction. Not surprisingly, such
districts could not even hope to offer the range of educational
programs that an industrializing society was beginning to demand.
Of this historical condition, found commonly across the country,
Johnson has reported: "The case against the small school district
was that it was inefficient and over-administered (three school
trustees for one teacher) and that the calibre of trustees left
much to be desired. The chief fault with the rural school
district, however, was that it was far too small an area with too
slender a tax base to provide modern educational facilities."29
Collapsing school districts into larger governance units
first gained popular appeal in the early 20th century. Prince
Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland pioneered
legislation to consolidate schools in the early 1900s.
Saskatchewan provided legal measures to consolidate school
districts in 1913, and British Columbia introduced measures to
consolidate high schools as early as 1905.30 However, not until
the Great Depression of the 1930s--and the devastation it caused
in public finance=A5did provincial governments generally began to
insist that districts and schools be integrated into larger
administrative units.31
The motives underlying school and district consolidation
during this time were many and varied. Government officials and
school professionals across the country assembled a catalogue of
reasons to support such change. These included: disparities in
educational opportunity between urban and rural schools;
inefficiencies in small governance units; inequities in the
spread of rural tax assessments; and vast differences in
conditions of employment for rural teachers.32
District Amalgamation in the West
In British Columbia, the first experiment to reorganize rural
school territories was conducted under the direction of Bill
Plenderleith, Inspector of Schools for the Peace River region. In
a 1934 report to the Department of Education, Plenderleith
described the physical condition of the 63 schools in his
inspectorate in these terms: "[T]he schools themselves were of
the crudest possible structure=A5usually built of logs--consisting
of four bare walls . . . no ventilation except doors and windows,
and no heating arrangements except an unjacketed stove which
provided excess warmth in some parts of the room and insufficient
warmth in others."33 For the 1,200 youngsters attending these
schools, there was only crude outdoor lavatory facilities, few
library books, little playground equipment, and no extra-
curricular activity. Such educational conditions bespoke the
generally impoverished conditions of a region at a time where
seven out of ten families were living on government food stamps.
On the basis of Plenderleith's recommendations, four large
units of school administration were established in 1934 by
amalgamating 39 former school districts. By 1935-36, when the
larger unit plan had been applied generally to all schools in
Plenderleith's inspectorate, "a saving of some $12,000 had been
recorded, largely due to economies in secretaries' fees, bulk
buying of supplies, a proper system of budgeting and accounting
and other measures."34 Plenderleith's plan, Superintendent of
Schools, S. J. Willis, advised Premier Pattulo, served "to remove
anomalies in the rate of school taxation and to encourage the
adoption of a fair schedule of salaries for teachers throughout
the district, and generally to administer the schools with even
greater efficiency than in the past."35 But not everyone was happy
with these changes. Consolidation, and Plenderleith's appointment
as the government's official trustee, provoked a sharp reaction
among Peace River residents. Some called the government's action
"arbitrary, undemocratic, coercive, despotic, fascist," and,
even, "un-British."36
Emboldened by the success of the Peace River experiment, and
with similar reorganizations in the Fraser Valley, in 1945 the
British Columbia Government appointed Max Cameron, an education
professor at the University of British Columbia, to investigate
the state of provincial school finance and governance and to
address administrative concerns raised two decades earlier by
Putman and Weir's 1925 inquiry into provincial schools. "Nature,"
Cameron observed, "with an irritating disregard for the problem
of school administration, has decreed that no system will produce
perfect equality."37 Nevertheless, Cameron claimed, British
Columbia was not well served by some 700 school districts, and
recommended they be reduced to 74 larger districts, of which
seven were already in existence, and that the Province retain 16
isolated districts as unattached schools.38 The government heeded
Cameron's advice: by 1947, the number of school districts had
been reduced to 89; and, by 1971, had been further reduced to 77.
Throughout the West, similar developments were taking place.
In Alberta, early attempts to consolidate school districts met
with community and trustee resistance--as they had in British
Columbia's Peace River country. In 1929, Education Minister
Perren Baker addressed the Alberta School Trustees' convention.
In his speech, he tried to persuade trustees to accept a
restructuring proposal consisting of 20 divisions, each made up
of 150 districts.39 Baker's plan, although rejected at this time,
resurfaced a half dozen years later when William Aberhart's
government came to power. Under Aberhart, the "division" system
was introduced to Alberta in 1936. The following year, 774 rural
districts were amalgamated into 11 divisions; and, by 1941,
school governance in Alberta was organized into 50 large
divisions.40 In 1950, the County Act gave county councils the
powers of divisional school boards and, by 1965, 28 counties were
established.
The Saskatchewan government likewise passed a Larger School
Units Act in 1944 and, one year later, placed all northern
schools under one administrative district, whose costs were borne
entirely by the province. As Johnson has observed: "The Royal
Commission on Agriculture and Rural Life in 1956 strongly
endorsed the larger units and recommended adjusting their
boundaries to conform with those of the communities."41 Similarly,
by 1950, in Ontario, 536 "township areas" were designated by the
provincial government to replace the nearly 3,500 small rural
school districts that had dotted the province.
By 1945, district amalgamation had meant that the governance
structures of the Canadian school system had been reframed and
modernized. The inter-war years had seen the consolidation of
thousands of small, or single-school, units of local governance
and their replacement with larger school districts which, decades
later, would culminate in the appointment of school
superintendents and their staffs at municipal levels. As part of
this consolidation, small high schools were unified into
comprehensive secondary schools, complete with academic, general,
and technical branches of study. Secondary schooling was now held
to be within the grasp of many young Canadians.
South of the border, the situation was much the same. When
the National Commission on School District Reorganization made
its survey in 1947, some 104,000 local school districts existed
in the United States.42 However, by 1956 this number had been
reduced to 59,000 and, by 1980, fewer than 16,000 remained.43
Reasons for this change were explained in one recent history of
school administration: "As school districts grew in complexity,
demands for efficiency rose. And as they increased in size and
scope, the need to equalize educational opportunities became more
evident."44
International and National Developments in the 1970's and 1980's
Although district consolidation faded from the centre stage
of legislative and educational discussion from the 1940s to the
1990s in Canada, events elsewhere in the 1970s gradually began to
refocus public and professional attention throughout the world on
governance issues. Of particular importance in this regard was
the California Supreme Court's ruling in the Serrano v. Priest
case which held that it was unconstitutional to base the quality
of a child's education on the "wealth of his parents and
neighbours."45 Subsequent to this decision, similar suits,
challenging the property basis of public school finance, were
filed in many states. In the decade following Serrano, 28 states
revised their systems of school finance to reduce disparities
among districts, despite a 1973 U. S. Supreme Court ruling that
the Texas system, based on local property taxes, was not
unconstitutional.46
The Serrano case returned two important aspects of
governance to the centre stage of public attention=A5namely the
issues of fiscal and educational equity. But, more than this, by
underscoring the outstanding fiscal inequities and differences in
tax bases that existed among school districts, and by introducing
new legal requirements, Serrano accelerated a movement toward
greater state control of education, a movement already taking
form around numerous calls for school reform and educational
"excellence."47 This movement, Doyle and Finn have observed, is
transforming the way American schools are being governed. A
"shift of the centre of school governance from the locality to
the legislature," they predict, "is all but inevitable."48
Moreover, Doyle and Finn have argued:
The first sign of wisdom is to acknowledge that 'local
control of public education' as traditionally conceived
is in reality disappearing, even though its fascade is
nearly everywhere intact. What appears to be happening
is that local school systems are evolving in practice
into something that they always were in a
constitutional sense: subordinate administrative units
of a state educational system.49
Changes in school governance, however, have assumed a
different form in Britain and New Zealand, where the re-
centralization of senior government's authority has also been
accompanied by a decentralization of powers at the individual
school level.51 This began in England and Wales in 1984, when the
state educational authority established "a new framework for
school government" for the nearly 25,000 county, special, and
voluntary schools in the two countries.50 This framework grouped
"many schools together under a single governing body" and allowed
school governors to be directly elected by parents and teachers.51
Since then, even more drastic measures have been implemented
in New Zealand. Spurred by a national economic crisis, New
Zealand embarked on a major retrenchment of its public sector
and, as part of this process, eliminated school boards in 1989
and replaced trustees with elected councils of parents, teachers,
and representatives from business and industry."52
Although dormant in much of Canada during the past half
century--at least as a subject of direct discussion--questions
about school governance have been implicitly raised in other
ways. Two general trends of the post-1945 era--the rising costs of
schooling and the gradual transfer in responsibility for school
support from local to provincial authorities--have had important
implications for school governance.53 In British Columbia, for
example, the provincial government provided approximately 80% of
school revenues in 1987, compared to about 38% in 1924. 54 Across
the country, three provinces currently operate without any
property taxes (Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and
Newfoundland) and, in the remaining provinces, local taxes for
schools account for only about 10 to 40 percent of overall
educational spending.55
But, as Chalmers has observed: "transfer [of] the tax burden
from local units of government, with their relatively inelastic
sources of revenue, to the provincial government with its almost
infinitely greater financial resources"has not been without
consequence. This shift in responsibility has meant that
provincial educational authorities now exercise "virtually as
tight a control over the externa of education=A5buildings,
furniture, and equipment, bus services, school borrowings=A5[as
they have] long done over the interna."56
This change has led directly to the imposition of new
provincial controls, including the introduction of provincial
legislation to: cap school expenditures; remove commercial and
industrial property from local taxation; and set levels of
taxation at the provincial level. In Alberta, amendments to the
School Act (1994) have also been passed to reduce inequities in
taxation and educational spending among districts57: likewise in
Ontario, the recent royal commission has charged the provincial
government with ensuring "equal per pupil funding across the
province."58 More than this, the commission added: "because of our
overriding belief that Ontario school kids need a largely common
and equitable learning experience, we recommend the transfer of
several key responsibilities away from boards. We believe that
determining the level of each board's expenditures, for example,
should be the Ministry's job."59
Moving Governance Closer to the People
One important theme in the emerging discussion about
restructuring school governance involves the idea of
decentralizing school control, in effect moving school
governance structures closer to the families and communities they
represent. Discussion about reconstituting the basis of school
governance first appeared in the literature on governance in the
1970s but, in fact, had far deeper historical roots.60
Constituencies traditionally ignored within public
education's mainstream made their voices heard for the first time
in the 1970s. Parents, taxpayers, business leaders, and others
dissatisfied with the direction and quality of public schooling
coalesced into special interest groups and began to petition
provincial and local governments for greater direct involvement
in school decision making. Their influence was immediately felt.
By the late 1970s, new programs and avenues for consultation were
created to deal with these new constituencies who represented
special needs children, the socially disadvantaged, the cause of
gender equity, multiculturalism, and other social justice issues.61
By the early 1980s, forums for participation in educational
policy had been opened to virtually everyone in the province=A5that
is to say, everyone except parents and members of the general
public. This would change in the 1980s.
Growing community demands for greater public and parental
involvement in schools, as well as public concerns that school
board bureaucracies had grown too large and complex, were
expressed throughout the 1980s to government-appointed
commissions of inquiry. British Columbia's 1984-85 Provincial
School Review Committee, for example, found that more than 80% of
the approximately 6,000 written responses they received called
for greater public and parental participation in school matters,
and 75% of respondents supported the notion that school councils,
comprised of parents and other community members, should be
established.62 Two years later, these views were echoed in the
findings of the Province's 1987-88 royal commission when it
reported: "Evident in the course of the hearings was a
considerable public appetite, especially on the part of parents,
for participation in local school affairs."63 Accordingly, the
commission recommended: "That each of the province's 75 school
districts adopt policies and procedures which would provide a
designated role for parents and others through membership on
parent-community advisory committees at the district level and at
each school within the district."64 Acting on the commission's
recommendation, the government's 1989 School Act gave parents the
right to form a parents' advisory council in each school to
advise "the local board of school trustees, the principal, and
staff, on any matter relating to the school."65
Developments in British Columbia reflected broader changes
across the country that aimed at shifting the locus of school
district governance downward to local school levels, thereby
securing greater democratic participation and representativeness
closer to the people. In Newfoundland, the importance of
expanding parental and public involvement in educational
decisions was likewise emphasized by the province's 1992 royal
commission. As the commission put it: "If the school system is to
reach its maximum potential with the resources available . . . it
is essential to establish the means for effective parental
involvement in the governance of the province's schools."66
Accordingly, it advised that school councils be established
consisting of "elected representatives of parents and teachers,
the school principal, as well as appointees from the churches and
members of the business community selected by the council
itself."67
Quebec's Bill 107, which became law in 1988, likewise
redefined the role of parents, and sought to redistribute
responsibility and power among partners in the provincial system.
This legislation provided for increased parental involvement at
school, district, and regional levels through two committees.
The first of these, the orientation committee, was charged with
determining specific school objectives. The second, the school
committee, was designed to "promote parental participation in
defining, implementing, and evaluating the school's educational
project."68 It is significant that Quebec's legislation outlined
parental participation in educational decision-making in a way
that went beyond an advisory role. Non-compliance with this
legislation by boards, the government warned, would result in
suspension of their powers.
Ontario's 1993 royal commission also called for greater
parental and public participation in schools. "Many schools and
school boards have become highly adept at using the language of
openness and sharing with their parents," the commission
observed, "now the deed must replace fine words."69 In line with
this sentiment, it recommended "school community councils on
which parents would have significant representation."70
Legislation to encourage greater parental participation in
decision-making was also passed in Alberta in 1988.71 By 1992, a
Department of Education survey on the state of school councils in
the province revealed that no school board had delegated any
significant authority to school councils, thus defeating the
spirit of what the government originally intended.72 This
resistance provided part of the motivation for legislating a
governance role for parents in the School Amendment Act, 1994.
Although Alberta's legislation differs from other province's
across the country, except for Quebec, in making school councils
mandatory, it permits parents to serve, if they wish, in a purely
advisory role. In this respect, AlbertaOs legislation parallels
the legislative provisions enacted by other provinces. In
addition to the provinces mentioned above, school councils have
also been established, or recently proposed, in Prince Edward
Island, Nova Scotia, and Manitoba.
Apart from providing a more direct structure for
communication and educational accountability than previously
existed, proponents of school councils argue that they are
important for other reasons. Such advocates contend that school
councils: reduce the distance between parents, the public, and
the schools; provide direct means for parental expression and
support at school-sites; reduce bureaucracy; and, serve as
important links in building school-community partnerships
(membership on these advisory councils is generally comprised of
parents, other members of the public, in some cases business and
labour representatives, teachers, and school administrators).
They are also said to be an important part of any system that
wishes to feature "school-based" management.
However, critical questions remain unanswered with respect
to the role of school councils in educational governance, namely:
Could the historical tradition of local representation be
maintained through alternative governance structures such as
school councils? Could provincial systems operate effectively
without district structures for governance and administration?
Could individual school councils be relied upon to represent the
general public interest, as well as particular local interests in
schools? and, Are provincial governments prepared to introduce a
new governance model that will situate decision making at
provincial and community levels, while reducing or eliminating
governance functions at the district level?
Coast to Coast Consolidation in the 1990s
For various reasons=A5including the promise of greater
efficiency, the need for fiscal restraint, and the aim of
reducing inequities among districts--provincial governments from
coast to coast have recently begun to amalgamate school districts
into larger units.73 Newfoundland has proposed reducing the number
of its school boards from 27 to 10. New Brunswick has reduced its
boards from 41 to 18 (12 English and six French), and is
currently considering further reducing their numbers or even
eliminating them completely.74 In Nova Scotia, the 1982 Nova
Scotia Education Act, which arose from the Walker Commission on
Public Education Finance, has centralized authority at the
provincial level and reduced the roles of "both school boards and
municipal units."75 "Although local control is still
significant," one authority has written, "the primary actors are
now at the provincial level."76 Nova Scotia is taking steps to
reduce its roster of 22 boards to either seven or five.77
Alberta's School Amendment Act, 1994 cut the province's school
boards from 181 to 63 and, in so doing, reduced the number of
trustees from 1100 to 450.78
Late in 1994, the Ontario royal commission on learning
released its report on the province's schools. And, although it
did not propose changing the number or kind of school boards, it
did advocate a more constrained governance role for them.79 Since
this time, however, the government of Ontario has apparently
chosen to disregard the commission's views by announcing that
some of the province's 169 boards will be amalgamated in the near
future. A further announcement made in late February, 1995 states
that Ontario intends to cut its number of school boards by 40-
50%, thereby saving millions of dollars.80 It has since been
reported that Ontario may cut its number of school boards to 82
and its trustees from 2,000 to 540.81 Saskatchewan's 119 school
boards may also be reduced in the months ahead as part of a
regionalization plan to reduce public sector spending.82 Reports
have also be made that Quebec school boards expect major cuts in
the near future, with possible reductions in district numbers.83
District Consolidation in British Columbia
The consolidation of hundreds of small school districts and
schools during the 1930s and 1940s in British Columbia had
important effects. It led immediately to the emergence of larger
school districts which, in turn, increased the political power
enjoyed by locally-elected school trustees, as well as their
association.84 In time, it also prompted the closing of the
provincial inspectorate, and the establishment of district
administrative offices.
Larger district size after 1946 meant that trustees,
generally, were farther removed from buildings where schooling
took place and, with the appointment of local administrative
staff, less directly involved with teachers who staffed the
district's schools. Obviously, this was less true in districts
that remained small and isolated. With the advent of district
administration in the late 1950s, trustees' relationships with
educators were increasingly confined within district central
offices. So, too, were trustees freed from carrying out some of
their historical tasks, such as buying chalk or fuel for the
schoolhouse, or filling out forms for provincial authorities.
Professional staff now assumed these responsibilities.
By mid-century, the work of board members was also changing
in other respects. Instead of safeguarding budgets of hundreds of
dollars, as they once did, they began to oversee budgets of
millions of dollars for local schools scattered across broader
and more diverse jurisdictions. Their autonomy grew in several
areas during the 1960s and 1970s as they were able to shape
capital construction projects through their taxation powers.
Curriculum change and relaxation of provincial regulation during
these decades also allowed trustees greater influence in shaping
parts of the educational program.
However, by the early 1980s, trustee autonomy was being
constrained by new developments. Rising educational costs
prompted the provincial government to introduce public sector
restraint legislation, which capped local spending and removed
board authority to tax commercial and industrial property.85 Since
this time, other provincial policies have further weakened the
power of school boards to shape the size and nature of their
educational budgets. Such policies have reflected a larger
national and international trend toward recentralizing
educational authority at the senior levels of government. Board
autonomy has also increasingly been constrained since the 1970s
by collective bargaining agreements with teachers, contracts with
public sector unions, and by school district obligations to
comply with federally-mandated language, multicultural, equity,
and immigration policies. These contracts and policies have
greatly reduced the latitude of school boards in budget
allocation and other aspects of governance.
Amid these developments, questions about school governance
and the issue of district consolidation continued to surface from
time to time, although no action was taken. In 1971, for example,
Education Minister Donald Brothers expressed his concern to the
Legislature that 'there were five school boards with 39 trustees,
five secretary-treasurers, and three district superintendents,
all within one-and-a-half hours' driving time of each other.'86
Similarly, during William Vander Zalm's tenure as education
minister, discussion reportedly took place about reorganizing the
province's school districts into a half dozen or 10 regional
boards.87 By the early 1990s, taxpayer concerns about rising
public sector costs led to the establishment of the Korbin
Commission on the Public Sector. In its report, the commission
called for a review "to determine the number of school boards
needed to provide education," and "to identify which, if any,
boards can be amalgamated
immediately."88 It also pointed strongly to the possibility of
province-wide collective bargaining in education and, with that
now in place, a major reason for maintaining local school boards
has been removed.89 Added to this, on January 19, 1995, the
Official Liberal Opposition pledged to reduce the number of
school boards, if elected.90 Such was the immediate context in
which the Minister's November 17, 1995, announcement to
consolidate school districts was made.
Lessons From the Past
This historical review strongly suggests that the provincial
government's recent action to reduce the number of school
districts and, presumably, the overall administrative costs of
the provincial system is not a radical departure from tradition,
but simply part of an established historical pattern of
centralizing educational governance. The historical record shows
in British Columbia and, indeed, in other Canadian provinces,
that the legal foundations of schooling, public perceptions about
school boards, and the challenges of providing common and equal
educational opportunities across sometimes vast provincial
jurisdictions has led provincial governments to centralize school
policy and decision making. It also shows that school boards have
been traditionally cast in a subordinate role, assigned to
implement standards, decisions, and policies determined by senior
government.
Examination of the educational past illustrates that, at
times of educational and economic exigency, provincial
governments have acted to reconfigure the size and numbers of
school districts. At various points in the history of education
in British Columbia--and elsewhere--school board numbers have been
sharply reduced, to the point where they are lower now than at
any time since the frontier era of provincial schooling in the
1880s. A review of school history also indicates that, since the
mid-20th century, a fundamental structural change has taken place
in school finance, with provincial authorities now providing the
largest share of school funding. With this continent-wide shift
in the basis of school finance from local to provincial and state
levels has also come greater provincial and state controls over
governance, as well as a concomitant reduction in the influence
of school boards. Mounting public debt and deficits, particularly
since the mid-1980s, have recently triggered a movement
throughout Canada in the 1990s to reduce the numbers of school
boards or, perhaps, even to eliminate them completely. So, too,
has this discussion suggested that increasing parent and public
demands for more direct forms of participation in schooling
promises to make redundant, if they have not already done so,
certain functions traditionally assumed by school boards.
What is also apparent is that recent public and academic
discussion in British Columbia and, perhaps, in other
jurisdictions has increasingly held that school districts and the
boards that govern them are outmoded institutions, in effect
organizational anachronisms. This line of argument holds that
modern organizational developments, particularly communications
systems introduced over the past decade, have relegated certain
aspects of district administration to the status of historical
curiosities.
Electronic management information systems in provincial and
school district offices date back to the mid-1970s but, until
recently, technology's impact on educational structures--
especially governance and administrative structures--has been
minimal. This, however, is changing. Through the use of
technology, provincial governments in British Columbia and in
other provinces can now correspond directly--and, arguably, more
efficiently--with individual schools and, indeed, with individual
teachers and classrooms. Such technology promises to transform
how provincial systems are administered.
Electronic networks, for example, easily allow provincial
departments to bypass the administrative offices of local boards,
thus making all but redundant the management functions now
carried out by superintendents and their staffs. Such change
also mean that many, if not most, of the communications and
policy directives that now flow from provincial governments to
school boards and their staffs could be routed directly to
individual schools. Obviously, if implemented, this
communications system would have profound implications for
district management and for the nature of school board
governance and supervision. Carried to the extreme, this could
make all but obsolete many of the boards' business, educational,
and supervisory functions. As in the case of New Zealand, where
senior government has eliminated school boards, school principals
would likely emerge as the pre-eminent local educational leaders,
instead of superintendents, as responsibilities for governance
were shifted away from school boards to public and parent groups
charged with overseeing individual community schools.
What is less clear from this discussion of provincial
restructuring, however, is the answer to several larger political
and pedagogical questions that continue to perplex studies of
school governance in British Columbia and elsewhere. These
questions include: Are school boards necessary in the 1990s and
beyond? And, if so, how many? Do larger boards offer improved
educational opportunities for students and, if so, how? Further,
if larger boards mean better service (as defined by improved
opportunities), why not move to one board, or 20 boards, rather
than the 37 the British Columbia government first proposed as a
default position? Or, finally, is the political debate around
consolidation better framed in terms of saving money, or in terms
of improving educational outcomes for youngsters?
This discussion has not attempted to explore these questions
nor some important economic questions related to British
Columbia's current restructuring proposal. It still remains
unclear whether school board administrative costs are more a
function of the number of boards or the number of people employed
by each board. Likewise, it is not clear whether decreasing the
number of boards will necessarily decrease the number of
employees in board offices. If decreasing the number of boards
only leads to increasing the number of administrators in the
remaining boards has anything worthwhile been gained? These
questions, however, are for another paper and another form of
analysis.
_______________________________
Notes
1 Province of British Columbia, News Releas (NR35/95), "B.C. School
Districts to be Restructured," 17 November, 1995, p.1.
2 Province of British Columbia, News Release (NR 35/95),
"B.C. School Districts To Be Restructured," 17 November,
1995, p. 1.
3 Vancouver Sun, "NDP plan to cut numbers of school
districts draws fire," 18 November, 1995,
p. 3.
4 Times Colonist, "Bigger school boards won't help
students," Saturday, 18 November, 1995, p. 7.
5 Ibid.
6 Province of British Columbia, News Release (NR 35/95),
"B. C. School Districts To Be Restructured," 17 November,
1995, p. 1.
7 Frederick Enns, The Legal Status of the Canadian School
Board (Toronto: Macmillan, 1963),
p. 4.
8Ibid.
9 Thomas Fleming, "In the Imperial Age and After: Patterns
of British Columbia School Leadership and the Institution of
the Superintendency 1849-1988," BC Studies , No. 81 (Spring,
1989), p. 53. Prior to Confederation, Vancouver Island's
first schools did not have school boards. In 1852, schools
were established for "the children of the labouring and
poorer classes" in Victoria, Craigflower and Nanaimo. The
schools were administered directly by the colonial
authorities. However, increasing public dissatisfaction with
private and sectarian institutions led social and
educational reformers to mount a vigorous and eventually
successful campaign for state-controlled, non-sectarian
schooling. Under the guidance of John Jessop, a graduate of
Egerton Ryerson's teacher training college in Ontario, and
British Columbia's first Superintendent of Education, a
Public School Act was passed in 1872. Section 9 of this Act
provided for three trustees to be elected for three-year
terms in each of the 25 school districts the province
established when it joined Confederation.
10 Fleming, "In the Imperial Age and After," p. 53.
11 The number and kinds of school boards vary somewhat across
the country. Since 1994, Alberta, for example, has a total
of 60 public boards. British Columbia has 75 public boards
and Manitoba has 57 boards, 56 of which are public. New
Brunswick has 18 boards, 12 of which are for children of
English-speaking families and six for Francophone families.
Newfoundland has 27 boards, 15 of which are "integrated"
(read "public"), 10 are Roman Catholic, one is Seventh Day
Adventist, and one is Pentecostal. Nova Scotia has 21 public
boards and one Francophone board. Ontario has 177 boards, of
which 114 are public, 51 are separate, and 10 govern
schooling on Canadian forces bases. Prince Edward Island has
five boards=A5four English and one Francophone. Quebec has 158
boards, 137 of which are Roman Catholic and French, and 18
which are English speaking and Protestant. In addition,
three boards in Quebec are defined as "multi-confessional."
In Saskatchewan, 91 of the province's 111 boards are public
and 20 are separate. The Northwest Territories has 10 boards-
-seven of which are "divisional," two are public, and one is
separate. At the present time, schooling in the Yukon
Territory is governed by the territorial government,
although a process for establishing school boards is
reportedly underway.
12 F. Henry Johnson. John Jessop: Gold Seeker and Educator:
Founder of the British Columbia School System. (Vancouver:
Mitchell Press, 1971), p. 79. In the North West Territories,
or what would soon be the provinces of Saskatchewan and
Alberta, the 1901 School Ordinance set out responsibilities
for trustees in similar terms. Among the tasks assigned to
trustees under the terms of the Ordinance were the
following: to appoint a chairman, a secretary and treasurer,
or a secretary treasurer; to procure a corporate seal for
the district; to keep minutes of school board meetings and
"proper records" for the district; to safe keep all the
property in the district; to purchase or rent school sites
or premises; to keep in good repair the school house, school
furnishings, and all other school property; to provide
"wholesome drinking water" for children; to provide toilets
and, if necessary, stabling accommodation; to insure school
buildings and equipment; to ensure that no school texts,
other than those authorized by the department, be used; to
engage, dismiss, or suspend teachers; to see that the school
is "conducted according to the provisions of this ordinance
and the regulations of the department;" "to settle all
disputes arising in relation to the school between the
parents or children and the teacher;" and to "see that the
law with reference to compulsory education and truancy is
observed." See Legislative Assembly of the Territories,
1901, Chapter 29, An Ordinance Respecting Schools, Sections
95-99.
13George Hindle, The Educational System of British Columbia
(Trail, B. C. : Trail Publishing Company, 1918), p. 83.
Inspectors were first appointed in Quebec in 1851, in
Ontario in 1855, and in British Columbia in 1879.
14D. Becker, "The Policy Decision-Making Role of the School
Trustee," in Ronald Common, (ed.) New Forces on Educational
Policy Making in Canada. (Brock University: College of
Educational Publications, 1985), p. 81.
15Bruce Curtis, Building the Educational State: Canada West,
1836-1871 (London, Ontario: Althouse Press, 1988), p. 293.
16 Thomas Fleming and Carolyn Smyly, "The Diary of Mary
Williams: A Cameo of Rural Schooling in British Columbia,"
in Jean Barman, Neil Sutherland, and J. Donald Wilson eds.,
Children, Teachers and Schools in the History of British
Columbia (Calgary: Detselig Enterprises, 1995), pp. 259-284.
17 Curtis, Building the Educational State, p. 370.
18James B. London, The Dynamics of a Non-Professional
Organization: A History of the British Columbia School
Trustees Association, 1905-1980 (Ann Arbor: University
Microfilms International, 1985), p. 58.
19 Ontario Royal Commission on Learning, Report of the Royal
Commission on Learning: For the Love of Learning: A Short
Version (Toronto: Queen's Printer, 1994), p. 50.
Concern about trustees' representativeness have also been
raised elsewhere in recent decades. As one 1993 study
observed: "Critics of the status quo in school governance .
. . complain that local school boards have become too
politicized and that they represent special interest groups,
especially among the education profession, more than they do
public interests. Attention, too, has been directed toward
the costs of local school governance and its relevance,
which some view as questionable." For the context of this
discussion, see Thomas Fleming, Review and Commentary on
Schooling in Canada 1993: A Report to the UNESCO
International Seminar, Santiago, Chile (Victoria: University
of Victoria, 1993), pp. 64-65.
20 Ontario Royal Commission on Learning, Report of the Royal
Commission,
p. 51.
21 Ibid.
22 Thomas Fleming, "Letters From Headquarters: Alexander
Robinson and the British Columbia Education Office, 1899-
1919,O Journal of Administration and Foundations
(forthcoming 1996). In Alberta, evidence of this can also be
found in Kostek's history of Edmonton public schools : M. A.
Kostek, A Century and Ten: The History of Edmonton Public
Schools (Edmonton: Edmonton Public Schools, 1992), p. 55.
23 Thomas Fleming, "Our Boys in the Field: School Inspectors,
Superintendents, and the Changing Character of School
Leadership in British Columbia," in Nancy M. Sheehan, J.
Donald Wilson, and David C. Jones, eds., Schools in the
West: Essays in Canadian Educational History (Calgary:
Detselig Enterprises, 1986), pp. 285-303.
24 Fleming and Smyly, "The Diary of Mary Williams," pp. 259-
284 describes how local communities informally shaped
teachers' social and professional behaviours.
25 For an illustration of this painting, which hangs in the
National Gallery, Ottawa, see Charles E. Phillips, The
Development of Education in Canada (Toronto: W. J. Gage,
1957),
p. 267.
26 British Columbia Department of Education, One Hundred
Years: Education in British Columbia (Victoria, B. C. :
QueenOs Printer, 1971), p. 22.
27 Ibid., p. 87.
28 Ibid., p. 76.
29 Fleming, "Our Boys in the Field," p. 289.
30 F. Henry Johnson, A Brief History of Canadian Education
(Toronto: McGraw Hill, 1968),
pp. 110-111.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 British Columbia Department of Education. One Hundred
Years, p. 19.
35 Ibid.
36 British Columbia Archives and Records Services, Memo to
Premier Pattulo from Superintendent Willis, December 13,
1934, GR 1222, Box 2, File 2.
37 Alan H. Child, "A Little Tempest: Public Reaction to the
Formation of a Large Educational Unit in the Peace River
District of British Columbia," BC Studies, 61, (1972), p.
24.
38 Quoted in John Calam and Thomas Fleming, Schools and
Society in British Columbia, Vol. 1, Commissioned Papers,
British Columbia Royal Commission on Education (Victoria,
Queen's Printer, 1988), p. 17.
39 British Columbia Department of Education, One Hundred
Years, p. 19.
40T. C. Weidenhamer, A History of the Alberta School Trustees
Association (Edmonton: Douglas Printing, 1976), p. 103.
41 Johnson, A Brief History of Canadian Education, p. 112.
42 Ibid., p. 113.
43 Roald F. Campbell, Thomas Fleming, L. Jackson Newell, and
John Bennion, A History of Thought and Practice in
Educational Administration (New York: Teachers College
Press, 1987), p. 13.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.
46 Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education,
1945-1980 (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1983),
p. 313.
47 Ibid.
48 Denis P. Doyle and Chester E. Finn, Jr., "American Schools
and the Future of Local Control," The Public Interest, No.
77, (Fall 1984), pp. 81-86.
49 Ibid., p. 90.
50 Ibid.
51 It should be noted that in both Britain and New Zealand
the tradition of elected school boards, common to Canada and
the United States, is unknown and that the role of trustees
in Britain and New Zealand cannot be historically compared
to trustees in North America.
52 Secretary of State for Education and Science and the
Secretary of State for Wales, Parental Influence at School:
A New Framework for School Government in England and Wales
(London: Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1984), pp. 2-3.
53 Ibid.
54 Debbie Edney, "Education Reform: The Search for the
Perfect System," Education Today, Vol. 5, No. 3 (May/June
1993), p. 9.
55 John C. Chalmers, Schools of the Foothills Province: The
Story of Public Education in Alberta (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1967), p. 334.
56British Columbia Royal Commission on Education, A Legacy
for Learners, p. 153; and F. Henry Johnson, A History of
Public Education in British Columbia (Vancouver:
Publications Centre, University of British Columbia, 1964),
p. 97.
57 Globe and Mail, "School boards threatened by financial
reforms," 22 January, 1996, p. A7.
58 Chalmers, Schools of the Foothills Province, p. 334.
59Organizations representing both the public and separate
school boards in Alberta have challenged the
constitutionality of amendments to the School Act (1994) and
the restructuring process as a whole. The Alberta Court of
Queen's Bench ruling of November 28, 1995 allowed both
public and separate boards to opt out of the equalization
scheme and thus to retain their powers of property taxation.
Both the Crown and the boards have appealed different parts
of the judgment.
60 Ontario Royal Commission on Learning, Report of the Royal
Commission on Learning, p. 79.
61 Ibid., p. 51. On this matter, D. Becker, "The Policy
Decision-Making Role of the School Trustee," p. 77 reports:
"In Ontario, the educational costs borne by the Province for
all schools through its grant plans, reached 9.6% in 1936,
40.08% in 1951, and are currently at the 50.09% level."
62Centralization of educational control in the late-19th
century=A5and professionalization of school administration in
the early 20th century=A5effectively muted any direct
expression of the public voice in educational affairs,
especially the voice of parents. Schooling, at least
according to the professional view, was too important and
complex a matter to be left to amateurs. And so, from the
late-19th century to the mid-20th century, the most
important decisions about schooling, and its effects on
children's lives, were made out of public sight, principally
in the offices and corridors of government education
bureaus, or in the officers of the inspectors who supervised
the large municipal systems. Only in the 1960s and 1970s did
this pattern of centralized decision making begin to
unravel. A better-educated public, and one generally more
conscious of individual rights, began to take greater
interest in the behaviour of public institutions and, in
particular, in the school's role as a social institution. As
part of the great political awakening that swept North
America after 1960, traditionally quiescent parent-teacher
associations were swept aside by an array of special
interest groups and organizations which were considerably
more vocal in nature, and more intent on challenging the way
that long-standing school policies and practices were
controlled.
63British Columbia Education Minister Eileen Dailly proved to
be one of the staunchest advocates of decentralizing
educational decision making in the early 1970s by promising
that the NDP Government would focus the system around "the
teacher, the parent, and the child instead of centering it
on "the superintendent, the principal, and the teacher," as
it had been in the past." See Stan Persky, Son of Socred
(Vancouver: North Star Books, 1979), p. 138.
64 British Columbia Provincial School Review Committee, Let's
Talk About Schools: A Report to the Minister of Education
and the People of British Columbia (Victoria: Queen's
Printer, 1985), p. 8.
65 British Columbia Royal Commission on Education, A Legacy
for Learners (Victoria, Queen's Printer, 1988), p. 10.
66 Ibid., p. 261.
67 Yvonne M. Martin, "Parental Participation Policy for
Schools: A Comparative Legislative Analysis of Reform and
Dynamic Conservatism in British Columbia, Alberta, and
Quebec," in Martin and MacPherson (eds.), Restructuring
Administrative Policy in Public Schooling , p. 128.
68 Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Delivery of Programs
and Services in Primary, Elementary, Secondary Education.
Our Children Our Future: Summary Report. (Government of
Newfoundland and Labrador, 1992), p. 11.
69 Ibid.
70 Martin, "Parental Participation Policy for Schools," pp.
130-131.
71 Ontario Royal Commission on Learning, Report of the Royal
Commission on Learning, p. 50.
72 Ibid.
73However, the nature of this legislation was shaped by the
lobbying activities of trustees who persuaded government at
the time to allow boards to set up school councils and to
delegate authority to them under Section 45 (i)(c) of the
1988 School Act. See Alberta Education, "Restructuring and
Refinancing Education," February 1995, p. 12.
74 Ibid.
75By the early 1990s, Fears about mounting government debt
and deficits, as well as unease with large public sector
costs, have led federal and provincial authorities in the
1990s to begin restructuring activities in almost all
branches of government. Within this broader context,
attention has naturally turned toward proposals about how to
control and reduce educational costs and, in particular, to
questions about how to achieve greater efficiencies from
school governance and administrative systems. One 1993
report on the state of Canadian education described the new
context for restraint and reorganization this way: "Today .
. . a new mood is upon the land as provincial governments
look to reduce educational spending as well as
inefficiencies and duplication within systems. Increasing
discussion has therefore been directed toward the role of
local school governance and, in particular, whether it
serves as an effective structure to express community
priorities and aspirations about schooling." See Thomas
Fleming, Review and Commentary on Schooling in Canada 1993,
pp. 64-65. It should also be noted that the ongoing process
of consolidation across Canada may make outdated some of the
data presented here concerning the numbers of existing
boards in various provinces.
76 Globe and Mail, "School boards threatened by financial
reforms," 22 January, 1996, p. A7. On February 22, 1996, the
New Brunswick minister of education announced the
elimination of elected school boards and the creation of "
school parent committees" at every school, "parent advisory
councils" at the district level, and two provincial "Boards
of Education," one Anglophone and one Francophone, which
will consist primarily of parents.
77 A. Wayne Mackay, Education Law in Canada (Toronto: Emond-
Montgomery Publications, 1984), p. 19.
78 Ibid.
79 Lewington, "Schooling Reform A Work in Progress, Globe and
Mail, 27 January, 1995.
80 Thomas Fleming, Alberta's School Amendment Act, 1994 in
Historical Perspective, University of Victoria, March 5,
1995, p. 5.
81 Ontario Royal Commission on Learning, Report of the Royal
Commission on Learning, p. 50.
82 Canadian Press Newstex, "Ontario to Create New French-
Language School Boards," 24 February, 1995, p. 1.
83 Globe and Mail, "School boards threatened by financial
reforms," 22 January, 1996, p. A7.
84 Globe and Mail, "Romanow message a tough sell," 25
January, 1996, p. A3.
85 Globe and Mail, "School boards threatened by financial
reforms," 22 January, 1996, p. A7.
86 Thomas Fleming, "Our Boys in the Field," p. 297.
87 Thomas Fleming, "Restraint, Reform, and Reallocation: An
Analysis of British Columbia Education Policies, 1982-1984,"
Education Canada, 25 (1), 1985, pp. 4-11-11.
88 British Columbia Department of Education. One Hundred
Years, p. 22.
89 Vern Storey, "Uncertain Days: British Columbia's School
Superintendents and Local Employment," unpublished paper,
University of Victoria, September, 1995, p. 8.
90 British Columbia, "Final Report: The Public Sector in
British Columbia," The Report of the Commission of Inquiry
into the Public Services and Public Sector (Victoria:
Queen's Printer, June 1993), p. xxiii.
91Ibid., p. xxii.
92 British Columbia Liberal Official Opposition, "News
Release," January 19, 1995, p.1.