To Whom It May Concern, 
 

RE: Bluewater District School Board Accountability 
 

      I am the single parent of two boys, Jack (4) and Michael (2 ½) in Owen Sound.  I work full-time in an educational setting, work part-time as a business writer, and am completing my Bachelor of Commerce courses part-time via distance education.  Jack attends Junior Kindergarten at Sydenham and is with Michael on the alternate days at the YMCA daycare at Alexandra school. 
 

      This is my first foray into elementary school politics and I certainly hope every year is less tumultuous than this.  The past few weeks have been a crash course in trying to understand who is responsible for what; which decisions are made at which level; and who is ultimately responsible for my children while they are in the public school system. 
 

      What little I knew of school boards and politics, I learned from my grandfather, a former Reeve and school board trustee, who taught me that the role of a school board trustee was to speak for every parent, every child, and every taxpayer.  Even though Cynthia Lemon claimed the trustees made this decision, we have since learned that was patently false.   
 

      When I first received the notice about the alternating JK/SK schedule, I had to take a few days to think about how this would affect us as a family.  I won’t dwell on the ramifications of the rotating JK/SK schedule as the issues facing parents were sufficiently covered in the media and at the March 23^rd BWDSB meeting.  Needless to say, the impact is far too great for the decision to have been made by a handful of BWDSB staff. 
 

      I then received a notice that my daycare is closing.  While Alexandra school is being rebuilt, the current daycare was funded by some kind of government grant to renovate existing school classrooms into daycares and that funding will not apply in a new build.  I follow you so far. 
 

      The next announcement was that the YMCA is losing 24 spots.  They expect decreased demand due to the phasing in of all day, every day JK/SK.  This is where I started to go… okay, but I’m hearing all of this talk about Pascal’s Report and how schools and daycares will be integrated to make the transition to full-day learning easier for children.  But no one seems to want to be responsible for the actual implementation of this plan. 
 

      A reporter from the Sun Times asked to interview me and take a picture of my family to demonstrate the effect of a daycare closing.  However, that same article included a statement from Dennis Spadoni from the Ministry of-something-or-other (do you see that this starts to get confusing for a parent?) stating that Owen Sound has 14 licensed daycares and some have up to 44% vacancy rates.   
 

      I went to this Ministry’s website and found that they had 16 licensed childcare providers listed; they included every before-and-after school program in town and listed one daycare twice.  There are actually only 6 licensed daycare centres in Owen Sound accessible to most parents; there are 6 wait-listed.  You do the math and tell me there is not already a childcare crisis.   
 

      I became involved in the current BWDSB JK/SK issue when I learned the Catholic board was not following this new rotating JK/SK schedule.  I then read an article in the Sun Times that said:

“Cynthia Lemon, Bluewater administrator of employee relations, said Monday the government left the board little choice on the scheduling issue.

"If we have ministry directives, then sometimes you just have to do them," she said when ask why consultation wasn't done. The board had little "wiggle room," she said.

She also said Monday: "The boards had been given a mandate by (former) Education Minister Kathleen Wynne, at that point in time. And so coming out of that was language that we had to embed in our collective agreements and one of those is the five-day cycle," a reference to the new kindergarten schedule.”

      And the obvious question is: why isn’t everyone else in the province doing this, then?

      This is where I started to see the half-truth in Lemon’s statement… and she speaks for the school board, so I saw this as a school board half-truth.  The five-day schedule was a Ministry directive; the rotating JK/SK schedule was not. 

      I tried to do as much background research as I could before the March 23^rd board meeting, but there was little time for poring over documents.  I went to the meeting hoping to learn.  Knowing a wrong had already been done, I hoped we would see the openness, honesty and transparency we have been promised by this board in the past.  Although I have not always been a parent with children in the BWDSB system, I’ve been a taxpayer for over a decade and the crises of the past did not escape my attention.

      As for everything that happened during the meeting, you can watch the video on the BWDSB website… but wait, you can’t see it all.  The entire section where I asked for a public meeting and asked why we should trust the board to do the consultation they should have done before announcing their decision has been edited out.  I personally worked on Sunday to put in the hours to be able to go to the meeting because I felt this was important; to get to the point, learn the truth, and see a resolution.  I know a lot of the other parents there made sacrifices to attend. 

      Considering the board’s pledge to be transparent, I cannot believe they would resort to something so archaic as censorship, but… that entire section is missing.  I’ve been told by a BW staffer that the video simply couldn’t pick up my audio because I didn’t have a microphone.  Let’s be honest for once, shall we?  You don’t see Jennifer Yenssen speaking to me, either, and she HAS a microphone.  The truth is, the BWDSB will do whatever they can to silence dissenting voices.  In this case, they did so by sneaking this past the trustees, then refusing a public meeting, then… editing it out of the video?  Come on.

      Following that meeting and this statement in the newspaper:

“Lemon said after the meeting it would be possible to both meet the contractual obligations for teachers' planning time and give parents what they want -- the same JK and SK schedule that's in place now. But it would be more difficult to schedule staff.

"It's very complex," Lemon said. "It'll be a scheduling issue within the schools themselves and we'll have to provide the administrators with a lot of support in doing that."

      … it was clear to me what had happened.  Please, correct me if I’m wrong.  The BWDSB administration took it upon themselves to make an executive decision to forego the accepted practice of presenting a situation to the board of trustees, who would then go back to the schools, parents, teachers, taxpayers - the stakeholders, the people they represent – for feedback.  The trustees would then report back to the board, share their feedback, and democratically form a motion and vote on its validity. 

      This did not happen.  Someone, or a group of some people, in the BWDSB administration, made a choice to take this process out of the hands of trustees and stakeholders and first blame a ministry mandate, then the teacher’s union, for the decision.

      As a parent, I was outraged.  Even more so when I realized most parents will have no idea what happened.  The more I look into this matter, the more I am convinced the administration of the BWDSB cannot govern themselves. 

      As I understand it, the trustees of the Bluewater District School Board are responsible:

• to ensure that the board's purpose, governing principles, function and activities are being pursued in a responsible manner with the utmost integrity
• to appoint senior administration and other staff as identified in the Education Act
• to evaluate the performance of senior management of the board
• to represent and actively promote the Bluewater board in their ward

“Trustees have an individual responsibility to represent the constituents of their respective ward(s) to the best of their ability.”

      That responsibility was taken away from them by senior administration and other staff who have shown time and again they feel they beyond are reproach.   

      Please, trustees of the Bluewater District School Board, show them that they are not.  Some have called for a cleaning of house from the top down.  A failure to act after an event such as this warrants that cleaning of house.  This WAS the board’s second chance, and I don’t think you’ll find many people who will say it wasn’t completely blown. 
 

      We, the parents, taxpayers, and other stakeholders, feel powerless.  In the week since that meeting, absolutely nothing has happened… or if it has, we are once again not privy to that information.  That is not accountability.  Deleting video footage of parents demanding accountability as if it never happened is not transparency. 

      Obviously, the board under its current director cannot get this right.  A new director can start with a clean slate, rid the board office of those contributing to this ongoing problem, and move forward.   

      I will be actively promoting the accountability and transparency this board needs, along with other organizers including those who have lobbied for change in this school board through the Grade 7/8 Rotary debacle.  I sure hope you make the JK/SK schedule right after consulting with the stakeholders who should have been involved the entire way.  But even when that is resolved, the ongoing issues of deception and incompetence in the BWDSB are not.  They will be addressed, regardless of how many times we are told to be quiet. 

      I speak only for myself and won’t presume what others want or believe, but I think you will be hearing from many more of them in the coming weeks if we do not see a decisive action to end these recurring issues. 

                                    Sincerely, 

                                    Miranda Miller