Who really cares about school board elections?
Charles Ungerleider
Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[Permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
Although
sometimes fiercely competitive among the candidates, school board elections receive
little attention from eligible voters. Political scientists R. Michael McGregor and Jack Lucas open their 2019 article
about the correlates of school board voter turnout with the declaration: “If
turnout is an indication of public engagement in an election, then most Canadians are
distinctly disengaged from school board politics.”[i]
Ouch!
It seems likely that citizen
disengagement has at least two negative consequences. One is that disinterest
in school board politics means that school trustees are not accountable for the
decisions they make, except to the narrow constituency from which they draw
their support. The second is that the lack of accountability to local electors
leaves provincial governments as the main agencies holding school boards
accountable.
Infrequently and typically with
reluctance, a school board is ‘fired,’ and an official trustee appointed in its
place. When Vancouver School Board Trustees failed to approve a budget under
guidelines the Ministry of Education had set, the Board was dismissed, and an official
trustee appointed for the school district. The trustees who had been dismissed
petitioned the court saying, among other things, their rights to liberty and
equal protection of the law as enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and
Freedoms had been infringed.
The
court disagreed. In its ruling, the court ruled that the trustees had “no
status to bring the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to their aid” because only
individuals were accorded rights by the Charter. “Creatures of statute like a
school board” or “members of a board acting in their official capacity” had no
such rights. “Even if they had a constitutionally protected liberty to be
school trustees, they had no absolute right, and lost their status when they
failed to comply with a constitutionally valid statutory requirement.”[ii]
Ten
years later, an Alberta court rejected an argument by the Alberta School Boards
Association that reforms introduced by the government “. . . violated their
right of reasonable autonomy which extended to elections, recruitment,
management and fiscal control.” In part of its judgment, the court ruled that
“. . . school boards did not have an expressed or implied constitutional right
to reasonable autonomy,” possessing only “rights and powers delegated to them
by the province.”[iii]
In
other words, although they may have been democratically elected, school boards and
the individual elected as trustees have only the standing and authority granted
to them under provincial legislation. This was evident when Nova Scotia eliminated
its seven elected school boards, replacing them with a provincial
advisory council on education whose 12 members are government appointees.
As was the case in Vancouver and Alberta, there were those who considered the
change undemocratic. Professor emeritus Wayne MacKay,
an expert on educational law and constitutional matters observed:
[It’s a] lesson in how
important and powerful the provincial government is in relation to education.
School boards are simply a delegate of the province and they can create them,
they can take them away.
McGregor
and Lucas go on to report the results of their study that they say is the
“first individual-level study of school board elections ever conducted in
Canada.” Their study of the Calgary
Board of Education found that those who vote in school board elections are likely
different from those who vote in municipal council elections. Voters in school
board elections are more likely than voters in municipal elections to be highly
educated parents who favour partisan positions that are often “left-leaning.”
McGregor
and Lucas observe that “studies of school board elections in the United States,
where turnout is similarly low, have noted the potential influence of
well-organized groups in low-turnout elections that may have distinctly
different interests from the wider population” (p. 924). While it would be
dangerous to make strong inferences from a single study, the outsized influence
of well-organized groups in low-turnout Canadian school board elections may explain
why, once elected, trustees find it difficult to see beyond the horizon of
their own electors' interests to govern in the interest of all citizens, and
why, from time to time, provincial governments find it necessary to intervene
on behalf of the wider community.
As
decisions are increasingly made by provincial ministries, school boards become
less important. Diminished school board importance and low voter turnout for school
board elections are likely harbingers of the future of school boards.
[i]
McGregor, R.M. and J. Lucas (2019). Who Has School Spirit? Explaining Voter
Participation in School Board Elections. Canadian Journal of Political
Science 52, 923–936. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423919000088
[ii]
Weinstein v. British Columbia (Minister of Education), [1985] B.C.J. No. 2890