ARE ALL THE SCHOOL BOARDS HOPELESS?

Today's Waterloo Region Record carrys the following story titled "School boards can learn from "crisis"". It seems that the start of school year last September was even more eventful than usual across Toronto. The Ombudsman, Paul Dube, released a report yesterday on the mess in Toronto last September. It seems as if thousands of students were stranded and some even went missing when bus drivers en masse dropped young children off at the wrong stops. This included junior kindergarten students as well as those with special needs. Many parents were left with missing children for several hours.

According to the Ombudsman there were warning signs well ahead of the start of school indicating that new bus operators combined with new or different bus drivers had no idea where their routes were. It was a mess. The Ombudsman has suggested that this crisis could have been averted and hopes that other boards besides Toronto's two baords have taken note and gotten their acts together.

It certainly puts in context for me the dysfunction and incompetence of school boards who just love to blame parents for any educational flaws rather than looking at themselves. Low graduation rates and declining math scores on provincial tests may simply be the tip of the iceberg. Politics and politicians seem intent on buggering up just about anything they can get their hands on including partisan trustees and promoting the flavour of the month edubabble from bureaucrats and their educational consultants. These are not smart people at the top of school boards. They are manipulators and deceivers with too much status, money and power and too little real accountability or transparency.