… for the largely symbolic move to take part in Ottawa’s pride parade later this month.

I say largely symbolic because “inclusive” policies at the Board are already in place and staff and Board members consider intolerance toward any students for whatever reason as inexcusable. Forward thinking stuff.

But symbolic actions are important; especially in these politically and socially polarised times.

One thing that does surprise me though has been the deafening silence from those in the conservative corner of giggling journos and commentators. There are a couple of Tweeps (you know who you are) who I had thought would be all over this like dogs in a butcher shop. Maybe they missed it?

Trashy,
Ottawa, Ontario

… in trying to track down some scumbags who defiled Pleasant Park School (OCDSB: JK -> 6… yeah, little kids) with some truly disgusting graffiti at some point over the past few days.

As in TRULY disgusting. Swastikas. Racist crap. The works.

The police are not likely to be able do anything other than log it as a report and look for similar incidents in the area. This kind of  crap is fairly rare. We have been pretty lucky in our community until now.

So, please re-post, and re-Tweet.  Maybe someone can come forward to the police with any info that may lead to identifying the worthless pieces of sewage who did this.

Thanks.

Trashy,
Ottawa, Ontario

Before scripted responses in QP. Before “messaging”.  Before every utterance from a Minister’s mouth had to be cleared by the PMO, sitting MP’s actually communicated directly with their constituents and other members of the public. All by themselves.

Yes. They did. I’m not making this up.

I know that on all sides of the House, there are Members who do good riding work…. no doubt. But in these days of über controlled messaging, rare is the MP who will just thrown out an email or letter in response to questions. No way. What if they said something that was counter to party lines? What if they strayed from the key messages that the PMO (or party leadership in the case of Opposition parties) wishes to convey.

The Resident Love Goddess was rummaging through some old boxes in the crawl space yesterday when she came across this letter sent to her by Flora MacDonald who was then the MP for Kingston and the Islands. She asked for some information to help prepare for a school debate.

She wasn’t even the MP for my RLG’s riding!

Imagine. Asking a number of specific question about an MP’s stand on different issues – some quite divisive – and getting a clear and unambiguous response… not a form letter sent by a staffer based on a template approved by the PMO.

Imagine.

And that is how it should be. Any and all elected representatives have as one of their duties, the obligation to answer questions posed to them by the public. MPs, MPPs, City Councillors and even School Board Trustees are obliged to communicate with the folks who elected them. They have a duty to go to community functions like association AGMs and other major functions, openings of businesses, breaking ground for a new arena and even school barbeques. My MP does a lot of this “riding work” and does it well. He was at our Community Association’s AGM last week and, just like I and several of other parents, flipped burgers at our local school’s year-end BBQ. (Oh, and for the record, our School Board Trustee was nowhere to be seen.)

In any case, the days that saw speedy and complete responses from our MPs are largely over. Public Servants like Mrs. MacDonald would have had a difficult time functioning in this climate of muzzles and straight jackets.

And just to note, the Honourable Flora MacDonald just turned 85 and is involved with a number of volunteer organizations.

Trashy,
Ottawa, Ontario

Gotta love transparency! True to their word, the mandatory financial statements as submitted by the candidates involved in last Fall’s municipal elections were published on the City website yesterday and WOW! Was I ever outspent! It is amazing how much $$$ some of the candidates sunk into their campaigns and how much they raised through contributions! Even the 3rd candidate in my Zone spent about 8 times more than I did (but he got only ¼ of the votes).

Bronwyn (the incumbent) spent $3,500 – which was peanuts when compared to the candidate who went up against John Shea in Orleans – she raised 11K! On the other end of the scale, ex-Chair Cathy Curry claimed only $600 in expenses… she was even more frugal than yours truly!

Note to self – next time, if there is a next time, find a fundraising coordinator!

Of course, as a statistician, I have to look at this using a common denominator – money spent per vote received. And  I guess on a dollar per vote basis, I rocked. Yay me.

• Me – $0.17/vote
• The incumbent (Bronwyn) – $0.48/ vote
• The third candidate (Mohamoud) – $4.23 /vote

Some of the statements really blew me away! Aside from the one candidate who received over $11K in contributions,  Another sunk more than 10K of his own money into it! Another contributed $7,600 out of pocket!

Sigh. And there I am with my big 780 bucks in expenses.

A couple of lessons I’m taking from all of this:

• Fundraising is a big weakness for me. I have a hard time asking people for money. I’m just not comfortable with it. I had a hard time doing it when I ran in 1993 and always when I volunteered to for one campaign or another.  Again, if I do run again, find someone who can help me with this.

• Union endorsements = donations.  A quick perusal of the candidates who were endorsed by organized labour reveals that they all received some level of financial support from one of the teacher’s unions. I don’t have an issue with this, but next time, don’t expect me to fill out your long questionnaires if you have already decided on who to endorse beforehand! All I ask is for a level playing field. I don’t know what I did to offend organized labour in this town, but I suspect it may have something to do with a certain failed candidate who tried talking me out of running at the outset of the campaign… Hmmmm….

All in all, I’m glad that these have been made public. The amount of money spent by School Board candidates to win a job that pays a pittance shows a level of commitment to public service that other candidates at other levels of government should regard with envy – and aspire to!

OCDSB Zone 6

Trashy,
Ottawa, Ontario

Here is how the OCDSB schools ranked according to the Fraser Institute school “report card” that was released on Friday.

As a statistician, I do have some serious issues with rankings like these – much like the EQAO testing process itself – there is no context presented in order to interpret these numbers fully. Unknown are factors that can greatly influence a schools performance, like:

• the percentage of students in ESL programs
• proportion of special needs students
• family income and household education
• and others…

The Fraser Institute says the following on their website:

By combining a variety of relevant, objective indicators of school performance into one easily accessible public web site, the school report cards allow teachers, parents, school administrators, students, and taxpayers to analyze and compare the academic performance of individual schools in an attempt to answer the question, “How are our schools doing?”.

Fine. Take this at face value, but the danger is that some parents will use tools like these as their ONLY basis of judgement about a particlar school. THAT is where I have a problem. Still, this is a tool that might be combined with others to help make decisions about the relative merits of one school over another. In that case, rankings like these can have some limited value.

Anyhow, here is the list. It would be interesting if someone organized these according to zone…

Trashy,
Ottawa, Ontario

According to Gallup, 40% of Americans believe that humans were created by a “god” in the past 10,000 years while this number is only 14% north of the border.

I love Americans. I truly do. They are an amazing people. But I just don’t understand them sometimes. They voted in Dubya twice. Indebted themselves into oblivion. And 4 out of ten of them, like our own Stockwell Day, think that humans played with dinosaurs.

A cousin of mine who is an ex-pat Québécois living in Tennessee, once remarked to me on Facebook that in the States, unlike Canada, religion and faith is everywhere. You can’t get away from it. With data like these, I think I understand what he said a bit better.

But still – wow. What a difference.

And I bet that if you removed the Alberta respondents, the 14% would drop into the single digits.

But if we’re so smart, why:

• Do we keep voting in the ReformCons?
• Have Ontario voters not pushed governments to abolish the separate schools system?
• Do we have voting rates in the 50′s?
• Does our weather suck so much?

OK – the last point is just me whining.

Trashy,
Ottawa, Ontario

A while back, I wrote this piece about non-Catholic kids in this small Alberta community being forced to attend a Catholic school.

The Alberta Education Minister, Dave Hancock, seems to agree that a way must be found to provide a secular education to families on the area.

They have a legitimate beef, says Hancock. “I think that they’re entitled to a public education that doesn’t include religion,” he said in an interview.

The columnist goes even further and notes:

Frankly, I think the denominational school system should be relegated to the dustbin of history. Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario are the only provinces that still maintain publicly funded separate schools. Quebec got rid of the denominational system years ago with very little fuss.

Newfoundland replaced its church-run schools with a public system about a decade ago after a referendum. The world didn’t fall apart there, either.

Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and any other religious group has the right to educate their children in a faith-based system if they choose – but it should not be on the public’s dime.

In the meantime, it is encouraging that the Alberta government is on its way to correcting this injustice.

Trashy,
Ottawa, Ontario

The issue of overcrowded elementary schools in the urban core and the fringes of the urban core came up more than a few times during the School Board election campaign last fall.  It was not then and is not now a situation that has an easy solution.  The Citizen re-visited the problem in an article the other day on the space problems in a few schools in Old Ottawa South, the Glebe and Centretown.

Trashy,
Ottawa, Ontario

The new Chair, Vice-Chair and Committee Chairs were elected at last night’s OCDSB meeting – the inaugural one for the new Board.

• Trustee Jennifer McKenzie, Chair
• Trustee Bronwyn Funiciello Vice-Chair
• Chair – Human Resources Committee – Trustee Pam Fitzgerald
• Chair – Budget Committee – Trustee Rob Campbell
• Chair – Education Committee – Trustee Shirley Seward
• Chair – Business Services Committee – Trustee Katie Holtzhauer

The new board will govern until November 30, 2014.

Good luck to all of them. I hope they make fair and well-considered decisions on behalf of the Ottawa public education community.

Stay tuned over the next 4 years as I check on their progress every now and then and praise or, if need be, critique their decisions.

Trashy,
Ottawa, Ontario

The next four years promise to be an interesting time for the new School Board. There are some new Trustees in the seats as some were either defeated in the past election or chose not to run again. And this change in composition may herald a shift in influence and direction at the Board table.

What comes out of the inaugural meeting on December 1st will tell me a lot about the direction that we can expect this Board to take. This is the meeting where the Chair and Co-Chair is elected by the Trustees. The same goes for the Chairs of the various Board Committees. The choice of the Chairs is an important decision as they can control and direct debate on issues at the table and are arguably the most influential players when it comes to local education decision-making.

One person who quite impressed me in the way she managed the few meetings I have attended was the current Chair, Cathy Curry. Speaking from experience, it is quite a challenge to manage a group with differing and often conflicting agendas. She does this admirably and should be credited for this.

But, I think that the majority of Trustees on this new Board may want a change of direction and we’ll see a few changes in who is occupying most of the Chairs (musical Chairs? ).

So. In this context, what are the challenges for this Board over the next 4 years? Here is my short list.

1. Full integration of the new Early Learning program into the Board’s schools. Already, some Boards are balking at the instructions that the Ministry of Education are issuing. Peel Board, for example, has scaled back the number of new Early Learning programs due to an absence of adequate funding flowing from the Province. It will be interesting to see how Queen’s Park replies as more Boards realize they simply do not have the resources to offer these programs at the level the Province is demanding while at the same time keeping the Boards” budgets balanced..

It is important that the OCDSB engage the existing pre-school education community in Ottawa. From what I have heard, there has been little or no consultation in the past when it came to decisions that directly impacted the non-Board pre-school community. We are all part of the broader Ottawa education “community”! Let’s work together more closely to try and address the issues raised by the early education community in the context of Board constraints and Provincial edicts.

2. Funding shortfalls. The Board, like others in the Province, is going to have to get creative about how they will manage funding shortfalls and demands for new or enhanced programs – or simply the preservation of existing programs. And I suspect that this particular Board is going to have a very, very difficult time prioritizing directions.

At a minimum, I suggest the following:

3) English versus French language demand. I addressed this a couple of posts back and I re-emphasize it here. I do think it is vital to offer a comprehensive English language program to whoever demands it – although this may result in some students having to change schools due to supply / demand dynamics.

The only way to intelligently analyse where the demand for both programs exists and what is driving this demand is to carefully research these questions using scientific methods and an unbiased analytical framework. This is very important and such an initiative should be discussed at the Board table at the same time as discussion about the strategic plan.

4) Maintaining relevance in the community. I am not going to expand on this too much because I talked about it over the course of the campaign. But suffice it to say that if issues around communication, responsiveness and transparency are not addressed, then the Board will find it increasingly difficult to get support from the community when the Province (not “if”, but “when”) takes more decision making powers from the local level.

Well, those are the “broad brush” issues as I see them. Over the next 4 years, I will be checking in on these issues from time to time to see if the current Board is up to the task of tackling them intelligently and creatively.

Trashy,
Ottawa, Ontario