Kaplan-Myrth: Why I resigned as a trustee from the OCDSB
On June 3, I resigned from the position of trustee for Zone 9 (Capital and Alta Vista) at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board. 'If you resign, please tell people why. Don't just leave,' said a fellow trustee.
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So here I am. This is the story of my three years as a trustee. It is a cautionary tale about the ways in which public school boards in Canada are under siege.
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Following my medical advocacy during the pandemic, I was approached by neighbours in July 2022 to run as a trustee in Ottawa. As a progressive voice in the community, I was tasked by my constituents with the responsibility to keep social justice issues on the agenda, and to advocate for academic supports for students with disabilities, neurodiverse students, 2SLGBTQ students, Indigenous and racialized students.
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School board trustee is a part-time position with hundreds of hours of work, board or committee meetings, sometimes twice a week, 6 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. It comes with a $17,000 salary, no support staff, a flood of emails from angry constituents and very little political esteem. It is nevertheless an important position. Trustees develop strategic plans, shape elementary and secondary school programs, oversee budgets (for the OCDSB, more than $1 billion), and develop and revise policies that affect every student and educator in the school district. Most trustees have no background in education, economics, urban planning, management, policy analysis or disability.
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Sadly, school boards are also particularly vulnerable to political manipulation. In the United States, there is a well-established pattern of MAGA-inspired takeovers of school boards by people whose agendas include banning books, removing topics such as sexuality, gender identity and sex ed from curriculum, and even erasing the science of evolution. In Ontario and across Canada, this is a very difficult time, in general, to run a Board of Education, with chronic underfunding from the ministry, staff shortages, over-crowding of classrooms, unprecedented dysregulation of students, and the concomitant challenge of increasingly radicalized groups that seek to influence us through an avalanche of emails, petitions and disruptions of our board rooms and schools.
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