Im not even going to try and explain the length between blog postings other than to say wow! this is how normal people live. Since I crawled into bed after our last board meeting on July 4th Ive spent more time with my family, friends and favourite community events than I remember being able to sustain since I was elected (not to mention getting reacquainted with my pillow!). Sure theres still work to be done, events to attend, festivals to sing O Canada at, but its a lot more relaxing not to have that treadmill of work all day, evening meetings all night.
With a few good sleeps under my belt its easier to see why I was SO exhausted for the last few months of this school year, my third on the school board. For the first two years I was elected, I spent about the same amount of time on school board duties as I did this year but got enough sleep and relaxation time to feel mostly normal. The price of that was getting behind on my other full time job. As a result I spent the last two summers continuing to work 80 hours a week, albeit focused on just one job, but with the stress of trying to get through the pile on my desk before the school year and the endless march of evening meetings started again.
Somehow during those 80 hour weeks last summer I must have subconsciously realized the sheer insanity of it all, because I managed to keep up with both school board and my work this year and am now enjoying a fairly normal person summer, at least I am now that Ive gotten a little more caught up on my family, friends and sleep. On the whole it was worth a few months of exhaustion to have a couple of months of down time, rather than 12 continuous months on the endurance treadmill. Bad news is that it took until the last year of my term to figure this out but lifes often like that. An unanticipated side effect is that its given me a much more positive attitude on the possibility of running for a second term but I think Ill be giving that decision a few more sleeps.
For posterity, heres the report on the last meeting of the 2004-05 school year:
My memory of the meeting was that it was interminably long but then that has been the pattern on all the last board meetings weve had before one of the several school breaks during the year. Because everything is supposed to go through committee before it can get to the board, if you miss an opportunity it can be more than a month once things get going again to get a board decision. The summer break itself is two months long so depending on when the committee meeting is scheduled in September it could be more than three months for business that doesnt get done at the last meeting of the school year.
Weighing against this long list of decisions that need to be made is the fact that most of the people making them are pretty exhausted from all the other meetings crammed into June to get these decisions through the various processes they need to go through. And in fact some dont even get through the process as youll see under the finance committee report below. A friend I had dinner with in early July who has spent a long time in and around government calls this government by attrition meaning that anyone with any energy left can basically get whatever they want.
Management and Coordinating Committee (I)
Several big ticket items but thankfully none that were brought forward for a vote.
The Corporate Sponsorship Policy , which has been rattling around the committee for two years or so, looked like it might be headed in that direction so I asked some parents and teachers to come and speak their mind on the current proposal from staff. Its a long story that deserves its own posting but the essence of it is that more than a decade of under-funding from the provincial government has created a very permissive atmosphere in our schools towards corporations marketing to students in exchange for some sort of material benefit to the school. We have one very good policy against this and one very bad policy supporting it so weve been trying to get one united policy which, in my mind, should not allow corporations to freely advertise their products to students in Vancouvers public schools. However, the proposed policy looked a lot more like the bad policy in part because the management and co-ordinating committee is a representational committee made up of people who are used to corporate sponsorships so it seemed important to bring in other perspectives, given that most people in our community dont support this type of activity. Getting a different viewpoint helped and the policy has been sent back for further revisions and will come back again in September.
We also discussed two issues regarding modified school calendars and the process by which decisions to modify would be made at the school level. Most of this debate centers what is an appropriate percentages of parents that should be in support before a change can be made and how much participation in a vote should be required. (ie. if there are 200 children in a school and only 20 parents vote, should that count?)
Finally, we revised parts of our District Bomb Threat policy that were inconsistent with actual practice and with each other. Thankful that relatively routine piece of business was completed before a couple of days before the bombings on the London transit system so it remained the routine piece of business that it was.
Planning and Facilities Committee (II)
Lots of items but mostly of the verbal update kind on the following:
- Seismic upgrade at Sexsmith Elementary
- Summer work forescast
- Cool schools
- Telus Walk In Closet installation at Nootka school
- Peace Conference at Gladstone
- Report out on meeting with Board of Trade
Discussed in a bit more detail:
- University Hill Secondary where over-crowding is creating a whole host of problems. The government finally relented on their out of touch with reality capacity formula for approving new schools and approved an expansion but in the meantime theres a lot of space issues to deal with before a bigger school can be built. Plus theres the issue of the over-crowded elementary that the government has not dealt with. A delegation of parents came to express frustration and our staff will be looking at mitigation measures to bring back to committee.
- We are still trying to get on the Translink Employer Bus Program that would give our staff access to discounted bus passes. The problem is that the program is based on 12 months and the vast majority of our thousands of staff are on a ten month contract. None of the other school boards in the region are on the program so were blazing new trail through a few bureaucracies here. Negotiations continue.
- A new left turn bay at 49th and Knight which would affect Fleming Elementary school (the city would need to annex some land from the school board) seemed pretty routine but turned out to be a sleeper issue as the school community had not been consulted on it fully yet. When it came to city halls traffic committee in July, the parents had some more time to organize and it looks like it will be slowing down a bit to allow for better consultations in the fall.
- Final item of discussion was on the development of a heritage protocol with the City of Vancouver and Heritage Vancouver to better deal with evaluation of heritage values as we move through the next ten years of seismic upgrades. This item came to a head on one of our very first schools scheduled for seismic upgrade under the provinces new program. The province does not allow us to consider heritage values in our feasibility studies, only cost, and as a result many of our oldest buildings would likely be required to be replaced rather than renovated. Seeing nothing but pain and suffering for all involved unless we found a better way to work on heritage issues, I worked with Heritage Vancouver to hook up a meeting between our staff and them to develop criteria and a protocol. This has since expanded into seeking the City of Vancouvers support to work together to get the province to recognize heritage values in capital funding determinations. The City has since approved our request and Im looking forward to us being able to save more of our schools heritage value.
Education and Students Services Committee (III)
We managed to move two major and long-standing items another step along at Committee III. The first was the technology task force report which I believe first came to this committee at the very first meeting I was at back in December 2002. Since then its gone through a host of iterations to finally come back to this last meeting of the 04-05 school year. The only change we made this meeting which was a relatively major one was to change language around minimum technology standards to suggested guidelines for technology in schools. Its a noble pursuit to get minimum standards in place but the reality is that prescriptive plans rarely ever work in the school system (just ask the provincial government about that) and in the case of technology you can waste a whole lot of money on prescribed purchases that will be obsolete by the time someone gets around to embracing them.
The second major item was the French Language Task Force action plan, the primary objective of which is to try and identify new French immersion space for the 2006-2007 school year. The challenge here is to do it without displacing students from regular programs in their neighbourhood schools. Some language around this was strengthened in the reports guiding principles but the really tough part is yet to come. Most of the space in the city is on the east side; most of the demand for immersion on the west side. It will be an interesting exercise to see how that gets resolved.
Finance Committee (V)
Some very beefy issues coming for decision out of the Finance Committee and you can only imagine how tired we were by this part in the meeting, which may help explain some of the decisions that were made.
The first item up was a delegation of Phys Ed Department Heads from our secondary schools. Several weeks earlier I had been approached by the department head at my liaison school in the West End, King George. He expressed concerns about the cuts the board had made to funding for the use of community facilities for phys ed. This coupled with the new graduation requirements was putting tremendous stress on our phys ed classes around the system. In most schools enrolment in senior phys ed has doubled this year (a good thing) but capacity remains the same, which was less than ideal before the vastly increased enrolment. Being able to access off site facilities not only eases the space burden but also gives students exposure to a wider range of physical activities.
Because we did not know what the added pressures from the new grad program would be when we passed the previous years budget, I asked him if hed consider pulling together the department heads from around the city to do a presentation to the finance committee to let others know about it. So they came, gave a bang up presentation that was really the first time weve had a chance to talk with phys ed teachers about the challenges our system is facing in that area. As a result, the board is planning to bring the item back in September with some information on costs, etc to see what we can do to reinstate some of the community facilities funding.
The second item was regarding School Generated Funds which probably doesnt sound like much, but its another controversial outcome of the many years of under-funding. School Generated Funds, or SGFs, are the amounts of money a school has in its bank account as a result of funds allocated from the school board for supplies each year and money the school has raised from things like charging students fees for courses, vending machine sales and corporate sponsorships. Its important to note that it does NOT include parent-raised funds which are held in a separate account and controlled by Parent Advisory Councils, not school boards.
The issue we were discussing was that some schools, particularly secondary schools, have a long-standing practice of holding money at the school level in rainy day funds, even going so far as to accumulate enough to invest in mutual funds and use the interest payments. It probably sounds a little crazy that schools wouldnt be spending supply funds or charging fees they arent spending on courses given how hard its figuratively raining in our public schools right now, but some schools can afford to do it because parent-raised funds help pay for those upfront costs while in other schools the both the cupboards and the SGF bank accounts are bare. And in many cases its simply the inertia of habit.
In fact, the board itself was unaware of the SGFs, and certainly the size of some of the SGFs, until very recently when a change in our accounting practices at the provincial level necessitated including these funds in our consolidated financial statements. After seeing some of the balances, the board wanted to ensure schools spend their SGFs on the services the money was originally intended for (especially in the case of board allocated funds or parent fees) so a proposal came forward from our staff to reduce school allocations for the next school year if the fund balances the schools had at September 1 exceeded a reasonable amount. This raised a great deal of concern amongst schools and a great deal of confusion amongst parents who assumed it included their funds so a bit of a ruckus ensued and a great deal of debate.
Personally Im very supportive of the intention of the original proposal but also was concerned about the timing of it. The way the timing would have worked out, it would not have allowed schools to make collaborative decisions about spending SGFs without penalizing them. Since that seemed a poor habit to enforce, I amended the motion to come into effect in the 2006-2007 school year, with a report this year on the impact it would have had on their allocations if it would have some into effect this year. Hoping this helps schools get on top of their SGFs this coming year although its always possible some wont and the board will be in the same position next year but well see.
The third item was a little less controversial, not because of the content but because theres really nothing we can do about it this point. Several years ago, the previous board lent several hundred thousand dollars to the then newly-created Vancouver Public Schools Foundation. The idea was that by investing this money out of operating funds, the Foundation would over time generate enough income to not only pay back the loan but also to fund short falls in the public system (you guessed it yet another artefact of under-funding). However, the Foundation was set up without much of a business plan. Had there have been one, it would have shown it takes about ten years to establish a foundation of the size the last board was dreaming of. Of course, that also would have meant a much bigger loan over many years and I doubt any board would have the stomach to keep siphoning away needed dollars from operating funds to support an organization set up to beg money for public schools.
Anyway, the crux of the decision before us was that we were being asked to designate half of the original loan as a doubtful account. Seemed like a no-brainer since there is little chance well see that money for many years but it did inspire a great deal of debate. My concern was that we have a more transparent process for lending money (like the SGFs it seems ludicrous that we would be in the position to lend anyone anything but there you go) similar to the one we have for borrowing money. Al Blakey insisted this was a transparent process but I know at least part of it wasnt decided in public session and in any event, it really should be part of the budget process where it can be put along side other priorities for public input. Well see where that one goes.
The very final item for decision turned out to the be the longest which is probably just as it should be given that for such a large proposed expenditure, it had received a scant half an hour in committee a couple of weeks before.
The basic story is that the province was offering us a half-price deal on some e-procurement software that, in theory, would help us reduce our procurement costs and pay for itself over time. How would it do this? By having one integrated database, the people at the school level who do most of our purchasing would be able to easily access products from companies we have bulk purchasing deals with. Software set-up, training and hard ware costs would require us borrowing $300,000 out of our capital reserve and spending an additional $28,000 - $34,000 out of our operating fund each year for annual licensing fees.
The more complicated story is, well, more complicated. Personally, Ive been concerned about our purchasing structure for a while now. In the years of cut backs, people not working directly with kids such as purchasers are some of the first to be laid off. Because the job of purchasing still needs to be done, it has fallen to principals, teachers and just about everyone else in the school to fend for themselves. One of the most common complaints when youre talking to people in schools about the way cut backs have affected their lives is that they spend more time at the photocopier copying lessons and more time surfing the internet looking for cheap pencils than they do with students, teachers and/or parents. This is obviously not a very efficient way of handling purchasing.
As it turns out, we do have someone left in central purchasing who negotiates contracts and forward this to schools but there are schools and individuals within schools that choose not to use these, in part because they are sure they can get a better deal surfing the net. The idea behind the software is that these people/schools would make better use of the bulk purchasing contracts. Given that it would involve training, new technology and the really challenging thing change, I was a little dubious as to how many of the hold outs would embrace this where the current system had failed. Maybe they would but with the price tag involved, not to mention the close proximity of this item to another large and failed loan, I wanted a little more assurance.
Time was not on my side though as the ministry wanted us to make a decision before July 29, which was another odd thing. We are the only school district in the province being offered it so it hardly seemed to need such a strict timeline. The offer was also contingent upon us conducting a feasibility study on a province-approved human resources management module from the same software manufacturer, making it not exactly a half price offer and all a little sketchy to me.
I was surprised to be the only trustee to vote against it. Id be happy to be proven wrong on this one but I suspect we would have been far better off hiring someone for a year or two to go work one-on-one with the hold outs and find out what is up. Humans are generally better at persuasion than machines and at the least a lot less of a gamble.
The final, final item was approving a new format for our financial report, which staff will be working on over summer. Having district financial information presented in a way that allows people to track resources to both programs and schools is something the board, parents and our employee association and unions have been asking for a long time and I was very pleased to see the effort staff had made to create a very user friendly format.
Should have named this posting four hours later (well three hours minus lunch and a few phone calls)! Starting to understand why I put off writing about this blockbuster meeting for so long. Im suspecting with an election on the horizon the big ticket items will continue to come to the board but I couldnt really say for sure, having no experience to inform that opinion. Will try to keep the postings going during September but it may have to be a little more bullet point.
Meanwhile Im going back to my garden, getting caught up on all that correspondence I got behind on in June, getting ready for the next spate of festivals and of course getting a little more sleep before September rolls around.
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