Chronicles of a Rookie Green Party School Trustee (2002 - 2005)

And now a word...on the federal election

Last night my family held our bi-annual election to see which one of us gets to govern for the coming two years. As the incumbent, I was coming off what I thought was a pretty good term -- spending was up (at least on things I wanted), meals were better (for my taste) and we were batting 1000 on finding previously elusive items such as scotch tape and scissors.

Run, Don't Walk

When people talk about schools winding down in June, they must be speaking figuratively if they aren't misspeaking altogether. Trying to get 24 months of work done in what is functionally about nine, is a test of stamina and at no time of the year is this more evident than the last couple of weeks before summer holidays.

Hockey Night at VSB

In the last month I've had a marked increase in the number of people asking me if I'm planning to run for school board again in 2005. Personally, I find it hard to even think about it - after all, the election is a year and a half (or 5% of my life) away. Plus we're still in the thick of this school year and then there's still another full school year and a bit afterwards.

The effect of it though is that first I've had to make a decision to make a decision and that second, I've started ticking off the positives and negatives of being a school trustee in my mind as I go along. And missing the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals when the Little Team that Sure Hasn't In a Long Time is playing in the finals, is definitely a big fat negative. To make matters worse, the chair I sit in is less than 50 feet away from a TV that if I could have turned it on...

All of this is a long way of saying that the meeting probably wasn't quite as long as it felt tonight. You'll note that we had a low scoring night too. Here's the rundown:

Dazed and Enthused

Last night I tried to write about the board meeting but could not. Not because of exhaustion or laziness (the usual excuses) but because I'm still stunned by Friday's announcement that the provincial government is giving back $3 MILLION FOR INNER CITY STUDENT SUPPORT IN VANCOUVER.

Sorry for the caps but it's hard not to shout it from the rooftops. KIDS MATTER, ADVOCACY WORKS, THE MINISTER LISTENED.

Modest Proposals, Radical Implications

Life at the board has not returned to normal post budget. Well at least what I imagined normal would look like after one year of budget under my belt.

Last year, life post-budget was blue, a kind of ashen sky blue that took both post budget months, the summer holiday and part of September to shake off. It was as though a great quest had been set out but the heroes and heroines had returned empty handed. Worse yet, barely disheveled. The result was a kind of lurking feeling that everything else we touched might also turn to ashes in our hands.

Grief.

Last night was the end of a very long and intense budget process. 21 formal meetings, dozens of informal meetings and thousands of submissions later it all came down to last night's vote on $11 million worth of services to Vancouver students.

Right up until Wednesday night, I still hadn't made up my mind. You'd think it would be a bit of a luxury not being the vote that decides such a thing - after all I am a caucus of one (unless you count the hundreds of bus drivers, convenience store clerks and anyone else who would talk to me about the issue - thank you all).

I Don't Feel Fine

T-minus 43 hours until we decide on the 04-05 budget and I still haven't figured out which way to go.

On the plus side, I have narrowed down the arguments to three broad areas (two for, one against a yes vote) so at least I have some solid reference points to evaluate against with two very short days to go. Up until now it's been an ever shifting mental landscape that's impossible to reconcile. After more that a decade of cuts, none of the decisions in this year's $11 million less budget are educationally sound. They are just more sound than what one imagines the alternatives to be if a provincially appointed trustee shows up if the board says enough is enough and votes against it.

Aie du Courage

The ungoing budget process at the board has been reminding me of one of the strongest and most missed memories I have of travel (a pre-mom, pre-school trustee life) -- a true cultural immersion. That feeling was always most vivid for me after spending days conversing in the local dialect and stumbling across a colloquial expression of a concept so universal yet so poorly articulated in our own language as to have been previously swallowed whole, untasted.

One of my favourites was "aie du courage", a french expression literally translated as "have courage" and for which the closest Canadian equivalent is "don't let the bastards get you down".

Now before I give off entirely the wrong idea, the budget process hasn't been about bastards. In fact quite the opposite (did I mention it's an imprecise translation?).

Balancing is Different Than Juggling

So much has happened this month it's hard to know where to start, which is precisely why the blog faithful such as myself shouldn't go blog-free for a month. Not that I can pretend it was some super smart pre-meditated plan with an outcome in mind or something like that. It's just simply being overloaded.

School (Boards) in Action

Tonight's board meeting more than made up for our one motion meeting of two week's ago. I think we may have set an all-time board record for number of motions passed per minute met. Maybe we can pass a motion at the next meeting to get someone to look into that (it's very hard to communicate late night intonation-based humor across cyber-space).