Suzanne Gammon
Tribune
West Nipissing’s lone voice on the Near North District School Board has resigned in frustration over what she feels is a lack of transparency, and she is hoping local residents with an interest in English language public education will pay closer attention and demand to be kept in the loop on any future decisions that may affect Northern Secondary School and White Woods Elementary.
Julie Bertram was elected as a trustee in 2022 and says she “knew right from the beginning that there were transparency issues.” She says she brought up her concerns early on, but they were “always swept under the rug.” In her first year, she asked that board meetings be recorded, but was met with objections. The proposal went to a committee where she presented her research showing many other boards were recording their public proceedings. “We have Zoom,” she argued, adding that at any point, if something had to be discussed in-camera, they could just press pause. “The technology is there, this is not 2012,” she points out.
At committee level, she was asked to do even more research on the matter, which she felt was not her job to do. “Because I didn’t want to do that [unpaid work], the motion died,” she recounts.
That is just one example. Over the years, she realized that many community concerns were not making it up to the board level for discussion. She cites the renaming of Chippewa Public School in North Bay. Bertram says she was getting calls from members of Nipissing First Nation who said the community had never been consulted on the decision and they opposed the name change. Communication to that effect never went to the board, she says. Administration presented the matter as a human rights issue that their legal department had identified as a potential liability. Bertram says she asked to see the legal opinion and was refused. While she has no lingering frustration over the ultimate result, she feels that the elected trustees should be kept better informed so that they can answer to the public they represent. “When there is a backlash, it goes to the elected officials, we have to take those calls,” she points out.
Bertram says the communications chain excludes the board, with complaints moving up the ladder from teacher to principal to superintendant to board director, stopping there. “It never gets to trustees,” she says, adding that they are charged with representing people and addressing issues but never get to actually do so. “It creates a troubling dynamic, where trustees are held responsible for outcomes they had little real power to shape. Decisions made without the full knowledge or consent of the trustee body, can significantly impact school operations, budgets, and community trust. When these opaque decisions come to light, it is often trustees who are called to answer for them, despite having been excluded from the process.”
It all came to a head recently when the board found out, in August, that a new school being built in Parry Sound was not going to be open for September as they had repeatedly been assured, and parents were not provided with a contingency plan until August 15, and a revised plan on August 27. Trustees were then left to face the public backlash, with no explanation to give, according to Bertram. “There’s been critical information that we’ve been missing (…) We’ve been told ‘Everything’s fine. Everything’s going to go ahead’, and we knew in our guts that it wasn’t going to. The parents who lived by the school knew it wasn’t going to go. And now here we are,” she rued.
Ministry investigating Near North Board
At the August 19 board meeting, Bertram brought forward a motion for trustees to request a Ministry of Education investigation into the workings of the board, citing “credible concerns of potential mismanagement within the administration of the NNDSB that warrant independent scrutiny.” The motion states that “critical information has not been provided to trustees in a timely, transparent, or complete manner” and that “lack of access to essential information has materially impaired trustees’ ability to fulfill our governance and oversight responsibilities.”
The motion was passed, however it was later declared null and void due to a procedural flaw, namely that the Director of Education was absent when the vote was taken. However, the matter was raised by the public, by Parry Sound municipal council and by the area’s MPP, leading to the Ministry of Education taking it on even without a formal request by the board.
In a letter to Parry Sound parents dated August 29, Minister of Education Paul Calandra expressed his outrage at the situation in Parry Sound, which “will delay the opening of in-person classes for grades 9-12, forcing these students and teachers online for the immediate future.” Calandra wrote, “I am incredibly disappointed, frustrated, and to be frank, angry.”
Calandra did get wind of the board motion, according to his letter. “On the advice of Graydon Smith, your MPP, I am launching a full governance review of the Near North District School Board. The board’s own trustees recently voted to request an investigation, underscoring the seriousness of the situation. This review will begin immediately, and I have asked for a report back in 30 days,” wrote the minister.
Is local input at risk?
Bertram says she is glad the investigation is moving forward, but she does worry the province may use the situation to justify a power grab that would curtail local representation and accountability. Bill 33, the Supporting Children and Students Act, aims to expand the Minister’s oversight of school boards and amend the Education Act to allow for more direct government intervention in school board finances and governance. That said, the Minister could also override local trustees and effectively take over any school board that it deems mismanaged. Bertram fears the government may even do away with school trustees altogether, which in her view “would undermine democracy.”
Calandra does hint at using the Near North Board situation to advance his proposed legislation. “Last June, I introduced legislation that would give the Minister of Education additional tools to step in sooner. The challenges at the Near North board are in part what inspired that legislation,” he wrote in his August 29th letter.
But Bertram stresses that trustees are elected by local residents to be their voice, their eyes and ears at the board table. “Once there are no trustees, there is no oversight whatsoever, so there’s an erosion of democracy,” she insists.
The last straw for Bertram
With the investigation launched, Bertram feels she’s done all she can to bring more accountability, but she’s tired of fighting. On August 28, she became the fourth Near North Board trustee to resign over the course of this term. She blames personal circumstances as well as “feeling exhaustion from essentially being blocked from doing my job.” While she is stepping away from the battle, she says “I’m proud of standing up for the families and students of Parry Sound, and now I can move on with my head held high.”
While Bertram fought for Parry Sound, she says local families were never out of her mind, even though “I kept being reminded that we don’t actually represent where we live, we represent the entire district.” Still, as the only voice from West Nipissing on the board, she felt an obligation to students and parents from White Woods Elementary and Northern Secondary to keep them informed. To that end, she started a public Facebook group and regularly posted board and school information.
For all of her efforts to keep the public involved, however, she says she hardly ever received input or calls from local residents, and she hopes this will change.