It's still a 4-2 split at the school board

Nov 29, 2023

Let me start this off by saying I don’t want to overstate the extent of the split because I just straight up-don’t know how deep it is. As I said the last time I wrote about a school board meeting, for all intents and purposes it looks like the work is getting done. At the meeting last night, just like the last meeting I attended, the board members are talking to and with each other respectfully and with some humour thrown in, and going through the business of the night as you would expect.

I say this because of the obvious deeper divides that have come before. You can read the history of this in my most popular post ever titled “An attempted guide to what’s going on at the school board” from March of this year, but for the purposes of today’s post here’s what you need to know: In March, the board held an in-camera meeting at at the end of it, the superintendent had been fired and in the days that followed two school board members, Gillian Burnett and Betty Bekkering, resigned. In interviews following that, Burnett said, “I don’t think I ever felt welcome or included,” while Bekkering “described the board as ideologically split between herself, Bob Thomson, Gillian Burnett on one side and [board chair Rachel] Weber, Corey Antrim, Erica McLean and Craig Brennan, on the other.”

“We were not going to ever defeat this four to three [split]. We're never going to move issues forward,” she said. "“Knowing we are going to beat our heads against a brick wall to keep on for three-and-a-half years into the future - it just looked like a bleak desert to me.”

Again, that’s one side of the story — the other board members have never really shared theirs, or responded directly to any of this. Just to be clear on which perspectives have been shared and which haven’t.

Anyways, in the wake of these resignations, by-elections were held with Sarah Holland and Shar McCrory getting elected. The two campaigned together, and Holland has spoken in support of the trustees who resigned while committing to working with the new board. And again, I really want to emphasize, I don’t have any insight into how this board is working together aside from what can be seen publicly when they have their meetings. It could be sunshine and rainbows behind the scenes, or swords and daggers, no clue. I’m just writing about what can be seen. And what can be seen is that, to at least some degree, there is still a bit of a divide between the four-person team of Weber, Antrim, McLean and Brennan and the two newly elected trustees.

I say this because of last night’s meeting which was fully congenial but was also the night when the board was scheduled to vote for their new chair and vice-chair, as well as the representatives to the B.C. School Trustee’s Association (BCSTA). And here’s how it went: First, Rachel Weber, who has been the chair, said she would not want the position again as she plans to run in the next provincial election (she is going to be the candidate for the B.C. Conservatives in the riding of Prince George-Mackenzie). She nominated Craig Brennan, who has been serving as vice-chair. McCrory nominated Holland. A secret vote was held, and Brennan was announced as the winner (btw, thank you to Hannah Petersen of the Citizen and Will Peters of My Prince George Now who caught the first part of the meeting that I had to miss for filling me on on this).

Then, it was time to vote for vice-chair. McCrory once again nominated Holland, while Antrim voted McLean. McLean won.

Next, it was time to elect the board’s representative to the BCSTA. This time, Holland nominated McCrory. Antrim nominated Weber. Another secret vote, and again Holland-McCrory lose, with Weber being voted in. This repeated again when selecting the alternative representative, with Holland again nominating McCrory and McLean nominating Antrim. Guess who won? (It was Antrim). Bob Thomson, the rep for the Robson Valley, was absent for most of this, dropping off of the Zoom session sometime early in the meeting.

Ironically, when it came time to vote for the final two positions — councillor and alternative councillor for the B.C. Public School Employers' Association — both Holland and McCrory had to recuse themselves from standing for the position because they have family members who work or plan to work as school employees, which disqualifies them from holding the position. This time, no one else wanted the job, with Weber eventually saying she would do it if no one else wanted to, and Antrim going in as the alternative.

And again, I am not intending to make more of this than it is. Votes were held, different people were nominated for the positions, different people won. The group of people who have been on the school board for the past year voted for each other over the two people who just joined over the summer. It happens all the time. But I am marking it because of everything that preceded it, and the interest in what comes next.

Good news/bad news in the school district

After all of this voting, there were a series of presentations given by principals from College Heights and Hart-area schools followed by the union reps for the teacher’s association and school support workers.

The principals’ presentations were largely focused around the positive trends they are seeing from various school programs — hot lunches, “soft starts”, trauma-informed learning, access to mental health supports, Dakelh language learning. All of this is worth noting because even as the politics at this school board or in the provincial legislature attract the most attention and ink, educators are going about the work of educating. I also feel compelled to say I was going to write this before Rachel Weber looked directly at the media table and told the people seated there that this is the sort of thing they should be reporting on.

Less positive news came from the union presentations, both of which were focused on the issue of retention within the district. The teacher’s union talked about the challenge not just of recruiting educators but getting them to stick around, and raised alarms at how many are not just going to a different district but leaving the profession altogether. He said he had personally been convincing people to not resign while also sharing stories of teachers in tears because they feel like they can’t keep up with the stress of their jobs. It was a similar story from the support staff who pointed out that despite recruiting dozens of new workers since last June, there are still fewer employees now than there were a few months ago because of the high number of resignations — 95 since the end of the last school year. The ask, from both, was for the board to make sure everything was being done to support the workers they have and to advocate to the province for more resources to ease the burden on people working in and around classrooms, as folks are burning out. Perhaps not unrelated, there were at least two members of the public seated in the audience wearing “Straight Pride” shirts. The world is still out there.

Resources for parents around sexual extortion

On that note, there has been a lot of good information shared over the past day on the topic of sexual extortion of kids, following the extremely tragic news that a 12-year-old in our community is gone after being victimized. Among the interviews and links I’ve found informative are these:

Quick news:

Today’s song is pyschedlic French surf-rock:

Northern Capital News is a free, daily newsletter about life in Prince George. Please consider subscribing or, if you have, sharing with someone else.

Send feedback by replying to this email. Find me online at akurjata.ca.

northern capital news

Discussion about this post