Who’s in Charge?

The headline splashed across the top of my local newspaper this morning reads “Trustees blasted over deficit”.

This refers to the elected trustees of the local public school board, which I should immediately add is in no real sense ‘local’. The provincial government some years back created the Thames Valley District School Board (TVDSB) by amalgamating a bunch of smaller boards into one monstrosity that is now one of the largest in the province. Many people seem to think that the lesson of Henry Ford – building a lot of cars on an assembly line allows one to build them at low cost – applies to everything. It doesn’t.

Anyway, the headline refers to the fact that the board, which has by now been put under the guidance of a provincially-appointed supervisor, had projected a deficit for the 2024-25 year of $16.8million, which is now turning out to be in reality a deficit of $32million. Oops.

After noting how ‘profoundly’ the former trustees had ‘failed in their duty’, the Ontario Education Minister goes on to say (and you had to see this coming…..):

“It also underscores the need for the ministry to have a more proactive role in the management of school boards in the province.”

It is the instinct of all politicians of all stripes: things will clearly run better if we consolidate control in one big office here, with me in charge.

Wanna bet?

The thing is, it is no surprise to me that this particular school board did a bad job of, well, doing its job. My one experience on any board was the three years I spent as a member of the board of a private social club of which I was a member. It seemed like a good opportunity to have a say in the running of the club of which I was a member. What it turned out to be was a crash course in the inertia of supervisory boards.

We did very little supervising of anything, there was almost no push-back or questioning of what the hired managers of the place wanted to do. We got monthly budget numbers, asked a few questions here and there, but most people went along with most everything. There was a lot of head-nodding.

Now a school board, particularly the one in which I live, is a much bigger and more important operation than a private club with a few hundred members. However, I think the same principles of inertia apply, and I have found a bit of evidence to back that up.

An organization known as The Brookings Institution, a Washington D.C. based non-profit think-tank has done a bit of research on what goes on in school boards. This is from the US, of course, but I don’t think the Canadian situation would be any different.

You can read the whole report yourself here https://www.brookings.edu/articles/school-boards-should-focus-budget-deliberations-on-student-outcomes-financial-sustainability/

I’ll pass along some of the key findings regarding what they say happens at US school boards. First, note that their findings are based on a study by three researchers who examined hundreds of hours of pre-recorded 2023 budget workshops across 174 school districts nationwide. They tracked each meeting, capturing how board members engaged in financial discussions.

Now, 174 is only a small sample of boards in the US, and the authors make no claim that it comprises a representative sample of such boards. Boards from only 27 states are included, but the authors assert that they represent a broad range of sizes, family average income levels, student performance and urban/rural mix. I will take their word on that.

Here are some of the key things they found, at least in my humble opinion. First, finances, which everyone (really, everyone) agrees is a primary responsibility of any board. It’s elected to oversee how the district spends the tax and other money the district receives. So, how much time does a typical board spend on finances at a meeting? The researchers found this:

It is certainly not surprising that larger districts, with more pupils and no doubt more funds to allocate, spend more time discussing finances. Here’s a quote from the study:

“District staff tended to do most of the talking even though trustees do receive all financial materials ahead of time. About a quarter (24%) of the meetings spent a majority of the finance segment time on revenues (which boards don’t control), leaving less time for the primary responsibility of determining how to deploy the dollars the district does have.”

An even more telling comment, and one that certainly jives with my own experience, is this:

“More than half of all school board members (53%) were categorized in our analysis as “silent observers,” meaning they offered no productive comments or feedback during public budget discussions (except to thank and congratulate the district on its efforts to draft and present a budget).”

But wait, there’s more –

“In our observations, most financial decisions of all types were called for vote with no board deliberation. For instance, in the meetings where employee salaries came to a vote, 82% of raises were approved without discussion.

Over 90% of meetings made no mention of any spending alternatives to the singular proposal on the docket.”

So far as I know, one must get elected to a school board, whether in Canada or the US. I know that in the local elections here, I never vote in the school board part of the ballot. I simply have no idea who any of the folks on the ballot are, and if there is a way to find anything out about them, I have not looked hard for it. I went looking to see how the elections for the TVDSB board went back in 2022 when those now-mostly-irrelevant trustees were elected.

Such information does not seem to exist. You can find out who was elected in 2022, and this website has information on ‘…the number of candidates seeking election, number of elected or acclaimed trustees, number of new or returning trustees and a comparison of 2018 to 2022 election results…’ but not vote totals. So, I have no idea how much actual support any of those elected had. Hmmmm…….

If anyone out there knows how to find this out, do let me know.

Anyway, on to more bad news about what actually goes on at school board meetings….and what does not:

Note here that only 23% of budget sessions included any discussion of student outcomes, which one might think is the absolute number one priority for any board. However, the following quote from the study is important, too –

“This is not to say that trustees were wholly unconcerned about student outcomes. Rather, any discussion of student outcomes typically took place outside of budget discussions. And yet, whether leaders recognize it or not, the budget is a set of choices about how to deploy the district’s resources and thus should be central to any strategy for learning. Money spent on one thing (e.g., more teacher aides, professional development, or pay raises) can’t be spent on another (e.g., tutoring or counselors). The tendency to separate these functions may be part of the reason why districts tend not to change their budgets much from year to year.”

A final quote about who ends up on school boards –

“Board members are typically elected positions that rarely come with any compensation. So it’s not surprising that many are unprepared for the financial aspects of their roles. In fact, 10% of meetings included a trustee expressing that they lacked knowledge of finance.”

Now, the implicit suggestion here is that it is board positions being uncompensated that leads to unpreparedness and inertia. That is not at all apparent to me. If board positions were paid, (and I cannot determine if they are in Ontario, but I don’t believe so) that would just be one more not very good reason for people to seek them. I don’t see that as helping things.

The over-riding lesson from this study is that boards don’t actually exercise much control over what happens to the money a school district receives. That is determined by the paid administrative staff of the district, and the board just rubber-stamps the budget they prepare, asking few questions and never ever suggesting alternative allocations of funding.

Well, that is at least consistent with what has happened in the aftermath of the two major fiascos that have occurred locally. The mess with the TVDSB began when it was discovered that a bunch of the administrative staff – not the trustees – had gone on a three-day retreat to the hotel in Toronto that is attached to where the Blue Jays play baseball. There were Jays games all three of those days. To quote my local paper on this ‘retreat’, “It was held amid deep spending cuts that slashed jobs in teaching, early childhood education and other areas as the board grappled with a then $7.6-million deficit that rose sharply.”

This triggered an outside audit, and the cost of said retreat was put at $38,000. Bad optics. This got the outside supervisor appointed by the province, and then, to again quote the Freeps:

“Mark Fisher, the board’s education director since 2019, abruptly took a paid leave days into the new school year, after news about the retreat was revealed, and later resigned without public explanation. Some other senior administrators also either resigned or retired.”

So…..it was the administrators who felt the need to take a leave, resign, or retire – perhaps fearing they would be fired if they tried to stick around. It was not the trustees, who are still around, albeit rendered even more meaningless by the presence of the appointed supervisor.

And, in the other local fiasco, when it was discovered that the local hospital organization was going to have a $150million dollar deficit, again a provincial supervisor was appointed, and it was the senior administrators who were pushed out, albeit slowly. Then, when it was further found the hospital system had been defrauded of some $50million dollars by some of its staff, it is those senior staff members, including the now-departed ex-CEO, who are being sued by the corporation for letting this happen – not the members of the hospital board.

To put it simply, it seems to me that no one really believes that trustees of school or hospital or university or social club boards are up to the task of overseeing what happens in their respective organizations. The (generally highly paid) senior administrative staff have all the information, all the expertise, and so hold all the cards. They control what the board even knows about the organization. The concept of a supervisory board is a good one. Checks and balances, right? Someone needs to keep the senior admin from feathering their own nests, from giving themselves raises, etc. Yet, they don’t seem to. The now-being-sued ex-CEO of the hospital system got a $230,000+ raise shortly after taking the job, something like a 30% increase.

So, we get the Education Minister saying the Ministry itself clearly needs to ‘have a more proactive role’. If you believe that better educational outcomes will result from decisions made in Queens Park about what happens in London school rooms, well…..I’ve got this great piece of land in the Okefenokee swamp we should talk about.

This is a difficult governance problem, no doubt about it. What to do? Boards don’t do their jobs of overseeing admins, the research from Brookings says so, and our local experiences with the hospital and school boards say so also. Yet, the admins run big deficits and commit fraud and get big raises, so…..???? Whaddya do?

Just for fun, here’s a crazy suggestion to consider.

Disaggregate the school board, tear the TVDSB back down into its former constituent parts. Hell, make the parts even smaller, break the London school board into four separate ones, one for each quarter of the city, east, west, north, south, make them really really local. Do the same with the LHSC, have each of London’s three major hospitals run themselves independently.

Now, let them compete for students and patients.

Crazy idea, eh?

Or, we could just have all the hospitals and schools and universities and hell – police and fire departments – in the whole country run by ministers in Ottawa.

Which is crazier?