Bill 177: The Student Achievement and School Board Governance Act carried through third reading on division Monday at Queen's Park. The Ministry of Education sent out its release, backgrounder and other items through its various platforms Tuesday afternoon.
I haven't had a chance to give this reading of the bill a thorough review and compare it to the original, although a trustee at the public board I cover advised her colleagues last week to read it over as there had been changes that took some of the concerns from trustees into account.
The leg website hasn't been updated yet to indicate when the Bill received / will receive royal assent from the Lieutenant-Governor. Many of its provisions don't take effect until then.
The bugaboo will continue to be the provincial-interest regulations stemming from this bill and the one passed in 2006, a draft of which were circulated earlier this summer for consultation. Plenty of trustees will no doubt consider these regulations and whether they wish to run for election in 2010 and face the wrath of the Ministry should they not meet any targets that may be established through regulation.
Or, the 'wrong' government gets elected (and you pick who you think that is, I'm not stating which party might be right or wrong, period) in 2011 and the regulations get re-written to really make life fun for trustees.
Once I give the bill a thorough re-read (if I ever get the time to do so... I'm still reading the Bluewater report a few paragraphs at a time) I may repost with more.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
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3 comments:
Bill 177 isn't peaking the interest of the school communities around here ER. No press released by boards on where they stand or what it means for them, that I could find.
I suspect that what it means on paper will turn out to look vastly different on the ground as it plays out.
At the end of the day most are just concerned how this affects their local neighborhood schools, and their children.
CC
Boards have by and large focused their responses through their associations, and were remarkably successful in getting amendments to the bill. Perhaps because this was one instance where the Catholic and Public boards were in accord? The OPSBA website has a section on what they were looking for, inside the advocacy tab. A sleeper item in the bill removes the concept of withdrawal of extra-curricular from the definition of a strike - that may come back to haunt a government down the road...perhaps the heirs of the one that put it in?
As far as I'm concerned all of the tampering in Bill 177 really doesn't matter where the rubber hits the road. The effective delivery of education is still between school and home...that means between teacher, parent and student.
All else is secondary.
Re: removing the withdrawl of extra-curriculars from the definition of a strike - I can guarantee that it WILL haunt us in the future. Not much of the bare bone recommendations raised from the Minister's taskforce back in 2001 was ever acted on, so RetDir.
is right on that count.
However when the conservatives are back in power...and they will be after the HST deal, they're pretty much screwed themselves of doing anything with regards to education thanks to their FB schools fiasco.
I'm betting it's not even on their top 10 list of campaign issues.
That leaves it up to the Liberals to make the changes so vast and ingrained as to be impossible to change - I think they're doing just that now, knowing that they may not be re-elected.
Re: Catholic and public agreeing
All I can say is that the presentation to my community of the Early Learning Program was remarkably different between boards.
Public board lead with their annoucement and got very little coverage in local media where the Catholic board just yesterday got almost a full page in our paper, plus several sound bites on radio.
There message seemed to counter that of the public board at times.
That really bugs me.
CC
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