Education candidates for local office: know your purpose!
TORONTO – Corriere Canadese is being inundated with requests for coverage of campaigns aimed at supporting one candidate or another for the office of trustee. Some candidates are worth supporting. We prefer to inform our readers on the issues and on the ability of candidates to grasp their importance to the electorate they [trustees] serve. When it comes to addressing this role respecting candidates to elected office in Education, it is an easy task for an Italian language daily newspaper.
Education is Big Business in Ontario – in direct, absolute dollars $ 32 Billion annually from the provincial government from K to grade 12 for approximately two million students. The funds are distributed according to designation for “property assessment” purposes according to Constitutional definitions as either Public or Catholic. Property owners are, by default, are supporters of a Public system unless they provide confirmation they are certified as [Roman] Catholic.
Such certification entitles parents to enroll their children in Catholic District School Boards, and demand a curriculum commensurate with the rites, culture and ethos of that religion. The money for that Constitutional entitlement is collected through the municipality flows from the province, which certifies minimal curriculum obligations and teachers acceptable to Catholic schools. It also permits Catholic ratepayers to seek elected office to discharge the fiduciary duty implicit, and explicit, as trustees for that purpose.
No trustee has the liberty to insinuate an ethos that is different from that provided by the magisterium for those who accept that fiduciary duty. As a lay institution, we respect the Church’s role in the Catholic designated school systems, just as we demand that the Ministry of Education respect the other criterion that shapes needs, language. The Minister in Council has decided to place several School Boards under the supervision of individuals who have a relationship with educational, formative goals that are difficult to discern. They seem content to have “former senior staff” responsible for the administrative debacle discovered by “investigators” into their operations to stay on in their job.
Happily, none of those “experts” in education are seeking office. Some trustees apparently “did not get the memo“. Maria Rizzo, TCDSB former Chair, and still trustee, is seeking re election. Why? She has been sending out messages via email accounts, content of which, suggest that – euphemistically speaking – she may be working for the wrong boss. Not a single word about Catholic Education. As per the attached email (here), provided to the Corriere on background because the source was not authorized to speak on her behalf, she is of the view that the only campaign issue is whether [Toronto] will continue to have meaningful, locally elected representation in public education.
One may, or not, agree that it is a little more than a self-serving partisan political sermon. For those who will be attending debates, ask her, and others, “where do you live and what designation is on the assessment roll”.