CALGARY BY-ELECTION BRINGS ISSUE OF SCHOOL TRUSTEES INTO FOCUS
The Calgary Catholic School Division is holding a by-election to fill two trustee vacancies on January 31st.
One of the vacancies - in Wards 11/12 - was caused by the death of Cathie Williams in July 2024.
But, the earlier vacancy - in Wards 4/7 - dates back to December 14th, 2022 - more than two years ago.
How? Why?
Well, let us explain...
This Calgary Catholic School Division by-election exposes an absurdity in the Education Act that applies province-wide, and which our Alberta Parents’ Union has been working to fix through our “Parents Deserve School Trustee By-elections” campaign.
In this situation, simply put, the Education Act does not require a by-election if the school board has only one vacancy, whereas it does require a by-election if the school board has two vacancies.
Normally, school boards are allowed to hold a by-election if they want, but they don't have to.
On the surface, that seems to kind of make sense.
Why go through all the time and expense of holding a by-election if you don't have to?
But - as with many government rules - the more you think about it, and the more you consider the possible implications of the rule, the less it makes sense.
Let's go back to the Calgary Catholic School Division.
Ironically, the vacancy in December 2022 was what (at least, in part) triggered us to launch this campaign to change the rules in the first place.
The vacancy occurred only a little bit more than a year after the election and, at the time, the Calgary Catholic School Division chose not to hold a by-election, leaving parents in Wards 4 and 7 without representation for almost three years!
Yet now, with just nine months until the next general election, because the number of vacancies rose from one to two - however different in length the vacancies are - the Education Act now requires a by-election, where before it did not.
There is simply no rational way to justify not holding a by-election then, and holding one now.
If anyone objects that a vacancy of two trustees is qualitatively different than missing only one - on a board with seven trustees at a full roster - we agree!
But, that is all the more reason to require a by-election at the first vacancy, not at the second - the board with seven trustees has been missing two since July last year already!
In fact, this highlights another reason why it would have been wiser for the school board to voluntarily hold the one by-election in 2023 - if only to avoid the absurd Education Act requirement to hold two by-elections in a general election year!
This Education Act requirement is especially inexplicable since it does not match the requirements of the other municipal governments.
At a minimum, the rules for municipal and school board by-elections should be brought into alignment, so that by-elections are required if there is a substantial period of time left until the next general election, and left as optional if they arise close to the next general election.
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Importantly, we shouldn't hold any of this against the school trustee candidates running for the vacant seats.
Parents need serious trustees to bring real accountability to administration, and we applaud anyone who runs understanding the task before them.
This also doesn’t mean we won’t be engaging with the Calgary Catholic by-election ourselves.
We are using this by-election as a dry-run of our project to survey all trustee candidates all across the province in the general election in October.
Our email next week will reveal the survey answers of the by-election candidates (and those who have not answered, which may be, itself, revealing).
We’ll be looking for your help - whether you live in Calgary or not - in telling us if we’re on the right track with our methods in this survey and in the questions we asked, or if you have changes to suggest.
For all of us, this serves as a useful exercise to consider what we want to see from our trustee candidates.
We share news of school boards behaving badly, not because we revel in them, but because it sharpens our thinking about what good decisions from school boards would look like.
When the Province leaves it to school boards to leave parents unrepresented for years, but then requires them to pull money out of classro