Ottawa public school trustees are about to dive into what promises to be months of tortuous budget debate with a plea from parents who want to save a summer school for their developmentally disabled kids.

The July school for about 300 of the board’s most vulnerable students is one of the programs under scrutiny as the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board tries to make up a $14.4-million budget shortfall. The program has been running for more than two decades but is not required by the province.

Parents who want to save the program were lined up ready to make their case to the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board on Tuesday night. At deadline parents were lined up to make their case after debate over controversial changes to French immersion and kindergarten went into overtime.

Six-year-old Nathalie has attended the summer school for the last two summers, her mom Françoise Slaunwhite, a member of the parent council at Clifford Bowey school, said in an interview.

Françoise Slaunwhite and her daughter Nathalie Slaunwhite at Clifford Bowey School. Parents are upset about the possible closure of a summer school for kids with developmental delays

Nathalie does not speak, but her face lights up with excitement when the van arrives to take her to school, where she has learned how to communicate using picture boards, use cutlery, walk with better balance, and socialize with other kids, says Slaunwhite.

“These kids need repetition and routine to learn and to maintain the skills they’ve learned during the school year, so in September they aren’t starting from scratch.”

Trustee Mark Fisher said he hopes the board can get creative by looking for community partners to raise money for such things as playgrounds. Changing the way the board educates students with special learning needs by integrating more of them into regular classrooms is another area being considered.

Outspoken Ottawa public school board trustee Donna Blackburn says she won’t be silenced, even after her colleagues met in-camera to discuss her behaviour.

Shirley Seward, the chair of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, said she sought legal advice and trustees met in-camera to discuss comments made by Blackburn. At issue are remarks Blackburn made in an interview with the Citizen, in which she described some fellow trustees as “whackjobs” who apparently “think there’s a f—— money tree out behind the board office and the money just comes off like leaves.”

Blackburn says she was operating on little sleep when she made the comment, and has apologized. 

She says she called several parent council chairs in her Barrhaven/Knoxdale-Merivale ward to find out if they were upset about the controversy, and was reassured by their responses, which she summarizes as “You go, girl!”

Blackburn says her constituents have larger issues in mind, from French immersion to special-education services and the cuts trustees will have to make in a difficult budget year. “The big issue is trustee Blackburn dropped the F-bomb and she called a colleague a name?” Blackburn says. 

Seward says Blackburn’s comments were unprofessional and disrespectful. “This behaviour is damaging to the District and to the Board of Trustees,” she warned Blackburn in an email last month.

Blackburn doesn’t sound too worried. “The most they could do is verbally spank me,” she says. “And I say, ‘Go ahead. You’ll just give me another media round.’ ”

Seward says the key part of the legal opinion the board received about Blackburn was to “quickly put our code of conduct in place. It’s almost finished.” A board committee working on a code of conduct meets Thursday afternoon. 

Blackburn, who is on the committee, wants to make sure that any code has reasonable penalties, so it can’t be used as a “political tool to silence and get rid of people they don’t like.”

She cites the case of Karen Round, a trustee at the Trillium Lakehead school board who resigned last fall after fellow trustees banned her from attending committee meetings. Round was initially censured for violating her board’s ethics code after she posted on Facebook the names of trustees who voted against a proposal to change the location of some meetings, and indicated which of them were running for re-election.

Seward and Blackburn also disagree on when trustees should speak to reporters. Last month, Seward sent Blackburn an email asking her not to do an interview with CBC. “This is not acceptable,” Seward wrote.

She was afraid Blackburn would make more intemperate comments, Seward explains in an interview. “The day before, she had sworn in the newspaper and said horrible things about another trustee.”

Seward says Blackburn isn’t following the board’s communication policy, which states that “the Chair (or designate, normally the Vice-Chair) is the spokesperson for the Board and is responsible for external communications regarding matters under consideration by the Board, as well as explaining Board decisions and positions.”

Trustees should be free to speak to the media about issues in their ward, Seward says. But she expects them to check with her first if they receive requests from the media, so she can determine if it’s more appropriate for her to comment. “There should be one major voice, and other people from time to time.”

And while trustees debate and disagree at public meetings, she doesn’t think they should do so in the media, because then the public would lose respect for the school board.

Seward acknowledges that other elected officials at the municipal level — city councillors, for example — speak freely outside council chambers and often disagree with each other. But Seward says that’s not “the culture” at school boards across the province.

‘Nobody can shut me up,’ says outspoken Ottawa public school board trustee Donna Blackburn. Her fellow trustees met in-camera to discuss her behaviour.

Blackburn’s response? She reports to her constituents, not to Shirley Seward. Blackburn also maintains she is following the communication policy because she speaks on behalf of herself, not the board.

“If it’s interpreted the way I interpret it, it’s no big whup.”

She adds: “Anybody can read any policy and interpret it any way. But the practice has been … between 2010 and 2014, I did umpteen interviews and the (former) chair never said boo to me. Do you think I’ve just become outspoken last week? I’ve been like this my whole life.”

Blackburn says she wants the public to find out about the important issues facing trustees. But most parents are at home doing homework with their kids, not attending board meetings, and the media rarely shows up, either. That’s why she has called reporters after board meetings to tell them what happened.

“Nobody can shut me up. Kids’ lives are at stake here. Not wanting to sound dramatic, but it’s true. Kids’ lives are at stake, kids’ health are at stake, kids’ educational outcomes are at stake. So for me, personally, I have an obligation to be making this phone call. I have an obligation because nobody was there (at board meetings). 

“The media doesn’t show up to see us in our buffoonery, then I’m making phone calls … (If) we’re making serious cuts, and people’s jobs are gone that provide day-to-day direct service to our students, then I’ll be able to sleep at night, knowing that I did my very best to make the public aware that this is going on.”

When elected officials try to craft a policy that would allow them to silence a colleague, openness and transparency – already under attack at all levels of public life – have taken a further pummelling.

But that’s where the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board is, with board chair Shirley Seward leading just such an action after Donna Blackburn, an outspoken school trustee for Barrhaven/Knoxdale-Merivale, made less-than-tactful public statements about her disagreements with colleagues.

The board is developing a code of conduct for trustees, which Seward says should be finished by March. Such codes are in place, though not routinely invoked, in the majority of school boards around the province and they allow for the censure of disagreeable trustees.

But this issue goes beyond whether or not Blackburn’s colleagues are comfortable with her style. The OCDSB is responsible for around 75,000 students and a budget of roughly $850 million. And, let’s not forget the arguments are going on against the backdrop of controversial changes to French immersion.

Taxpayers should be exceedingly skeptical of the suppression of dissent among elected officials. 

Back in 2004, the board voted in a communications policy for itself, which designated one person to speak publicly on matters of board policy. (This flows from a couple of clauses in the provincial Education Act). Over the last few years, codes of conduct have been implemented across the province.

Let’s go back 30 years, and revisit a 1986 recommendation from a subcommittee that religious counsellors shouldn’t be allowed in schools.

Trustee Dalton McGuinty, Sr. publicly opposed the policy, thundering that it was a rejection of Judeo-Christian values. “This is reverse discrimination and it’s getting to the point where those with traditional values are not welcome on this board,” argued Trustee Brian McGarry, also quite publicly.

Presumably, the board in those days was more or less functional – without a gagging communications plan.

The recent moves toward muzzling are part of a larger overall clampdown on communications by public institutions, sort of a “loose lips sink ships” philosophy seeping down to even the lowest level of government.

It does a tremendous disservice to Ottawans who have entrusted officials to do what’s best for their children. A veneer of unanimity may make life easier for trustees, but it’s dishonest. If there is disagreement, the public deserves to know, in full, about those debates.

Seward believes people won’t respect the board if trustees air their grievances through the media.

Quite the opposite. Respect will be lost by choosing suppression of dissent over good policy born of serious – and open – public debate.

Related

• Renegade school board trustee Donna Blackburn says she won't be silenced

If parents say their six-year-old son glimpsed pornography on a tablet at school, the big question is maybe not how or whether the kid actually saw what he says he saw, but why kids are on computers in school at that age.

The school says it was a workout video, while the child – through his parents – says he was watching a sexual encounter between two women. The parents are upset, believing this material managed to slip through the school’s filters. 

But let’s back this up for a second.

What is the pedagogical value of students having tablets in class when they’re six? According to Brenda Wilson, with the Ottawa Catholic School Board, kids are already arriving at school with solid technology skills. Computers are used, in some fashion, for what sounds like practically everything. Even four-year-olds are “quite versed in using technology,” says Wilson.

The kids (and educators) might just be right. And us old-fashioned types might not be.

The days of overhead projectors likely are over. Gone, probably, is creating lines with permanent marker on blackboards (though even in my day they were green) for writing lessons. Gone, perhaps, is smacking chalk dust out of brushes for fun.

To hear people tell it, this is a good thing. Because, when you think about it, gone too are the days when teachers paddled kids and made them write lines.

It turns out that there is value to tech in classrooms, though, as with all things, it’s contingent on how it’s used. Aimless browsing, says Carleton University Prof. Stefania Maggi, might not be that helpful, but solving problems with technology is.

“There’s not a place anymore for us to tell kids what we know; it’s more about giving them the skills to become good researchers,” Maggi says.

But it’s hard not to wonder, in this age of increased childhood obesity, for example, mightn’t kids be better off doing something other than staring at a tablet screen? (Wilson notes that students likely aren’t sitting slouched over their tablets at recess, at least).

“There is no digital technology that can provide children with as rich a learning experience as their own interaction with the world around them,” says Jason Nolan, a professor in the school of early childhood studies at Ryerson University.

So there’s a larger issue of balance: Tech replacing activity in the classroom is bad, but if it’s complementary, then it’s a good thing. “The positive aspect of a child having their own tablet is that they are in charge of their learning in a sense,” says Maggi.

What’s key – and key for schools to know – is that there isn’t a universal policy of what’s good for kids, Nolan says.

Kids are going to be using this tech for work, study and in their personal lives, so they may as well learn how to use it early. It also can be exceptionally useful for children with learning disabilities, and bring them into the larger school community.

Wilson says there are many uses, everything from video editing to group learning to language translation for kids who don’t speak English.

“The vision of coming in and having everybody on an iPad … with their heads down working by themselves, like, it just doesn’t happen that way,” she says.

But for all the value and opportunity tech offers, there might still be a place for some tough love on skills that need to be learned. So perhaps there’s room for skepticism.

It’s about balance. Schools have clearly thought this process through. It’s clear that tech – pervasive as it is – has taken its seat in the modern classroom. Even if the odd unseemly item does slip through the filters.

tdawson@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/tylerrdawson

Tyler Dawson is deputy editorial pages editor of the Ottawa Citizen.

Sarah Mindry was astounded when she discovered this week that her three-year-old son won’t be able to start kindergarten at Elgin Street Public, the neighbourhood school where he is already registered.

To ease overcrowding at the small downtown school, trustees at the school board decided that kindergarten children will be moved to Centennial Public School next fall.

Parents at Elgin Street are divided on the solution to overcrowding at the school, which has two portables in the yard and no space for more pupils. 

But Mindry and other parents say they feel blindsided by the solution adopted by the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board because it runs counter to what staff recommended and was made so quickly it was difficult to lobby against.

Trustees recommended the kindergarten transfer while sitting as a committee on Monday night, then approved it at Tuesday night’s board meeting. Usually there is a week between meetings, but a committee meeting was cancelled last week because of a snowstorm.

Mindry said she attended three public meetings about overcrowding at Elgin Street Public School, but transferring kindergarten students was never presented as a serious option. Discussion centred on the staff proposal to move the entire English program to Centennial and make Elgin Street School an all-French immersion school. 

However, trustees appeared to be swayed by a group of Elgin Street parents who appeared before them Monday night to argue, among other things, that the school’s multicultural flavour would be lost if it drops the English program, which tends to be more popular among immigrants.

The controversy illustrates a number of issues: the impossibility of pleasing all parents, the impact of the popular French-immersion program on school enrolments, and the challenge of consulting with parents who don’t yet have children in school.

Mindry, who has three children, says the change will create a morning drop-off nightmare. She’ll walk one son to junior kindergarten at Centennial School, another son to senior kindergarten at Elgin Street school (the kindergarten switch is being phased in over two years), then drop her toddler daughter at daycare before walking to work herself. She estimates the process will take her 90 minutes.

Like an increasing number of young families, Mindry chose to live downtown because she likes the atmosphere and ability to walk to school, shops and work. But the trend can have drastic consequences for small schools like Elgin Street Public, where even a small enrolment increase is hard to accommodate.

The root of the problem is also the increasing popularity of French immersion, said one parent at Monday’s meeting. The English program at Elgin Street School is shrinking, with small or split classes, while the French-immersion classrooms are stuffed. This year, for example, there are only seven students enrolled in English SK, and 48 in French immersion SK.

Staff argued that consolidating English at Centennial will improve the program.

Miriam Padolsky, whose son starts JK next year, said she understands something must be done, but three and four-year-olds shouldn’t bear the burden. “These are the most vulnerable students, who are being asked to move twice — once away from their neighbourhood school, and then again back to the school in Grade 1,” she said in a letter to trustees. “This will be highly disruptive and difficult for them.”

Parents on both sides of the dispute say the school board should do a wider study of all schools in Central Ottawa and Ottawa East. 

Trustee Donna Blackburn says she hopes the disagreement doesn’t pit parents against each other at the school. “You never want to see a school divided, and parents talking against each other. It’s heartbreaking.”

jmiller@ottawacitizen.com

twitter.com/JacquieAMiller

You can go watch trustees at Ottawa’s English public school board debate a code of conduct they’ll use to discipline each other, but if you want to know in advance what they’ll talk about, you have to ask.

The board posted a notice that its “ad-hoc working committee” on the code, partly aimed at dissident Barrhaven trustee Donna Blackburn, is meeting Wednesday afternoon. But the committee has no agenda, and no draft of the proposal it’ll consider.

This is not a deliberate attempt to hide anything, said Michèle Giroux, the board’s executive officer of corporate services.

“It’s not our practice to post ad-hoc committee agendas on the website. It’s not that they aren’t open,” she said, it’s just that they’re usually of negligible interest outside the board office. This one, though, will recommend language for a code trustees can use to discipline each other, and that implicates Blackburn and other trustees. Including chair Shirley Seward, because she and Blackburn are at war.

It’s been through multiple iterations and the group is closing in on a final draft. Because this committee’s of unusual interest to some people, board staff made the call to post the fact that the group is meeting, Giroux said.

Having done that, the board staff also made the call to not post the committee’s agenda or the latest draft of the code of conduct it’ll consider, she said. They had those, and sent them to me when I asked.

“There was no intent in trying to withhold it, but we also weren’t sure that we wanted to start a practice (of releasing ad-hoc committee agendas),” Giroux said. Sometimes those committees meet frequently or on short notice.

Fair enough. But the result in this case is awkward. Here’s a meeting about how the people who run an $850-million public institution behave, and you can go watch it, but you can’t know just what they’re going to talk about.

The details of the code matter because there’s a decent chance it’ll be used this term.

Blackburn’s not a perfect champion for open dissent. In one interview (with me) that got the board’s attention, she called some fellow trustees “f—–g whackjobs” in a disagreement over funding an extended-hours program. This is not politics at its best.

But codes of conduct for elected officials are tricky, especially when they go beyond basic corporate ethics. “We wish you wouldn’t say that” and “We’re going to punish you for saying that” are very different things.

Imagine how badly rules about politeness could be abused. Just rejecting a staff recommendation could be seen as disrespectful, depending on the circumstances. And what if it’s really bad work? If a trustee really thinks a policy proposal is lazy or self-serving, shouldn’t he or she be able to say so?

The first stage of discipline under the Ottawa board’s proposed code is an informal meeting between the impugned trustee and the chair of the board. The next step is a formal review, possibly led by an outside investigator, also “conducted in private.”

Formal sanctions have to be voted on publicly. But even that doesn’t have to mean openness.

A trustee in the Trillium Lakelands board west of Peterborough quit last year after her fellow trustees used their code of conduct to bar her from all committee meetings for the whole term. Karen Round, a former chair, could still show up to full board meetings but not to the ones where the real work happens.

What had Round done? It’s a secret. The meeting where she committed her offence was itself in camera.

When she resigned because she couldn’t represent her constituents, the board decided to skip a byelection and appointed a replacement, who’ll serve almost a whole term. Kawartha Lakes voters got a representative they didn’t choose and nobody has to defend it.

Another trustee, in northern Ontario’s Rainbow district, found himself excluded from his board’s committees after repeatedly talking about board business in public. This wasn’t a code-of-conduct matter (they just didn’t vote to put him on any of the committees on which he wanted to serve after he was re-elected in 2014). Rainbow board trustees didn’t like Larry Killens, his constituents re-elected him, and the other trustees cut him off at the knees.

Ottawa trustees are giving themselves a dangerous tool. They should be doing everything possible to quell doubts about how they’ll use it.

dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely

More than 950 Ottawa intermediate and secondary school students have been suspended because their immunization records aren’t up to date.

The latest wave of suspensions issued on Tuesday by Ottawa Public Health is for students at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board. Phones at the Public Health department were ringing off the hook as parents tried to update their children’s vaccination information.

More than 500 calls had been received by Wednesday morning from parents of suspended students, said spokesperson Donna Casey. She said Public Health has extra staff working the phones, and the department is doing its best to get children back in school as soon as possible. Parents of suspended students had been sent two warning letters over the course of the past six weeks or so, she said, with the second warning letter specifying the date of suspension.

It’s part of a Public Health campaign to make sure the immunization records of all 150,000 elementary and secondary students in Ottawa are up to date.

To attend school in Ontario, children must be vaccinated against nine diseases unless they have a valid exemption. Parents must provide information about vaccinations when they register kids in kindergarten, and they are supposed to report all subsequent vaccinations to the Public Heath department.

But many Ottawa parents failed to report all the vaccinations, and in some cases their school-aged children have not had them.

Public Health officials say up-to-date information is crucial to prevent outbreaks of infectious diseases such as measles.

Another wave of suspensions is planned for March 8, said Casey. Those will be the final suspensions issued in public schools in Ottawa. Next, the department will turn its attention to private schools, she said.

As of October 2015, the immunization records of 50,000 children in Ottawa were incomplete. Public Health sent warning notices from October 2015 to January 2016, according to department statistics.

Suspensions for students whose records are incomplete are staggered. In total, from Dec. 15, 2015 to March 1, Public Health issued suspensions to approximately 7,350 students at all four local school boards. 

Information for parents

How to contact Ottawa Public Health: Parents who receive a letter requesting immunization information can contact Ottawa Public Health by phone at 613-580-6744 or submit immunization information online, by fax (613-580-9660), by mail or by the ImmunizeCA app.

More information: parentinginottawa.ca/immunization has more details on how to submit a child’s immunization information.

jmiller@ottawacitizen.com

Twitter.com/JacquieAMiller

Maria Gagnon is only in Grade 5, but her assessment of how some parents were behaving at Elgin Street Public School on Tuesday night was pretty sharp.

Gagnon tagged along with her mom to a meeting at the school, where she watched the adults trade angry accusations over the issue of which students will have to leave the overcrowded downtown school. 

“Would you like my opinion?” Gagnon asked solemnly in the hallway outside the meeting. “I think this issue has ripped the community apart. The truth is, we have to join together and work as a team. We have to co-operate to make a better school.”

An apt message for some of the 50-odd parents at the meeting, which featured people sniping at each other and one woman bursting into tears.

 Two camps have emerged over the best solution to crowding at the school, which already has two portables in the yard and no space for the number of students expected to enrol in the fall.

Some parents support sending Elgin Street’s kindergarten students to Centennial Public School, about two kilometres away on Gloucester Street near Bay Street, an option already approved by the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board. Other parents are hoping trustees will reverse that decision and adopt the staff recommendation, which is to move students in Elgin’s English program to Centennial instead. 

“There is not going to be a situation where everybody is happy,” warned superintendent Dorothy Baker, who answered questions and helped keep the peace. Strong opinions are best expressed, not bottled up, she suggested. “It’s important all voices be heard or it happens in the community, in the (school) yard, that anger does come up.” 

Restraint wasn’t a problem Tuesday. Some parents accused the school council of misleading trustees by suggesting everyone supports the kindergartners-must-move option. The council was called a clique, its members biased and underhanded, with allegations of “cronyism” on behalf of the English program students, keeping reports “underground” and allegedly violating various constitutional laws. 

“We are volunteers,” said Randy Reynoso, co-chair of the council. He said they worked hard, did the best they could and never pretended to speak for everyone.

One woman burst into tears, saying she had joined the council to help out with things like pizza day, but now feels afraid of some parents she encounters in the schoolyard. “Come to the meetings and help us, please. Don’t attack us. You’re attacking me. Me!” she sobbed before fleeing briefly into the hallway.

That didn’t faze another parent who identified himself as a former teacher. “It’s fine for one person to go out and cry about it. I don’t care about that,” he spat.

Another woman launched an extended tirade at the school principal for the offence of emailing a movie-night poster to parents without noticing it contained a reference implying that the English program was moving out of Elgin. “This poster came from her!” she yelled, pointing at the principal. “It’s her responsibility to vet it! This is a big mistake!”

When another parent suggested she tone it down, the woman replied: “I’m not being hurtful! My kids’ education is being impacted!”

There were calmer and conciliatory voices, too. And the emotion is understandable. The changes mean some parents will have children in two different schools, or will no longer be able to walk to the neighbourhood school. “Parents are very divided now,” said parent Angeleen Nayak. “It’s very close to home. It’s affecting people’s lives and their families.” 

One dad said he moved to Ottawa after being stationed at Petawawa, and fears his three-year-old son hardly knows him. “Now I worry he won’t be in the same school as his sister.”

Attention turns now to the March 29 school board meeting, where a motion to reconsider the decision made on Elgin Street PS will be on the floor.

The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, seeking the power to discipline unruly members, is on the verge of adopting a policy that could stifle legitimate debate. 

Trustee Donna Blackburn’s outspokenness – if that’s the appropriate term for calling colleagues “whackjobs” in an interview – has landed her in a tub of trouble. Her colleagues are clearly unimpressed with her level of discourse, and are casting about for a way to handle the behavioural bull in their china shop. Their proposed solution: a tough code of conduct with a harshly punitive clause.

Board chair Shirley Seward says the code of conduct has been in the works for a long time, to bring Ottawa in line with other school boards in the province (a code is not a provincial requirement.) Then Blackburn provoked her colleagues, so Seward sought a legal opinion on what to do. The board is now speeding toward adopting its conduct code. 

Codes of conduct aren’t unusual in organizations, private or public. Aside from laying out expectations, they provide a standard for censuring egregious behaviour. It’s understandable that trustees – toiling not for glory or very much money but to improve their communities – want everything to tootle along smoothly. 

There have been disagreements and hurt feelings over the years among board members: People behave differently and some are more thin-skinned than others. 

But the solution the board is settling on goes beyond publicly disapproving of insults or reinforcing the merits of civil behaviour. The code of conduct that will be debated by committee of the whole on March 22 gives trustees the power to indefinitely ban colleagues from sitting on committees, where much of the actual work of running a school board gets done. There is the very real risk that it’ll be used to squelch dissenting views.

The board already has a communications policy, adopted in 2004, that designates the board chair to speak for it (linked, by the way, to the provincial Education Act.) This policy already encourages homogeneity among trustees. 

Rushing into a tough conduct code on the heels of one trustee ruffling feathers looks like a further attempt to bring everyone into line. This is not acceptable for a group with power over an $850-million budget and the education of 75,000 students. 

If Blackburn – or anyone else – were suspended from committees for making waves, who would be the elected school board rep working for the people and students of her ward?

One reason we’re concerned is because of what’s happened elsewhere: On the Trillium Lakelands board, west of Peterborough, trustee Karen Round was suspended from committees by her colleagues, and subsequently resigned, since she was unable to represent her constituents. The board then appointed a representative for her ward, sidestepping the democratic unpleasantness of having constituents from that area choose a new trustee.

Trustees are given a mandate by voters. It shouldn’t be up to their colleagues to effectively revoke that mandate for bad behaviour; unless there’s criminal behaviour, it’s up to constituents to vote a trustee out. So while it’s understandable that school board members want an easier working environment, it must never come at the price of snuffing out dissent. 

That’s our fear here. The board should tone down the severity of punishment it is contemplating. 

Feedback: letters@ottawacitizen.com

A summer school for severely disabled kids should not be cut, trustees at Ottawa’s public school board recommended Tuesday.

The 17-day summer programs run at Clifford Bowey and Crystal Bay schools are for children and teens with a mental age of about 18 to 24 months. Parents who lobbied the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board says their children need the routine of summer school so they don’t regress, and their severe disabilities make it hard to place them in summer camps.

Trustees made the recommendation to save the summer school while sitting as a committee of the whole on Tuesday’s night, and since it was almost unanimous it seems likely they’ll make the decision final when the final vote is taken March 29.

Tuesday’s debate is an illustration of just how hard it will be for the board to make up an estimated $10-million shortfall as budget discussions begin. 

Several trustees said they didn’t want to cut a program that helps the board’s most vulnerable students.

“We have an obligation to make sure we look after these children’s needs,” said trustee Christine Boothby, who proposed the motion to continue the summer school.

The summer school costs about $400,000 a year, and is not required by the province. The board has been using a surplus to fund such extra programs, but the reserve fund is now low, and the province has warned trustees that they must balance the books.

Parent Michel Barbeau said his 14-year-old daughter Marie-Hélène has benefitted tremendously from the summer school at Clifford Bowey. 

The board provides extra funding for top academic students in the International Baccalaureate program, for arts students at Canterbury High School, for students in high performance athletics and for high school students to pick up credits during the summer, he told trustees. Is the learning potential of developmentally delayed students any less valuable? he wondered.

Trustee Trustee Donna Blackburn, who voted against the motion, said it was unfair to vote to spare the summer school after “16 minutes of discussion” because the board is scheduled to debate all the programs that might be cut as part of budget discussions in May or June. Blackburn, in an interview after the meeting, said she believes the summer program is valuable, but “cuts have to be fair, even and balanced. There’s no group that is sacred.”

Other children are also vulnerable, she notes, such as a suicidal teen who might be affected if a social worker ends up being cut.

The board will have to cut some teachers in 2016-17, warn staff, although the exact number is in flux. The budget process is a “puzzle,” said Mike Carson, the board’s chief financial advisor, since teacher staffing decisions have to be made before the board finds out how much money the province will provide in grants.

In the meantime, trustees recommended cutting 25 elementary teachers, including four ESL teachers and four learning support teachers who help students with learning disabilities or other special needs; nine secondary teachers; and four principals and vice-principals. 

There isn’t much leeway in where cuts can be made because about 60 per cent of the board’s $850-million budget is academic salaries. And most of the teaching positions are not discretionary because of provincial limits on class sizes and teacher contracts.

Raymonde Barbeau credits Clifford Bowey Public School with “taming” her daughter, a dark-haired dynamo who can be quite a handful.

Marie-Helene is 14 and has severe developmental delays and autism. She doesn’t speak, and her behaviour used to make it difficult to take her anywhere, says her mom. “It was like she had ants in her pants, she’d be all over the place.” Marie-Helene might run around at family gatherings and remove straws from drinking cans, for example, or have meltdowns.

Today, Marie-Helene holds the hands of her teacher, gently bouncing on a giant ball. Raymonde calls the progress teachers at Clifford Bowey have made with her daughter since she enrolled a decade ago nothing short of miraculous. Marie-Helene can now sit still and listen to instructions.

The 104 students at Clifford Bowey range in age from four to 21, but all have a mental age of around 18 months to two years. Most can’t speak, and communicate by pointing to pictures depicting basic needs — stop, look, like, want, eat — or pushing buttons on voice-activated tablets.

Some students are deaf, blind or medically fragile, prone to seizures or fed through tubes. Most have poor co-ordination, and kids in wheelchairs and giant trikes roam the hallways of the school on Kitchener Avenue.

Educational Assistant Marcy Stickle works with, from left, Christian, Marco and Steven.

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It’s a cheerful place, where teachers find lots of reasons to laugh and celebrate every success, whether it’s a boy who has learned to bring a spoon to his lips and eat by himself, or a 20-year-old woman who waves her whole body in delight and sings along to her favourite Abba song. “You are a dancing queen!” yells Anni, 20, in delight to a visitor in her classroom.

The school has loads of special facilities, from touchable murals lining the hallways to an eerie sensory room that offers calming lights and textures. Students use a public swimming pool next door several times a week.

Françoise Slaunwhite says her six-year-old daughter Nathalie used to be terrified of water. “She would literally almost go into shock. Now she’s doing the doggie paddle.”

Nathalie Slaunwhite, 6, with her mom Françoise Slaunwhite at the school library, which is stocked with lots of picture books.

At the school’s greenhouse, children plants seeds and watch them grow. They especially love digging their hands through the dirt, laughs educational assistant Marcy Stickle, who proudly shows off rows of spider plants in plastic pots. “Kids find it very calming in here.” 

An industrial kitchen provides opportunities to learn some cooking and cleanup skills, and in the recycling room students sort plastic milk bags to be sent to a charity that makes mats out of them for people in developing countries.

Educational assistant Dawn Glover shows off the recycling and composting area the students use.

Weekly field trips to malls, libraries, museums and restaurants give students a chance to practise life skills like how to behave in public places.

“Our goal is to make them as self-sufficient as possible,” says principal Laurie Kavanagh, although most students need constant supervision and have little sense of personal safety. The doors at the school have alarms in case anyone wanders off.

Karen communicates by tapping pictures on an iPad.

Parents love the school, and mounted a ferocious lobby campaign against a school board proposal to eliminate a 17-day summer school at Clifford Bowey and Crystal Bay, a similar school in the east end of the city.

The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board is facing a budget shortfall of $10 million, and looking for things it can cut. The summer program costs about $400,000 a year, and is not funded by the province.

The summer school gives kids like Marie-Helene and Nathalie a chance to continue their routine and specialized education, ensuring they don’t regress, say their parents. They appear to have won the argument. After listening to parents on Tuesday, trustees recommended saving the summer program, rejecting staff advice to cut all or part of it and bypassing the budget debates scheduled for May and June when they’ll consider other programs that could be reduced or eliminated.

A final decision will be made March 29.

It’s an example of just how difficult and divisive the budget trimming will be. Something has to be cut, whether it’s ESL and learning support teachers, the board’s outdoor education centres, or continuing education classes for adults, all of which have been singled out by staff as possibilities.

Which children are most deserving? Parents of disabled children at Clifford Bowey have pointed to other programs that receive optional funding, from the international baccalaureate program for top academic students to Canterbury High School for the arts, programs for high-performance athletes, and summer school for high school kids who need to pick up credits. As budget debates continue, no doubt the parents of kids who benefit from those programs will be heard, too.

From left, parents Raymonde Barbeau and Francoise Slaunwhite with principal Laurie Kavanagh in front of one of the touchable murals that line the school hallway.

The kids mingling at Elgin Street Public School are as diverse as the neighbourhood from which they are drawn: newcomers just learning English share the playground with the children of prosperous civil servants.

That rich cultural, social and economic mix will be destroyed if the downtown school is turned into a centre for French-immersion students, warn parents in a brief to the school board. Students in the English program are more likely to be from immigrant and disadvantaged families. They are a welcome source of cultures and ideas, and should not be “pushed out of their neighbourhood school,” says the brief.

And the parents who wrote the brief? Their own children are enrolled in French immersion. 

It’s one of the intriguing currents running through the lively debate about how to solve overcrowding at the school. Many of the parents leading the fight to save the English program don’t use it, but value the diversity it brings.

“This is a heterogeneous community and I want to see that reflected in the local school,” says Anna Feininger, whose son is in the English program. “That’s a big part of school, learning how to be with one another, all sorts of people. These are the kids they play with at the weekends in the park … It’s not just French with French, and English with English. Everybody mixes and matches.”

The problem is surging enrolment at the school. Elgin Street PS is stuffed and there’s no space to expand. Some students have to be moved about two kilometres across Centretown to Centennial Public School on Gloucester Street. A nasty battle has erupted between parents who favour having the English program students leave Elgin Street, and those who want to ship out the kindergarten kids.

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Public meetings have featured parents breaking into tears and yelling at each other. “The way people are treating one another is really embarrassing,” says Feininger. “I don’t think people should belittle one another this way. We’re adults. It’s supposed to be anti-bullying in the school, but that’s what’s going on here.

“All of us are parents and we want the best for our children.”

Parent Malaka Hendela says she’s uncomfortable dropping her kindergarten son off at school these days because some parents are so angry. “It’s a really divided school. It’s hard to be a new parent in the school because you don’t feel welcome. I never expected this would be the first year of school for my little boy.”

The debate goes beyond which set of parents will be inconvenienced, although that’s certainly a big part of it. Under either proposal, parents face the prospect of having their children enrolled in different schools or being bused rather than walking. 

There are also whispers of class, with one parent who appeared before trustees suggesting the French immersion program was “elitist” and moving the English program kids would be treating them like “second-class citizens.”

That notion infuriates Hendela, a policy analyst, who says moving the English program students is the most logical solution. She did a statistical analysis of enrolment and classroom configurations which found that moving the kindergarten children was not the best way to resolve crowding at Elgin Street, and would result in more split classes and some large class sizes.

A key factor is also the exploding popularity of French immersion education in this government town where bilingualism is seen as a ticket to success.

Nearly 70 per cent of senior kindergarten students in the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board enrol in French immersion. At some schools like Elgin Street PS that offer both programs, the number of students in the English stream is tiny, making it more difficult to organize classes.

School board staff recommended sending the children in Elgin Street’s English program to Centennial, where they would be consolidated with the English program there. 

Trustees rejected that idea and decided to send the kindergarten kids to Centennial instead. That enraged some parents who say that idea was never presented as a serious option during public meetings. Why should the youngest kids be disrupted? they wonder. It won’t be as difficult for them because they aren’t part of the school community yet, is the rejoinder from the other side.

Parent Steve Jaltema, who has a two-year-old son, says the public consultation wasn’t done properly and the option the board chose was the worst of the two. The broader issue, he maintains, is that municipal planners have not provided the services needed as more people move into the city core.

Everyone values a community school, said Anatole Papadopoulos, who has a son heading to kindergarten next year. “But I have a little bit of a problem with the idea that it’s a neighbourhood school when the smallest children are being shipped across town.”

The trustee for the ward, Erica Braunovan, says the issue has been divisive and difficult, with good arguments on all sides. However, she was swayed by need to maintain the English program at Elgin, because if it is removed, it will probably never be restored at the school. Moving the kindergarteners seemed the best temporary solution until a wider study is done about schools in the Centretown area, she said.

The issue comes back to the school board on March 29, when trustees will decide whether to reconsider their decision.

Amir Attaran says it took a few minutes of legal research and a quick Google search to discover that the public school board’s solution to overcrowding at Elgin Street Public School was illegal.

What remains a mystery to the University of Ottawa law professor is how that detail escaped the notice of staff and trustees at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board and left parents feuding over which students will have to leave the downtown school in September.

Some parents say the school board should bear part of the blame for all the bad feelings because it bungled the public consultations, then quickly approved a solution that violates provincial law.

Trustees voted in February to temporarily send the kindergarten students at Elgin across Centretown to Centennial Public School. Everything is now up in the air, though, because last week Attaran informed the board that the Ontario Education Act requires all elementary schools to offer full-day kindergarten. 

“It’s just preposterous that they didn’t know this,” says Attaran, whose three-year-old daughter is eligible to attend Elgin next fall.

The legal changes associated with the introduction of full-day kindergarten were not obscure, he maintains. Attaran also dug up, with a quick Internet search, a 2014 memo from Ontario’s deputy minister of education to school boards that clarifies the changes.

“Full-day kindergarten is in the news day after day, the laws have been amended and are on the e-law website, you have a lawyer who you are paying a pretty penny to … and you’ve been written to by the deputy minister. What do you want? An aircraft to sky-write it above the (school board) headquarters?

“If a professor of health law could find this in minutes, how did it escape their attention?”

Attaran fears what he brands as a lack of due diligence might extend beyond Elgin Street Public School. “When we are speaking of a board that has a budget of nearly a billion dollars, if an illegal decision can slip past, one as conspicuously illegal as this, how many other things are slipping past that don’t have a proper legal vetting where there could be significant legal liabilities? That’s my worry.”

Others are more understanding, but perplexed. 

“The fact that they didn’t know about this is a little disconcerting,” says Malaka Hendela, whose son is in junior kindergarten at Elgin. She hopes the board doesn’t simply try to find a way to “get around the law” to proceed with plans to move the kindergarten children.

Parent Malaka Hendela says she was surprised that the school board didn’t know about changes to the Education Act that governs school boards across Ontario.

It was an unfortunate oversight, said board chair Shirley Seward. “It’s very rare that this kind of thing happens. It’s simply human error and nothing more than that.”

The board had moved kindergarten students temporarily in the past to accommodate construction or overcrowding. Staff and trustees failed to notice the education act amendments.

Mistakes happen, and staff should not be “thrown under the bus” for them, said trustee Donna Blackburn. “I’ve been a trustee for six years. This has never happened. … Everybody calm down.”

The board does not have a staff lawyer, but instead has retainers with several Ottawa law firms whose lawyers provide advice if staff or trustees think it’s required. That’s not unusual among school boards, which do not routinely seek legal advice on “governance issues” such as motions before the board, said Michael Barrett, the president of the organization representing Ontario public school boards. He’s only aware of a few large school boards in the Toronto area that have staff lawyers.

No one at the Ottawa board sought a legal opinion on the motion brought forward in February by trustee Erica Braunovan to move the kindergarten children — counter to advice from board staff, who suggested the students in the English program should move to Centennial instead.

Trustees recommended the kindergarten option while sitting as a committee on a Monday and finalized it one day later. There is usually a week between committee and board meetings, but a snowstorm forced the cancellation of one meeting, so the schedule was condensed.

Parents of younger children were outraged, saying moving kindergartners was never presented as a serious option during public meetings. They quickly organized a lobby campaign, followed by several public meetings during which were parents yelling at each other and breaking down in tears.

Bad feelings have escalated to where some parents say they fear being insulted or shunned in the schoolyard, a Grade 5 student circulated a petition at recess, and there is hand-wringing from all quarters about how the acrimony has divided the school community.

Trustee Shawn Menard said he’s grateful to Attaran for raising the legal issue, and agrees the board should be expected to stay on top of changes to laws and regulations.

He expects staff will bring forward suggestions on how to improve decision-making and drafting of motions. 

However, Menard objects to calling the decision “illegal” because the board may seek an exemption from the education act to allow the kindergarten children to be moved.

However, that looks increasingly unlikely. In a memo posted on the board website Friday, board staff said the ministry has never been asked for an exemption, would probably request a “detailed supporting rationale,” and has given no indication of how long it would take to make a decision. Time is of the essence, because school staffing must be put in place.

Staff, meanwhile, recommend that trustees abandon the idea of moving kindergarten students and send the English program children to Centennial as they originally suggested. Trustees consider the issue April 5.

Parent Shaun Simms says his main concern is the “botched consultation process” that blindsided parents with an unexpected decision. 

 “The board staff recommended an option, and they consulted on that. The trustees went against that option at their own risk. As you can see, this is what happens when you don’t follow the expert advice of board staff.”

He said the school board is partly to blame for dissension among parents. “I’m really saddened it’s come to this. The lack of knowledge and the lack of information on behalf of the local trustees has created these different camps within the parent community, and pitted people against each other, when it was completely unnecessary and unhelpful.”

jmiller@ottawacitizen.com

twitter.com/JacquieAMiller

Ottawa’s public school board appears poised to drop its legally questionable plan of moving kindergarten students out of Elgin Street Public School to solve overcrowding there.

The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board voted in favour of that solution in February, only to be informed by a University of Ottawa law professor whose daughter is going into kindergarten that it’s illegal. The Ontario Education Act requires all elementary schools to offer full-day kindergarten.

Parents have been feuding over which children will have to leave the school in September: the kindergarteners, or students in the English program, which was the option recommended by staff. Now it appears the fighting was all for naught because the board doesn’t have much legal choice in the matter. 

The trustee for the ward, Erica Braunovan, said she’ll propose a motion at Tuesday’s board meeting that the English program move to Centennial Public School instead.

A few days ago, some trustees were hoping the Ministry of Education would grant an exemption to allow kindergarten to be eliminated from Elgin Street PS. 

That does not appear likely, at least in time for September, said Braunovan.

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The ministry has never granted an exception, and would ask for a lot of evidence and time to consider such a request, school board staff warned in a memo. There’s no time to spare. Staffing must be put in place at Elgin Street PS and parents informed about which school their children will attend in the fall.

Braunovan had initially proposed the motion to move the kindergarteners, saying it would be the best temporary solution until a wider study of schools in Centretown can be conducted. 

In a Facebook posting, Braunovan explained that the education ministry has not developed a “process for requesting, reviewing or granting exemptions to the less than two-year-old law requiring kindergarten at every elementary school. As such, there are no guidelines in place for how long it would take to determine whether the kindergarten program can be moved from Elgin Street to Centennial. A decision cannot be postponed any longer though as overcrowding must be addressed before September.”

Amir Attaran, the professor who pointed out the legal problem, was aghast at Braunovan’s post. “It is rather lacking in taste, intelligence and accountability that she blames the ministry for not giving an exemption, and not her own failure of moving kindergarten when that was illegal.

“Braunovan should be apologizing for her error, rather than seeking to deflect blame upon the ministry.”

Braunovan said that was not her intention. “I feel awful,” she said in an interview. “This has been very divisive in the community, and I take full responsibility for the part I’ve played in it.”  

She and board chair Shirley Seward acknowledge that both trustees and staff failed to notice the Education Act requirement, but said such errors don’t occur often.

Seward said the important thing now is to move on from the controversy and try to heal the rifts among parents at Elgin Street PS.

The York Catholic District School Board in southern Ontario was caught in a similar bind in 2014 when trustees proposed eliminating kindergarten from an elementary school, only to face parent protests and the threat of legal action. The board sought a legal opinion, concluded it had to offer kindergarten, and changed course. 

William Reid, the Aurora, Ont. lawyer who helped the parents, said in an interview that he expects the education ministry would not grant an exemption for one small school in Ottawa, because any ruling might have implications for boards across the province.

“Assuming the vote goes as it appears it will on Tuesday, I am glad we’ve gotten to the best outcome for students and the schools involved,” says parent Anatole Papadopoulos, who opposed moving the kindergarten students. “But it’s a real shame that it was such a difficult, ugly route to get to this point.

“I hope that after Tuesday everyone can put their full energies into overcoming all the divisiveness generated by the process and the mistakes that were made and into supporting a downtown (school) review.”

jmiller@ottawacitizen.com

twitter.com/JacquieAMiller

After weeks of parents’ bickering, the conclusion to the debate over how to solve overcrowding at Elgin Street Public School came to an emotional conclusion Tuesday.

Trustees voted to send students in the English program at the downtown school across Centretown to Centennial Public School. They had little choice after discovering that the alternative solution they had approved in February violated the provincial law that governs school boards.

The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board had voted to send Elgin’s kindergarten students to Centennial, a temporary solution that was seen as less disruptive and less permanent than moving the English program. 

But they were forced to reconsider that decision after the parent of a soon-to-be kindergarten student pointed out that the Education Act requires elementary schools to offer full-day kindergarten.

Trustees concluded there was no time — and perhaps no likelihood, either — for the province to grant an exemption from the law. 

Parents on both sides of the issue and three children made last-minute pleas to trustees. The issue fiercely divided parents.

Parents from both camps and some trustees say they were dismayed by the animosity churned up by the debate over which students should leave the school. Some parents yelled and burst into tears at public meetings, while others said they felt uncomfortable in the schoolyard because of all the bitterness.

“I’m sorry … the community has been so divided,” said ward trustee Erica Braunovan at Tuesday night’s meeting. She said the solution was not equitable but trustees had little choice and she hoped parents could “find a way to forgive people who have said things that hurt us” and move forward as adults.

Parent Malaka Hendela had said that “sadly it will damage our community and impact kids no matter what the outcome.”

She said the board created the mess by not offering enough French immersion programs to meet the demand in the city core. When the English program students leave in September, Elgin Street school will become a centre for French immersion.

In an interview, Parent Amanda Potts said she has friends on both sides of the issue, and parents at the school are “thoughtful and loving.

“It’s because the community is so valuable that people feel so deeply. We are ready for the process of healing.”

French immersion has slowly come to dominate the city’s largest English-language school board, raising questions — surely — about its raison d’être.

Enrolment figures from October 2015 show that, for the first time in the history of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, there were more students enrolled in early French immersion at the elementary level (22,517) than in the English program (21,142).

It is a dramatic shift from the comparable numbers in 2007, when the English program had 27,647 students and so-called EFI had 15,266.

More importantly, the trend over at least 10 years is the same: every year, enrolment in the English program slips and EFI grows. Where will it end? Are we headed to a situation where the main English public board in the city will deliver the bulk of its elementary education in another language?

Will English, in effect, become a “specialty” program?

“Possibly,” responded Pino Buffone, the board’s superintendent of curriculum. “That’s possible, depending on the interests of our parents and guardians.”

Though our publicly-funded boards are, in theory, divided on religious and language lines, one wonders how much the distinction means anymore when the main English board is delivering so much of its elementary program in French.

“We’ve always celebrated a bilingual culture. In a sense, yes, I think that is our future, but I think it’s also been our past,” Buffone said Thursday.

Trustee Mark Fisher is concerned the board doesn’t have a complete understanding of what these long-term trends mean for parents and the board’s 71,000 students.

“I think we need to have a better conversation about how this city is changing and transforming and what that means for our neighbourhoods.”

These conflicts are not brand new. It has long been the case that the board cannot run full English and French-immersion programs (dual-tracks) in every neighbourhood school. We’ve no better fresh example than Elgin Street Public School, which is just emerging from a wrenching debate about accommodating English vs. French-immersion programs.

(Enrolment figures for Elgin from October show 47 senior kindergarten students in EFI and only seven in English, with similar low numbers, nine and nine, in Grades 1 and 2. So, guess who loses?)

The resolution, reached this week, turns Elgin into a French-immersion centre in September and ships English kids to Centennial Public School, about 12 blocks away.

So, it is no doubt disconcerting, if not a little absurd, that a child who lives across the street from the Elgin school and wants to be taught mainly in English — as has gone on for more than 125 years — must to be shipped to another part of Centretown.

“Elgin Street is not isolated,” says Fisher. No kidding. Look at Fallingbrook Community Elementary School in Orléans: it had 55 children enrolled in senior kindergarten in October, 53 of them in French immersion.

Buffone, of course, has heard it all before. This is hardly the board’s evil plot. It is, largely, what parents want, especially in a bilingually dependent capital like Ottawa.

“At the end of the day, this is a real positive reflection on our society.” He said there has been a “democratizing” of French immersion at the board, in the sense it is now seen as open to any level of student (not just the stronger ones), including new Canadians.

“That has changed significantly and we’re very proud of that.”

This is a reference to the accusation that French immersion draws the elite academic students, “ghettoizing” the English program with students who struggle with regular subjects or language in general. One of the first obvious signs of whittled enrolment is double classes, fairly common in elementary English.

“It is worrisome,” said Fisher.

The enrolment data also suggest there is some mythmaking around the magic of early French immersion to turn out fluent, bilingual Renaissance teenagers. In the current year, at least, the number of students in EFI falls in every grade so that, by Grade 7, there are more pupils in English than in immersion.

(In other words, kids try it and many switch out.)

Where is it all headed? Is it time for the board to consider one elementary program (maybe 50/50 English-French in early grades, like the Catholic model) so that, at least, there is equity across the district and not this, ship-in, ship-out practice?

Or should there be co-operation or even neighbourhood mergers with the French-only board? The alternative isn’t great: continued turf wars that pit parents against each other, all wanting the best thing for their children.

“This is something the board, absolutely, needs to get its head around,” concludes Fisher.

To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@postmedia.com.

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Trustees on the Ottawa public school board overwhelmingly support adopting a code of conduct that would allow them to discipline fellow trustees they deem to have behaved badly.

But at a meeting Tuesday, they recommended watering down the most controversial penalty in a proposed conduct code by limiting the amount of time a trustee could be booted off committees to six months.

Outspoken trustee Donna Blackburn, who fears the code of conduct will be used to muzzle outspoken trustees such as herself, made little headway at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board meeting. 

Her proposal to add a clause specifying that trustees should be able to express their “personal political views” was roundly defeated. Several trustees said it wasn’t needed because they weren’t trying to interfere with freedom of speech, just deal with trustees who, in the words of trustee Sandra Schwartz, don’t behave in a civil manner or uphold the integrity of the office.

Trustee Keith Penny said Blackburn’s proposed clause would give trustees a “get out of jail free card” that would allow them to violate the code of conduct, then claim they are just expressing a personal view.

Trustees began debating the code of conduct earlier this year after Blackburn used a profanity and made rude comments about fellow trustees, calling them “whackjobs.” The proposed code, similar to those in place at many Ontario school boards, says trustees should, among other things, behave professionally, act with “decorum” and avoid making comments that are personal, demeaning or disparaging.

The code emphasizes that complaints should be resolved informally if possible, but it also sets out a detailed procedure for investigating allegations trustees make against each other, including hiring an outside investigator.

Blackburn, who fears the code is a back-handed way to shut her up, says there are already laws in place that cover conflict of interest, libel or criminal wrongdoing. 

Under the proposed code, trustees could be censured, banned from a meeting, or, in what was the most controversial proposal, banned from committee meetings indefinitely. At the suggestion of board chair Shirley Seward, trustees recommended that six months should be the maximum time a trustee could be barred from committees. 

Anything longer than six months is “unjust,” said Seward. She noted the case of Karen Round, a trustee in the Muskoka area who was censured at an in camera meeting by fellow trustees and banned from committee work for 3 1/2 years, which was the remainder of her term. Round quit last fall, saying she couldn’t perform the job she was elected to do.

Trustee Theresa Kavanagh said she couldn’t fathom removing an elected trustee from a committee for six months. Blackburn said the idea was “beyond outrageous” and undemocratic.

Trustee Lynn Scott noted that the board’s committee of the whole, which includes all trustees, is where much of the policy debate occurs. She urged trustees to exclude committee of the whole meetings from the penalty, but her suggestion was voted down.

Trustee Chris Ellis said he had confidence that trustees would give “great thought” before imposing a six-month penalty.

Another part of Ottawa’s proposed code says the chair is the “spokesperson to the public on behalf of the board,” a phrase that is open to interpretation. Seward says trustees should check with her first, for example, before speaking to the media. Blackburn argues that elected trustees have the obligation to speak for themselves. 

At Tuesday’s meeting, trustees sitting as a committee of the whole recommended adopting the code of conduct, but it must still be approved at a board meeting.

Staff reported they knew of four instances in which school boards in Ontario have used codes of conducts against trustees, but none of the penalties has been challenged in court.

There was never a pressing need for a code of conduct for trustees at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board.

They’re adults. Can they not accept the word “whackjob” in the spirit it was intended?

In any case, there is certainly no pressing need for the code of conduct approved at the committee level on Tuesday. Politicians are unherded cats. See Ford, Duffy, MacLaren, Blackburn, and then some. It’s the price of democracy.

This code pretty much had me nuts at hello.

“5. Trustees of the Board shall discharge their duties loyally, faithfully, impartially and in a manner that will inspire public confidence in the abilities and integrity of the Board.”

Why impartially? Is a trustee supposed to be free of bias? What about the election platform they ran on? Does this not make them partial to certain issues they’d like to pursue?

No one is impartial about everything. So stop pretending. Onward we read.

“8. Trustees shall ensure that their comments are issue-based and not personal, demeaning or disparaging with regard to Board staff or fellow Board members.”

The code has no business dictating the breadth of trustee comments and restricting them to certain motives. And, by the way, what if the issue IS the other trustee or the chair? And does this exclude positive comments about other trustees? This is the kind of hopeless debate these codes encourage.

“28. (partial) When individual Trustees express their opinions in public, they must make it clear that they are not speaking on behalf of the Board.”

Says who? In what other field of legislated life is an elected official asked to constantly remind listeners “Heh, just me talking here!” It’s unnecessary, offensive and an affront to free speech.

The code, too, desires to cover behaviour on and off the job.

“16. No Trustee shall engage in conduct during meetings of the Board or committees of the Board, and at all other times that would discredit or compromise the integrity of the Board.”

Is it really the board’s business how trustees behave in their private time?

Well, I suppose it was all inevitable.

There is just a certain kind of mind out there, especially in education, that runs into a problem and wants to respond with rules, instead of a one-time solution.

Trustee Donna Blackburn certainly accelerated the creation of the code when, in January, she told Citizen columnist David Reevely that some fellow trustees were “whackjobs” because of their stance on a fee hike for before- and after-school programs.

She soon apologized, but the fuse was lit. How would the board respond? Well, first with a warning from the chair, and now, essentially a legal framework on behaviour.

A good chunk of the code — it goes on for 10 pages — deals with enforcement. A conduct complaint must be made in writing. With any luck, it can be dealt with informally by the chair or committee head. The penalty could be fairly minor, like a warning or a suggested apology.

There is, however, a formal inquiry process, to be conducted by the chair, vice-chair or an outside consultant. It has its own steps, with time deadlines, but here is the important part: it could lead to a trustee’s being removed from committee meetings for up to six months.

Is it even legal, one wonders, to forbid an elected trustee from voting at meetings?

Blackburn, not surprisingly, spoke against it.

“The notion of the code of conduct came up last term,” she said Wednesday, “and I argued then that these codes aren’t necessary and they are simply tools that can be used to exact political revenge.”

Donna Blackburn, outspoken Ottawa-Carleton District School Board trustee.

She sits, for instance, on no standing board committees, which she believes is a form of punishment. She also believes that barring a trustee from meetings for six months — “that’s scary” — is too harsh.

“What possible thing could a trustee do that isn’t covered by other legislation, that would disenfranchise them from representing their constituents?”

Blackburn tried to insert a clause that would permit trustees to express their own political views. After all, have trustee jobs not been used as a launch pad to higher office, lo these many years? The suggestion was defeated.

“In my personal opinion, this board is largely dysfunctional. Am I going to get in trouble for saying that? Am I allowed to say that? I don’t know.”

That, indeed, is the worrisome part: when speech is coded, is it still free?

To contact Kelly Egan, please call 613-726-5896 or email kegan@postmedia.com.

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Once a week, rain, shine or even in the sub-zero depths of winter, a group of Ottawa five- and six-year-olds spends all day out in the forest.

They climb trees, built forts out of sticks, collect skulls, bones and feathers, search for salamanders and frog eggs and get very, very muddy. They sustain minor scrapes and bruises, know what a dead animal looks like and get their feet wet if they venture into the pond over the tops of their rubber boots.

“I like learning at Forest School because you don’t just sit down,” one Meadowlands Public School student told his Grade 1 teacher, Jackie Whelan. 

“I fell out of a tree and lived to tell the tale,” another reported.

“A lot of parents scratch their heads and ask why this is so novel,” says Whelan. “But kids don’t have access to free play with risks anymore.”

Located in a swath of woodland in the greenbelt near Kanata, Ottawa’s Forest and Nature School is one of about 100 similar programs across Canada. It’s part of a boom that is, in part, a reaction to free-range childhoods that have morphed into bubble-wrapped, over-digitized kids in the space of a couple of generations.

Forest schools are also centred on the idea that children benefit from regular and repeated exposure to natural spaces, exploring wherever their imaginations and curiosity might lead them.

It sounds like a free-wheeling hippie-dippie sort of ideal, but it’s based on evidence that children learn better by exploring and doing what they want to do instead of sitting at desks filling in worksheets. Canadian developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld, for example, has argued against kindergartens, unless they are “play-based,” and play was the basis of the full-day kindergarten program rolled out by the province in 2010. 

Carrying a couple of buckets and a walking stick, a boy heads out to explore the woods.

Play-based education means that children are allowed to play and direct their own learning with minimal direction from adults, says Queen’s University outdoor and experiential education professor Elizabath MacEachern.

“Play is children’s work and their job in life is to learn,” she says. “They learn about balance and levers when they climb trees. They learn about compassion by watching others express and sort out their emotions. They learn what adults do by watching adults, whether that is sit at desks behind devices or take walks and notice where the leeks are coming up through the ground.”

Open-ended free play helps to promote the development of “executive functioning,” which includes skills such as planning, organizing and decision-making, says David Sobel, an education professor at Antioch University New England in New Hampshire and author of Nature Preschools and Nature Kindergartens.

“It’s a better indicator of future success than letter and number recognition.”

Children sift through the “treasure box” of bones, rocks and feathers and other objects found on the forest floor.

Are there risks to jumping off logs and wading in ponds? Sure, but the risks are outweighed by the benefits, says Marlene Power, executive director of the Child and Nature Alliance of Canada, which has already trained 120 nature school “practitioners” across the country — mostly teachers and early childhood educators — with another 80 in the pipeline.

“To a child, it shouldn’t feel like learning,” says Power. 

Students from Meadowlands and Centennial Public School are in the forest one day a week as part of a pilot project to look at the value of play-based schooling. So far, 14 Ottawa Carleton District School Board classes participated in forest school this year on a regular, repeated basis.

At forest school, there are rules, but they are few and simple. Children are rarely seen without a stick in hand, but they also understand the imperative that “sticks need space.” Hazards like ticks and poison ivy are managed with knowledge instead of fear. If a child wants to climb a dead tree, there’s conversation about whether it looks sturdy enough to climb. Usually, the child decides for him or herself that it’s not a good idea. On the other hand, a game the children call “Timber!” which involves toppling a small dead tree, is very popular. 

“There are risks everywhere. In the city, it’s pollution and traffic. Indoors, it could be online predators and household mould. Kids want to experience minor risks,” says Power.

There are few toys — forest schools use “loose parts” like string, a box of chalk, and a few pieces of lumber to supplement the rocks, leaves and sticks the children scavenge from the forest floor.

In many of the 700 “waldkindergartens” in Germany, the only shelter is an unheated yurt or a shed and an outdoor toilet. By these standards, Forest and Nature School is downright luxurious — it has a cabin equipped with a woodstove and a composting toilet. But even on one of the coldest days of February, when their classmates at school weren’t allowed outdoors at recess, the Meadowlands students spent almost all day in the forest, warming up only long enough to launch another foray into the snowy woods.

“After 15 minutes for lunch, they all barrelled out the door,” says lead educator Sonja Lukassen.

Whelan and senior kindergarten teacher Joanne Burbidge says children learn a lot in the forest that applies to the academic curriculum. Children count and classify things they find. They tell stories about their experiences, write in their journals, learn about the principles of engineering by building a dam out of sticks. Last week, a group of students spent all day building a “blacksmith shop” and devising a bartering system for exchanging found objects.

“Bones or feathers could be so many different things in their imagination. They could be tools, or money,” says Whelan.

This week, they decided to write a play and make animal masks out of birch bark. Back at school, they draw maps of the forest and identify the plants and animals they discover by using field guides. 

Forest school has never descended into Lord of the Flies — it is well, but gently, supervised — and there has never been a serious injury, says Whelan. In fact, ordinary gym classes, where kids have to wait for their turn to do an activity, are more likely to result in a injury. “Kids get hurt when they have to wait around.”

Whelan has measured the impact of forest school on student well-being after a year. Before, students asked to draw themselves in nature drew picture of trips they had taken on vacation. After, they drew pictures of the forest.

A class navigates its way through the forest.

Meanwhile, their French vocabulary grew to include words to describe their experiences and the names of trees, birds and animals. Their motor skills, orientation and confidence improved because they had to navigate around random tree roots and long-hanging branches.

“There are some children who have never walked on an uneven surface before,” says Whelan.

Burbidge found her students reported spending more time in their own backyards. Reluctant writers and artists were happy to write and draw. Introverts become more gregarious in the forest, and extroverts weren’t shushed.

“Here, you don’t have to use your indoor voice,” she says.

There are other benefits, says Whelan. Research suggests that children with attention deficit disorder better able to stay on task and understand that actions have consequences when they are exposed to green spaces. Children who are allowed to make mistakes bounce back from adversity.

Antioch University’s Sobel says forest schools also have an effect on families. Parents spend more time outdoors and children introduce their parents to natural areas they have discovered.

While there’s been quite a lot of research on the educational advantages of forest schools in Europe, so far it’s pretty scant in North America, he says. One study by University of Victoria researchers looked at two groups of students, one from a regular kindergarten and one from a nature school. After a year, the nature school students had improved their motor skills “significantly more” than the students in regular kindergarten. 

“The greatest danger is keeping kids indoors,” says Sobel.

jlaucius@postmedia.com