Accountability and Transparency

 Some loose ends remain in the wake of Education Minister Carr’s statements last week.

The first loose end is accountability for the MHS fiasco.  What happened last fall was neither a natural disaster nor an act of god.  Nor was it an accident.

Many parents have aptly compared the MHS shutdown to a school destroyed by fire.  In both cases there has occurred an existing or proximate threat to health and safety.  When a building burns down, there is always an investigation – conducted by disinterested professionals – to identify the causes of the fire.  The reasons are evident.  There may have been wrong-doing or negligence that endangered life and property, or causes may be identified with a view to preventing similar occurrences in the future.

It is tempting to blame the government in Fredericton.  The chronic underfunding of school maintenance has become a well-known scandal.  Permitting public buildings to decay due to budgetary constraints or competing political objectives is false economy at its worst.  Successive governments have given citizens compelling reasons to be much more insistent on sound decision making, and much more vigilant of our public officials in discharging their duties.

How are these decisions made?  Is a distant bureaucrat clutching the purse strings as he decides which of our crumbling buildings to shore up, which ones to let slide another year?  No.  It is the locally elected, volunteer board, the District Education Council, or DEC, that has the legal responsibility for the maintenance of our local schools.

Leaving aside the absurdity of encumbering a volunteer, elected board with a huge, unfunded liability and no powers to raise revenues, we as citizens are obligated to demand that this system be reviewed.  We have to ask whether this system of governance is effectively serving our schools.

More particularly, we have to ask hard questions of what the DEC has done in recent years to discharge its responsibility to maintain our schools in good condition.  The DEC has manifestly failed to do so.  Alarms have been raised with respect to MHS for many years with no effect.  If the risks of inadequate maintenance were not already obvious to the DEC, the 2008 closure of Uplands School due to the DEC’s failure to effect timely low-cost repairs, and Mary Laltoo’s accurate premonition published just 18 months prior to the MHS evacuation, were timely warning:

In 1998 the province carried out a review of school facilities province wide, itemizing and cost estimating any required repairs. At that time it was noted that Uplands School required repairs to the foundation wall (estimated to cost $3000)....

One has to wonder how a repair estimated at $3000 can be let fester until the repair bill reaches $1.3 million. Similarly, the Uplands situation saw the school (with a known breach in the foundation and a developing mold problem) shut tightly for a complete (wet) summer. No wonder the place smelled when summer ended and the school was open. Of course the students had to be moved. There was no choice at this point with the air quality being so poor.

I cannot believe that facility managers would not realize that a hazardous mold issue would develop in this situation. One then has to wonder why this was allowed to occur. It certainly made the possibility of closing this small school an easier decision on the part of everyone involved....

Or what is to become of MHS? An examination of the Capital List as it occurs on the District website lists no projects for MHS (despite a damning report presented to the local DEC last winter). Is this the next school to be allowed to slide into unsafe territory?

The public, which now is contending with this nightmare scenario, is entitled to know whether the DEC did all it reasonably could in discharging its responsibility with regard to MHS.  At the very least, it should have spared no effort to alert the government and the public of this looming disaster.  Did it do so?

As tax-paying citizens, members of the Moncton community, and parents of students affected, we have a right to answers.  The Ministers and MLAs of the new government must undertake to commission an independent investigation of the processes followed and decisions taken leading up to the closure of MHS last fall.  There may be individual errors and omissions that have to be addressed, and the entire scheme of DEC governance and responsibility has to be reviewed and adjusted or replaced if it is not functioning effectively, as seems to be the case.

A second, closely related loose end is the secrecy surrounding many critical decisions of immediate consequence to the public.  The tendency to preach openness and practice the opposite is not new.  On January 7, 2009 the Times & Transcript published the following Opinion article:

For no apparent good reason, the governing District Education Council (DEC) for English-speaking School District 2 was to meet behind closed doors last night to hear engineers and architects explain the contents of their report into the renovations needed at Moncton High School as well as to answer any questions from DEC members.

If ever there was an issue of tremendous and active public interest and a wish to be kept fully informed, this is it. Nor was there anything in the agenda that falls under the standard guidelines for justifying secrecy: no personnel matters or other issues requiring confidentiality; no privacy concerns. It is simply a report into structural problems at the school and estimates of what is needed and the cost.

The DEC is the governing body of the District and is elected by the public. It is their job to represent the public interest and to do so openly and accountably. That includes keeping the public well informed.

With an issue such as the potential future of Moncton High School, there is no better way than directly via an open meeting. Let the public hear the experts' opinions first-hand as well as the responses to questions raised by DEC members.

It is baffling why this meeting was slated to be held in secret. Members of the DEC, including Chair Harry Doyle, have publicly stated they favour open meetings. Why was this one marked for secrecy?

Mr. Doyle, who was himself an educator and knows the system, said he didn't know why it wasn't set as an open meeting. That's startling. It seems to imply that neither the chair of the governing body nor the body as a whole are making the decision, as they should and have a right to do, about the status of their own meetings. Are District 2 staff usurping the DEC's legitimate power when legally they are responsible to the DEC, not vice-versa?

It is time for Mr. Doyle, who has proven himself capable many times in the past, to take a firm hold of the DEC reins and make it open and responsible to the public it serves. If he doesn't, he risks losing credibility for one cannot repeatedly say they are for accountability and openness, but then fail to ensure it happens. Public business should be conducted in public, with very few exceptions. It is time the DEC honoured the principle in reality.

It is disappointing that our new Minister of Education, Jody Carr, has wasted no time in adopting the bad habit of saying one thing and doing something different.  On October 22, 2010 Minister Carr stated regarding the MHS evacuation:

The superintendent will explain fully what has lead the district to this point, the options explored, and the reason she and the DEC arrived at the current re-location plan.

Neither the Superintendent, Karen Branscombe, nor anyone else has ever offered any such explanations.  Notably, years of air quality testing data which is said to prove the schools air was safe has gone inexplicably and persistently missing.

Over the past months, Minister Carr has made repeated promises such as the following:

We have committed to being transparent, collaborative and will work as efficiently, effectively and quickly as possible to build a new high school.... The collaborative working group has started its work and will report back by mid February on recommendations on where MHS students would be located in September 2011.

As I stated at the beginning of this course of action, I am committed to a full and transparent process which involves the input of all stakeholders, especially parents. This transparency includes the openness of the Working Group.

These turned out to be hollow commitments, hopeful words that no one intended to live up to.  The Working Group process was shrouded in secrecy from beginning to end.  The result was a cliff hanger that left the MHS teachers feeling betrayed and blindsided by a decision they had no idea was coming.  This could never have happened if there had been an open, transparent and collaborative process.

Minister Carr now would like the MHS teachers, and parents of students going back into MHS, to trust that the health issues in the school will be effectively remediated, in the face of years of accumulated distrust.  It will take more than promises of openness and transparency to earn public and professional trust for our elected and appointed officials, and Minister Carr should consider some serious reforms of governance and accountability in the education system, particularly District 2, to overcome the culture of secrecy.

Accountability and transparency are essential requirements for effective governance.  The governance of school districts under the Education Act is not just about money and buildings.  It is primarily about our children’s future.  Without effective governance, we in New Brunswick will never get on the road to creating the world class education system that we will need to thrive in the 21^st century.