The ongoing trustee resignations at the North Okanagan-Shuswap school board reflect a failure of both the elected trustees and the administrative staff which the trustees depend on for advice.
As a participant in dozens of budget reviews at council and regional district tables over the years, I can confirm they can be mind-numbingly boring.
For all nine trustees and the superintendent to admit, however, they missed the transfer of $10.5 million over five years to build a new district support centre and works yard building is beyond comprehension.
In one year alone, $3 million was moved out of operation to capital. This is at the same time parents and teachers were wringing their collective hands at what to do about operational funding shortages in the district schools.
Of course, the scapegoat has always been the provincial education budget.
We now clearly see that was not the case and it also becomes clear why the education ministry refuses to open the bank vault every time the schools cry poverty.
North Okanagan-Shuswap School District administrative staff should have known that operations were being compromised through the construction of these new buildings and yet no one at the board table saw fit to ask questions about this, and administration felt no need to point out what the trustees apparently couldn't see for themselves.
Newly elected trustees can be excused for not seeing the big picture nor should they be the ones tendering their resignations.
Long time Armstrong-Spallumcheen trustee Bob Fowler, in an interview with The Morning Star April 15, called the trustee resignations a "knee-jerk" reaction to some of the public, saying that a small group of the public calling for more accountability is not reason enough for him to resign.
Apparently Mr. Fowler can't see the connection between the threatened closure of schools and the $10.5 million in operational dollars that went past his nose as he voted to approve the school board budgets which could effectively doom Armstrong Elementary School and several other schools in the district.
As if to confirm this, Mr. Fowler opposed an April 12 board motion for the Ministry of Education to undertake a review of the board's current governance practises.
Meantime, board superintendent Glenn Borthistle, while declining to resign, also claims in that Morning Star article of April 15, that he did not know that operational surpluses were being used to fund the new construction.
It is a top-to-bottom example of incompetence in my opinion.
I hope for the sake of the schools at stake, the ministry steps up to the plate and puts someone in charge who knows what they are doing.
John Trainor
Armstrong