School Council Pandemic Breakdown: Is the Time Ripe for Re-engineering School-Level Governance?

Effective school councils, at their best, truly engage parents and give them a meaningful voice in shaping school-level policy affecting students. Far too many of them devolve into ‘window dressing’ and instead expose the limits of parent involvement. When schools shut down in March 2020, local parent consultation committees were rendered almost invisible and sidelined in many school districts. Nine months into the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s time to take stock of that impact with a provincial case study of the current state of local school-level parent engagement.

A recent CBC News Nova Scotia investigation by Brittany Wentzell provided penetrating insights into the state of School Advisory Councils (SACs) in Nova Scotia, a middling Canadian province often seen as typifying the national mean. If Nova Scotia is at all representative, the grassroots level of the P-12 education system has been reduced to either empty shells or gone missing during the pandemic. That unsettling CBC News investigation also suggests it’s time to look seriously at proposed governance reforms and sound, implementable policy alternatives to rectify the problem.

Functioning SACs are actually getting harder and harder to find in Nova Scotia. Out of 333 N. S. school websites examined by Wentzell between November 19 and 23, 2020, only one-out-of-four had posted online any recent meeting agendas, minutes, or meeting dates. A majority of school websites had blank or outdated sections on school councils.

Public and parent inquiries are routed to school principals. School administrators jealously guard the identities of SAC members, citing privacy concerns. It’s become next-to-impossible to find out who’s on your local SAC, let alone bring any local concerns forward. The same critical flaws exist at the provincial level with the nearly invisible Provincial Advisory Council on Education (PACE).

The promise of “enhanced school councils,” first articulated in Dr. Avis Glaze’s January 2018 report, Raise the Bar, has not materialized in any way, shape or form. If anything, school advisory councils are weaker and less effective now than before the province’s elected school boards were eliminated nearly three years ago. Vocal critics of the abolition of Nova Scotia’s elected English school boards three years ago were so absorbed in trying to save the existing system, that most failed to recognize a bigger threat to local democratic voice, the potential for even further weakening of local educational participation and input into decision-making.

School advisory councils first arose in the 1980s in response to two main public pressures: rising concerns about the responsiveness of larger and more complex school district bureaucracies and growing community demands for greater parental involvement in schools. The first Canadian school councils were established under a 1989 B.C. School Act reform which directed that province’s 75 school districts to form a parents’ advisory council in each school to advise “the local board of school trustees, the principal, and staff, on any matter relating to the school.” Most provincial school council initiatives, including that of Nova Scotia, originated between 1992 and 1995. Encouraging local school-level administration to consult with parents did not work, so, province-after-province, from Alberta to Nova Scotia, made school councils mandatory in every school.

The Nova Scotia model was an outgrowth of the proposed structural reforms initiated by Dr. John Savage’s Liberal government in the mid-1990s. Initial plans to decentralize educational decision-making with school-based management (SBM) and governance were abandoned. While the N.S. SBM pilot projects were judged a success, school-level administrators were cool to assuming expanded responsibilities with more accountability to local parents.

School governing councils were effectively neutered. With the exception of Quebec, such bodies across Canada were all consigned to an “advisory role” so as to contain and limit their influence on the shaping of school, board or provincial policy or practice.

School Advisory Councils in Nova Scotia remained almost unchanged from 1996 onwards. Although they were supposed to be mandatory, not every school had one and many were competing for parent loyalties with the longer-established holdover school branches of the N.S. Home and School Association. Like their Ontario counterparts, many SAC’s got into school fundraising and strayed from an explicit policy advisory role.

School boards consolidated and retrenched, and superintendents gradually expanded their authority over not only elected boards, but the whole P-12 school system. In the 2014 report, Disrupting the Status Quo, the Myra Freeman commission found half of Nova Scotians dissatisfied with school system performance and saw the potential for improved governance with “less duplication of services” and “more openness” to working across boundaries inside and outside the system. The Nova Scotia School Boards Association (NSSBA) and its member boards operated in a peculiar educational bubble. When the decision to dissolve all seven English school boards was announced, it hit the leading members of NSSBA and most regional board chairs like a bolt out of the blue.

The Stephen McNeil government, acting upon Glaze’s 2018 report, abolished the English boards and promised a “more coherent and responsive” school system with “enhanced school councils.” Three public accountability initiatives proposed by Glaze were shelved: an independent student assessment agency; a self-governing college of educators; and an education ombudsperson for students and parents.

Education Minister Zach Churchill brushed aside my March 2018 AIMS report, Re-Engineering Education, calling for “enhanced school councils” with a three-year development plan to establish effective and more meaningful a new model of school-community-based education governance. A comparison chart of school-level governance models was provided utilizing World Bank decentralized governance research which identified some 28 specific powers that could be delegated to establish newly-constituted “self-governing schools.”

Instead of enhancing school advisory councils, Churchill and his Education Department have actually weakened the grassroots education bodies. Eleven of the twenty-eight possible roles/responsibilities were enshrined in the 2017 Guide for School Advisory Councils, and the latest iteration, issued in 2019, actually removes some of the previous roles and responsibilities.

The new N.S. SAC guide provides a mandate that is much fuzzier and far more limited in its scope. Completely missing under the new mandate are: advise on the criteria for principal selection, school discipline, and needed school repairs; monitor and report on class sizes; review the annual School Calendar and the annual School Improvement Plan; serve on School Review (School Options) and Site Selection committees; and provide feedback on the School Annual Report to the community.

The cure for Nova Scotia’s democratic and accountability deficit is actually worse than the original disease diagnosed by Dr. Glaze– inflexible, muddled-up, increasingly distant, and unresponsive elected regional boards. It’s hard to see how enfeebling school councils serves the interests of local parents, teachers, employers, or the engaged public. Whether Nova Scotia is indicative of trends province-to-province is a matter requiring further study and investigation. What the case study does reveal is that allowing school councils to atrophy only brings us one step closer to ‘accountability-free’ education.

What impact has the great COVID-19 pandemic disruption had on local school-level democratic governance? How representative is the situation in Nova Scotia? Why did public engagement with parents fall by the wayside during the first phase of the pandemic? Would schools have been better prepared to weather the pandemic if they had stronger school-teacher-parent relations? Is the time ripe for establishing school-based governance and management?

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Pandemic School Shutdowns: What were the Lessons of the First Wave?

Flattening the curve of the pandemic is a long slog, but a few lessons are being learned, particularly in the K-12 education domain. When COVID-19 hit in March 2020, pandemic emergency response plans embraced a singular education strategy – close all K-12 schools and default to hastily-assembled and largely-untested “home learning” programs.

Following public health directives, close to five million Canadian K-12 students and 451,400 teachers were left scrambling to master unfamiliar technology, slap together learning packages, and muddle-through until the end of the 2019-20 school year. The school year mostly petered-out, ending two-weeks earlier than ever before. Without reliable student tracking or achievement data, assessing the real impact is guesswork. Provincial systems and school districts did their best under stressful conditions. In Canada’s largest school district, the Toronto District School Board, it was aptly described as an “unmitigated disaster.” Few students, parents, teachers, or child psychologists would ever like to see that experience repeated again.

Nine months into the pandemic, public health authorities, ministries of education, and and school system superintendents are singing a different tune: keeping students in school is the first priority as we prepare to ride-out the second wave of viral infections. Everyone is far more acutely aware of the accumulating academic, human, and social costs of shutting down schools, falling unevenly upon children and teens in the most disadvantaged communities.

Combating the relentless virus and keeping regional economies in tact will not likely be greatly affected through system-wide shutdowns. What is needed is a new arsenal of strategies embracing a “flexible response” doctrine, borrowing a phrase popularized by former U.S. Secretary of State Robert McNamara in the early 1960s. Banishing the devastating pandemic, much like vanquishing the Russian nuclear arms threat, requires a carefully considered set of options and a calibrated range of responses.

With COVID-19 infection rates spiking again, school closures are becoming a distinct possibility, if only as a temporary respite, for shaken-up students, fatigued teachers and bewildered parents. Setting a relatively low infection positivity number, such the 3 per cent figure applied in closing New York City schools, is unwise because, by that standard, all schools will ultimately close at some point this school year.

Some far more effective strategies are coming to the fore:

Isolating Cases and Suspending Exposed Classes
A case-by-case isolation strategy, in provinces and districts with lower transmission rates, has proven reasonably effective, as long as the public health system can sustain contact tracing and isolate children and staff who have COVID-19 exposures. It was working, up until now, in most provinces covered by the Atlantic Bubble. Implementation challenges are compromising its effectiveness in Ontario, where the numbers of infections exceed the capacity for contact tracing.

Short-Time Limited School Closures
Extending school holidays is emerging as the most expedient way of applying an education “circuit breaker.” Starting the Christmas holidays early, as in Quebec and Alberta, and extending the break (as in Manitoba) into January 2021 are the latest “quick fixes” gaining traction from province-to-province right across Canada. It’s much easier to extend school holiday time because that policy response resonates with teachers and education support workers and is more minimally disruptive for working parents. Policy-makers often opt for the path of least resistance.

Dual Track-Student Choice Model
Giving students and families the choice of completing courses in-person or online was implemented in Ontario and it caused an array of unanticipated, disruptive and unpredictable consequences. Students and parents in more affluent school districts in the TDSB chose in-person schooling, while online enrolment was highest in the district’s poorest and most racialized communities. School schedules were constantly changing as students bailed out of in-person classes, generating unexpected demand for online courses. Hundreds of thousands of students in Toronto, Peel and York Region have shifted online, rendering the two-track strategy essentially unsustainable over the longer-term.

Hybrid Blended Learning Model
Moving to a Mixed In-Person and Hybrid Learning Model on a so-called “rotation system” is a response full of implementation bugs. Some Ontario school districts have resorted to dual track delivery models with classes combining in-person and video streamed classes. Since September 2020, New Brunswick has implemented a Hybrid Blended Learning Model with alternating days in all high schools with decidedly mixed results. Curriculum coverage suffers, with loses estimated at up to 30 per cent of learning outcomes, and student participation rates reportedly low during the hybrid off-days in checkerboard the high school schedule.

Defaulting to Virtual Home Learning in Upper Grades
Younger children benefit more from teacher-guided instruction and do not as readily spread the virus, judging from K-6 in-person classes in Denmark and British Columbia. Splitting larger classes in urban or suburban school zones is prohibitively expensive, so school districts resort to shifting everyone to online classes. That has made defaulting to virtual home learning in the upper grades a more practical and more easily implemented option. Online learning has a better track record in Grades 9 to 12 when all students are enrolled and teachers possess the training and resources to use a full repertoire of pedagogies and resources.

The pandemic continues to bedevil our modern bureaucratic school systems that tend to thrive on fixed school schedules, top-down leadership, orderly transitions, systems thinking, and algorithms. Public health pronouncements can, and have already had, unintended adverse effects on our children’s education and well-being. It’s time to apply those lessons.

Closing all schools should probably be the last resort this time around. That’s the consensus among leading British, Canadian and American pediatricians and epidemiologists. Sending kids home should only be considered if and when transmission rates turn schools into vectors and staff infection rates make it impossible to provide a reasonable quality of education.

Nothing is predictable when it comes to the current pandemic. Resurgent rates of infection and community transmission in October and November produced what Science Magazine acknowledged is “a more complex picture” of the very real risks and the need to be flexible and responsive in the face of a rapidly changing, unpredictable public health crisis. While there’s no perfect solution, keeping schools open remains a priority and a “flexible response” strategy will likely be required to ride out the second wave.

Will public health authorities and school systems apply the lessons learned during the first wave of the pandemic? What is the tipping point for moving away from in-person schooling? Which are the most viable alternatives to system-wide shutdowns? Is it a case of responding with flexibility and in response to local or regional pandemic health risks?

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