New president, same old challenges

BY RAFFY BOUDJIKANIAN

raffy.boudjikanian@transcontinental.ca



Increasing public interest in school boards, challenging the ADQ's call to abolish them, and getting English textbooks out to students on time are some of the main challenges the Quebec English School Boards Association's new president will have to tackle.

“I'm fairly confident that this government and the Minister of Education do not want to abolish school boards at all,” said QESBA's new president Debbie Horrocks.

QESBA's vice-president for the last year, Horrocks was elected recently at the association’s annual general meeting, where two-term president Marcus Tabachnick stepped down. The association constitutionally limits anyone from presiding for over two terms.

“I don't think [the ADQ] is targeting the English community at all,” said Horrocks. However, the party's call for abolishing all school boards in the province de facto challenges the existence of English ones as well, which are the only democratically elected institutions particularly representing Quebec's anglophone community.

Horrocks said she last met ADQ Education critic François Desrochers in June. “It was more of a 'listening-to' than a talk,” she said with a laugh. “We certainly made our demands to the education critic clear,” she insisted.

However, both Horrocks and outgoing president Tabachnick did acknowledge there is work to be done in order to reinvigorate the public's interest in school board activities. “It seems people only turn out in record numbers when there are real issues,” Horrocks said, recalling that the last large turn-out for school board elections was in 1998, when the administrative bodies were turned into linguistic boards rather than confessional ones.

“Part of it is raising awareness of who we are and what we do,” said Tabachnick . Both of them explained that the provincial ministry of education will unveil plans or guidelines to that effect at an upcoming public forum on democracy and governance about school boards.

Another ongoing battle for QESBA is the lack of timely English translations for textbooks. Though primary and secondary school education in the province has undergone a reform plan since 2000, Horrocks said English versions of new textbooks have yet to be made available at the same time as French ones. “How are our teachers supposed to implement the program when they don't have English textbooks?” she asked.

Tabachnik said this is a hurdle that QESBA has been trying to clear since his own days as president.

The public forum on education and governance in school boards is scheduled for Feb.20-21.