BSD’s communication breakdown

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/10/2021 (1791 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Earlier this week, a Brandon Sun report revealed that the Brandon School Division is currently on track to record a deficit of more than $3.1 million in the current fiscal year.

The report added that the projected deficit has drained the division’s accumulated surplus — its rainy-day fund — to slightly more than $600,000. That’s barely enough money for the division to cover just one day’s worth of expenses.

Division auditor Todd Birkhan urged school board trustees to “exercise caution” as they set next year’s operating budget, as such “razor-thin margins” don’t give the board any flexibility for future spending.

There’s a lot to unpack from that information, starting with the fact the only reason the public knows about the deficit is because The Brandon Sun reported it this week.

There was no information on the school division website, and no other evidence the division had done anything to tell local taxpayers it is more than $3 million in the red — and that’s with eight months still remaining in the current fiscal year.

In fact, the last we heard from our school trustees about the current budget was a Feb. 23 report in the Sun, which revealed that “The Brandon School Division board of trustees made some tough decisions during Monday’s preliminary budget presentation, since they had to come up with a way of addressing a $720,500 shortfall for the 2021-22 school year.”

In other words, the board cut more than $700,000 in planned expenses during budget deliberations last February in order to balance the budget for the current fiscal year. Now, not even four months into the fiscal year, we find out from The Brandon Sun — not the school trustees — that the budget is more than $3 million short, and the board has offered no clear explanation for this predicament.

It’s easy to assume the shortfall has something to do with the COVID-19 pandemic, but given that salaries make up approximately 90 per cent of the BSD operating budget, COVID may not be to blame. It could be something else, or a combination of things.

That said, the public shouldn’t have to guess why there’s a deficit. The board should have told us about it, and why they are $3 million short just one-third of the way into the fiscal year. The fact they didn’t do that is troubling, but it’s the consequence of an even bigger issue.

The reality is that our school board has a serious communications problem. That creates a serious transparency problem, which in turn results in a serious accountability problem.

That’s a lot of problems, but they all stem from the way the trustees have chosen to interact with the public or, more accurately, not interact with the public.

It appears they have adopted a policy that all communication with the public must come from the board chairperson. Individual trustees are apparently not allowed to communicate directly with the public.

Indeed, when was the last time any trustee other than board chair Linda Ross (no relation) was quoted in the media on any important issue? Do you even know the names of our school trustees?

There are several flaws in such an approach. First, it means the public only gets information about what the board is doing when the chair feels like talking to the media. Second, the public only gets the board chair’s position on an issue, even though other trustees may have a different perspective.

That approach may create the appearance of board unanimity, but it can also mean the public isn’t getting the complete story or, as in the case of the budget deficit, isn’t getting the story at all. That’s not transparency.

Third, the approach is contrary to the democratic principle that elected representatives must always be responsive and responsible to the people who elected them. The reality is that the public hasn’t heard much from the majority of trustees since the 2018 elections. That’s not accountability.

If the voice of each trustee isn’t heard, how do citizens know where they each stand on issues? How does the public know how hard they are working? How do voters know if they deserve to be re-elected?

With the next school board election less than a year away, that’s something our trustees might want to think about.

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