Brandon School Division board candidate pledges better transparency

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This article was published 18/10/2022 (1219 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One of the 14 candidates vying for seats on the Brandon School Division’s board of trustees is promising to improve transparency, if he is elected.

In a media release issued Monday, Duncan Ross — no relation to current BSD chairperson and fellow candidate Linda Ross — said he would work to end the practice of only allowing the chair to speak publicly on behalf of the board if he secures one of the eight positions up for grabs.

Duncan Ross claims this results in the public only hearing about board matters that the chairperson wishes to speak about and only when they feel like talking.

Ross told the Sun Monday afternoon he doesn’t want to start any fights, but there has been very little communication from local school trustees over the last four years and beyond.

The board’s current policy manual states the following: “The board shall designate a board spokesperson who will endeavour to be current on all matters of board governance and policy. This will be the chairperson of the board unless an alternate is designated by the board.”

This, he said, has led to the public having little information about what the board of trustees’ decisions are, how they’ve come to those decisions and which trustees might disagree with them.

“Kim Fallis, for example, does she disagree with anything with the school board did over the past few years?” Ross asked as an example.

Fallis is an incumbent trustee seeking re-election.

“I don’t want to point out her specifically, but I’m not sure I’ve heard Kim Fallis’ name one time in the last four years since she was elected until this election cycle. It’s the same with the rest of the trustees. We only ever hear from Linda,” he said. “I think it’s against the public interest for our school board to have so little communication with the public.”

According to Ross, this is leading to public apathy since members of the public don’t care about things they don’t hear about.

It has also prompted periods of uncertainty for the public, he said, like at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when parents waited to learn about how local schools were to handle the situation.

Should Ross be elected but the board ultimately decides not the change the policy, he said he didn’t think it would be legally enforceable and to follow it would be against the public interest.

However, Fallis said the policy isn’t out of the ordinary.

“That’s the communications policy … at hundreds of organizations,” Fallis said.

She said in her experience, whether a matter is discussed in an open or closed session, if a board can come to a consensus or a decision, the chair is the designated person to speak on the issue outside of meetings.

“You show as a united front on the decisions,” she said.

But when it comes to the board of trustees’ municipal counterparts at the City of Brandon, individual councillors are not prohibited from commenting on decisions made by city council.

Asked what the difference is between the two groups of elected officials in terms of accountability, Fallis said she didn’t know how to answer the question.

“I don’t even know if there is a policy or just an agreement that there’s one spokesperson who speaks on behalf of the committee,” she said. “If they did something really outrageous that I couldn’t live with, I might resign my position if I was ever in that case.”

Linda Ross said the decisions made and the discussions held by the board of trustees are a matter of public record and their meetings are archived for public consumption on the division’s website.

“Trustees are not constrained from making their opinions known but, of course, only the board as a whole can make a decision,” she said. “So individual trustees can speak at our meetings, which are, again, public and recorded and maintained in an archive so people can access them at any time.”

Trustees used to be allowed to speak individually to the media, she said, but it created confusion in the public as to what the position of the whole board was.

Should Duncan Ross be elected, Linda Ross said she would have no issue with bringing the policy up for debate.

Election day is Oct. 26.

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