Rusnak wants BSD to refocus

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This article was published 12/09/2023 (906 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brad Rusnak is eager to get back on the Brandon School Division campaign trail, since the issues he flagged during last fall’s trustee byelection haven’t, in his experience, been meaningfully addressed.

During his initial unsuccessful run to become a member of the school board, Rusnak highlighted the division’s failure to provide adequate resources for students with disabilities, like his two sons who live with ocular albinism.

This condition significantly impairs his sons’ vision, which means they require specialty tools and devices in order to follow along during class.

Even though Rusnak has discussed his boys’ unique needs with the division extensively, these shortcomings have continued to persist into this current school year that began last week.

“From day one of school this year some things that were approved last year hadn’t even come through,” he told the Sun on Monday. “One of my kids wasn’t even on the list for a tablet that he was supposed to get at the start of the year.”

While Rusnak insists that the teachers at King George School are “outstanding” when it comes to understanding his kids’ unique needs, he believes a lot of this dysfunction stems from poor communication practices on the administration’s part.

This miscommunication almost resulted in Rusnak’s son Jacob being placed in the back of his Grade 6 classroom despite his vision problems.

“He pipes up and says ‘I need to sit in the front,’ and [the teacher] didn’t know why. And she should know why,” he said.

“There should be communication to say what’s going on and be prepared for this class. And it really scares me in a way that certain things aren’t communicated the way they should be.”

If elected to the board next month, Rusnak promises to serve as an outspoken advocate for students with special needs more broadly, especially since he knows local parents with deaf and autistic children who harbour similar grievances against the division.

“They need that attention and … especially at the start of the year, the communication needs to be there from the parents and to the teachers,” he said. “The board should be very highly involved in all that to make sure that all the students have the proper setup in their classrooms, and they don’t go three months until something happens, right?”

The past several months have been particularly frustrating to Rusnak, since he has witnessed a small but vocal group of residents further divert the local school board’s attention by engaging in “narrow-minded” culture war rhetoric.

During a May 8 school board meeting, former BSD trustee Lorraine Hackenschmidt proposed installing a book review committee that would potentially ban material from the division that she, and other like-minded individuals, found objectionable.

Most of this objectionable material, to Hackenschmidt and her supporters, includes books that discuss LGBTQ+ issues and topics surrounding sexual health.

While the school board ended up rejecting this book review committee proposal on May 23, this issue continued to linger throughout the summer during the “public inquiries” and “presentations” sections of every subsequent BSD meeting.

On Aug. 23, members of this same group served six of the seven trustees with “notices of liability” from the group Action4Canada, accusing them of exposing “minors to sexually explicit educational resources, performers, activities and/or events.”

To Rusnak, the actions of these residents only serve to eat up the school board’s time and energy that could be used more productively towards securing more resources for children in need.

He also objects to this book banning campaign on moral grounds, believing it to be a “scare tactic” that will end up creating a more hostile environment for staff and students alike.

“Some of these kids don’t have a safe place, and they use school as their safe place. And the information that’s there needs to be available to them,” he said.

“They need to know that the school is supportive of them, whatever they decide to do.”

While Rusnak has never held elected office before, he touts more than a decade of experience in business management, having overseen operations at several automotive shops and dealerships in both Brandon and Winnipeg.

He currently serves as the autobody manager for Fowler Hyundai.

Rusnak believes that there’s plenty of overlap between his career and the responsibilities of a BSD trustee, especially when it comes time to balancing the division’s operating budget.

The 42-year-old also knows a thing or two about delegating tasks in a board setting, having served as the president of the Westman 5-Pin Bowlers Association for four years.

With all this experience in his back pocket, Rusnak is confident that he could help the BSD school board refocus on the day-to-day issues that matter to students, while also serving as a “loud voice” that could ward off misguided residents who want to resurrect the book banning issue.

“This has gone on long enough. It’s been discussed far too much,” he said. “There needs to be an opening to making sure that these students have an outlet and we need to be supportive. That’s all there is to it.”

Outside of Rusnak, two other Brandon residents have told the Sun about their intentions to run in the Oct. 25 trustee byelection. They are local child-care provider Breanne Bauche and Brandon and District Labour Council president Kirk Carr.

For all other prospective candidates, the deadline to submit nomination papers is Sept. 19 at 4:30 p.m.

» kdarbyson@brandonsun.com