School District Consolidation
Abolition of school Boards
Parent Committees
School Structure
Financing
Events Late in the Decade
Conclusions
Bibliography
bottom of page
The purpose of this paper is to examine the structural changes in the education system of New Brunswick from the beginning of the nineties to the end of that decade, changes that included school district consolidation and the abolition of school boards. During most of this time, from 1987 in fact, until mid-1999, there had been only one political party in power provincially, the Liberals. The Progressive Conservative party took control of the New Brunswick legislature seven months before the end of the decade. Other changes included the introduction of kindergartens and a reworking of the vertical structure of schools. All changes must be examined and evaluated within the unique political, geographical, and linguistic situation of the province.
For more than thirty years New Brunswick has operated with one of the most centralized educational systems in North America. In 1967, as part of the Equal Opportunity Program, school boards were deprived of their power to levy property taxes and education finance was centralized at the provincial level. The number of school districts was reduced from 422 to 33. At that time the only other North American jurisdictions with comparable levels of centralization of finance and governance in education were Hawaii and Yukon. In the decades after equal opportunity, the number of school boards actually increased as French and English bilingual boards created by the 1967 consolidation split along linguistic lines. In 1981 this linguistic separation became a requirement that was guaranteed legislatively and, in 1993, as a result of New Brunswick's favourable vote on the Charlottetown accord, that guarantee was entrenched in the Canadian constitution.
The guarantee of separate but equal school systems for the two linguistic groups creates diseconomies of scale in education that add to those caused by geography. Pupil transportation costs, for example, depend on urbanization and pupil population density, but in New Brunswick the population densities of anglophone and francophone pupils must be considered separately because they must be transported to different schools. Both geographical and linguistic isolation guarantee the continuation of a few small schools with relatively high unit costs and also result in relatively high pupil transportation costs. Nevertheless, the populations of the two linguistic groups are geographically concentrated enough to make this factor less important then the rural nature of the province. But both factors are given and no amount of school reform can change them.
Equal opportunity was an emotionally charged issue when it was first proposed in the mid-sixties, but after thirty years of experience even its detractors admit that it has achieved its stated goals, those implied by the program's name. Egregious spending differences between urban and rural and between anglophone and francophone disappeared almost overnight and have not resurfaced since. Observers are less unanimous about the effects of the highly centralized control that equal opportunity brought with it. From the beginning the government that provided virtually 100 percent of educational funding to local school boards was determined to exercise very close control over how it was spent. The funding mechanism used since 1967 has been school district budget approval with only minor variations from year to year. Provincial officials exercise control over staff complements, often down to the level of the individual school. They monitor pupil transportation to the level of the single school bus route and school bus.
Although school boards were deprived of most fiscal powers by provincial hegemony and confined in staffing matters by collective agreements negotiated at the provincial level, they nevertheless performed important functions and exercised real power in some areas. They were largely powerless to determine staffing levels, but did select and employ teachers and assign them to schools. They controlled many matters that were of immediate concern to parents. School boards were very accessible to parents and other members of the local community. Emerging community issues quickly become school board issues. School boards acted as conduits bringing local concerns to the attention of provincial officials. School board advocacy on behalf of education was very public, frequently loud, and often not to the liking of the provincial government.
Although not a structural change, the decade began with a positive development, the appointment of the Commission on Excellence in Education late in 1991. This commission consisted of two members, one anglophone and one francophone. The anglophone, James Downey, was a former president of the University of New Brunswick. The francophone, Aldéa Landry, was a former Liberal member of the legislative assembly who had been defeated in a recent election. Over the following several years, this commission was to produce a number of generally well received reports containing recommendations for education in New Brunswick.
Return to the table of contents.
School District Consolidation
Except for the introduction of kindergartens to the province, to be discussed later in this paper, the 1992 school district consolidation was the first major reform of the decade. The Minister of Education announced late in 1991 that changes to school district boundaries were being considered (Belliveau). Specific details were released early in January of the following year (Richardson). The 27 English language and 15 French language school boards were to be reduced to about 12 boards but there would be several weeks of consultation with boards before the plan was finalized. The stated purpose of the consolidation was to save 6.4 million dollars by reducing school board central office expenditures.
By the time the final plan was enacted (An Act . . . 1992), the number of boards had risen to 18 and the projected savings had dropped to five million dollars. Consolidation proved to be awkward, in part because the previous structure of 42 boards had arisen in response to the geographic and linguistic realities of the province. The extensive 1981 Schools Act amendments (An Act . . . 1981) that legitimized the cleavage in the system along linguistic lines had introduced minority language school boards. These were school boards appointed, not elected, to manage the schools of the minority official language in an area where speakers of that language were a small minority. By the time of the 1992 consolidation there were five of these of which two were English language. Linguistic isolation combined with geographic isolation meant that some school district groupings would necessarily be rather artificial. To ease this difficulty and to replace the minority language school boards, community boards were introduced. Members of community boards were elected every three years in the same way as school trustees. In their areas they replaced the school trustees, but each community board elected from among its own members a few representatives to act as school trustees on the parent school board. Under section 36.5 of the Schools Act the community boards were responsible for the daily administration and management of their community schools and for the hiring and immediate supervision of school personnel. Their parent boards could also delegate other responsibilities to the community boards.
The final structure included six French language school boards, twelve English language school boards, and six community boards. All the original minority language school boards became community boards as well as the Grand Manan school board, a regular English language board for several isolated islands in the Bay of Fundy south of mainland New Brunswick. By way of example, the consolidation created one French language board with a board office in an Acadian area in the south-eastern corner of the province to serve two large non-contiguous regions, the more remote of which extended to the western border of New Brunswick with Maine. This graphically illustrates the geographical anomalies of the new boundaries, which remained in place to the end of the decade and beyond.
The epilogue to the 1992 school district consolidation occurred in 1996 just before the announcement of the next major reform, the abolition of school boards. The auditor general of New Brunswick had released his report for 1994-1995 (Black . . ., 164-165) in which he pointed out that the projected reduction in school board central office expenditures of five million dollars to have resulted from consolidation had turned into a two million dollar increase in expenditure. He chided the Department of Education for being unable to point to any actual savings. The Minister of Education responded in a press release (Education minister . . .) that there had been a 4.6 million dollar saving resulting from a reduction in central office personnel. He blamed the discrepancy between himself and the auditor general on a multitude of accounting changes and price increases. He did not mention any diseconomies resulting from the consolidation, although both the economies and diseconomies would have been picked up in the auditor general's accounting.
But there are other perspectives on all this. The personnel reductions claimed by the minister had indeed taken place. They had been mandated by the Department of Education and imposed uniformly on boards including two boards that had not been consolidated. One might imagine that the central office staffs of small boards would have been under-employed prior to consolidation, but this was not the case. New Brunswick has had a long tradition of sharing central office resources, including personnel, among boards, both large and small. The reality is that these personnel reductions could have been implemented just as easily, or with equal difficulty, in the absence of school district consolidation. In addition, if we ignore the diseconomies of the consolidation, as the minister did, and accept his estimate of the savings, it works out to just three-quarters of one percent of the recurrent expenditure on education of 621 million dollars for that year. Of course, the auditor general's estimate of the increase in costs resulting from consolidation is even smaller, less than one-half of one percent. The complete elimination of central offices and all their staff would have saved a mere four percent of the recurrent expenditure on education. From a financial point of view, the 1992 school district consolidation was completely irrelevant. But facts like these have not been sufficient to dampen the reformist zeal of successive ministers of education. The next major structural reform was only two days away.
Return to the table of contents.
Abolition of School Boards
Although the school district consolidation of 1992 was preceded by minimal consultation, the elimination of school boards in 1996 involved none. It was announced without warning by a press release (Highlights . . .) and a longer document on February 22. The legislation (An Act . . . 1996) necessary to put it into effect was assented to on March 22 but contained wording making it retroactive to March 01. All school boards were abolished and all school trustees removed from office. The Minister of Education took control of "all funds, including trust funds, and accounts receivable standing to the credit of a school board or a community board" (section 80.1(4)) and assumed all the responsibilities of school boards. Sections 80.1(12) and 80.1(13) immunized the government against any civil liability for the consequences of the school board abolition including any suits for unjust dismissal and section 80.1(16) gave this legislation precedence over all other acts of the Legislature of New Brunswick including, for example, the Human Rights Act.
Prior to February 22 the minister had indicated that there would be more school reform without providing any details (Mutisme . . .). During January and February various rumours circulated. Originally the expectation was for further consolidation (Allard, . . . 01 15) but rumours of the complete elimination of school boards appeared (Allard, . . . 01 18). When the announcement came, school boards were to disappear but were to be replaced by parent committees. Reaction was mixed. Home and school organizations welcomed the greater direct involvement of parents. In contrast, Acadians were particularly negative (Gagné). They saw their school boards and school trustees as protecting them against the actions of a provincial government controlled by the anglophone majority. Local school boards had provided them with the assurance that there was an element of control close to them and elected by them that would be sympathetic to their linguistic aspirations. But their objections were considerably attenuated by the failure of the francophone teachers' association to oppose the abolition and by the fact that the minister responsible was a francophone.
In spite of the abolition of school boards, school districts were neither abolished nor further consolidated. The school district central offices were retained but the chief executive officers of school districts, called superintendents up to this point, became directors of education. Multiple districts were grouped together under a new administrative position now called a superintendency. Directors of education of districts were to report to the superintendents of the new super-districts. Thus the board abolition resulted in an additional layer of bureaucracy. It's a tribute to the haste with which the new legislation was introduced that the terminology used to describe the positions of superintendent and director reverses that which is commonly used elsewhere, in Ontario, for example.
From this point to the end of the decade and beyond, there were twelve English language school districts and six French language districts for a total of eighteen, each managed by a director of education. They reported to eight superintendents, five anglophone and three francophone. Six superintendents, three for each language, were responsible for two school districts each. The other two, both anglophone, were each responsible for three districts. A set of districts under one superintendent was sometimes called an administrative region.
The stated purpose of the abolition of school boards was to facilitate decision making, clarify the lines of authority, make the reporting structure more direct, and produce consistency in the development and application of policies (Journal . . ., 738-739). According to the minister, the old system was characterized by unclear responsibilities and overlapping authority. The Equal Opportunity Program of 1967 had removed fiscal responsibility from boards and, in 1996, the Minister of Education felt that what responsibility was left was not worth keeping. The Commission on Excellence in Education had also noted the limited responsibilities of school boards but had recommended a very different remedy (Downey . . ., 1992 05 07, 61).
42. Therefore, the Commission recommends that effective steps be taken to strengthen the role and responsibility of school boards in the setting of goals, managing the resources, and assessing the achievements of the schools in their communities, and to create a closer partnership between schools and the communities they serve.The Commission was proposing a devolution of some provincial authority to school boards to give them a more significant role. Instead the province decided to centralize all authority at the provincial level.
One of the first and most conspicuous effects of the abolition of school boards was the greatly reduced amount of information on education available to the public. School boards were legally obligated to hold their formal meetings in public and no school board motion could be passed in a meeting that was not open to the public. School board policy and education in general were debated at these meetings and widely reported in the press and the other mass media. But at the provincial level, only legislation is debated in public. Both regulation and policy regarding education came to be decided provincially behind closed doors without any public input and with little coverage by the mass media.
A second immediate effect was to distance from the education system those citizens who did not have children in the elementary and secondary schools. A majority of citizens and households in New Brunswick fall into this category. These persons lost their local political route into the system. Their ideas and concerns had to be expressed at the provincial level. It would be wrong to conclude that individuals without children in the school system have no interest in education. New Brunswick's population is aging, but many people who do not have children in elementary and secondary schools do have grandchildren there. And of course, many citizens show an interest in education for other reasons.
Return to the table of contents.
Parent Committees
According to the Minister of Education, school boards were to be replaced by parent committees, although the idea that one could replace the other seems a bit far-fetched. But parent committees in one form or another had been adopted by most other provinces and it's no surprise that New Brunswick got onto the band wagon. They had also been recommended by the Committee on Excellence in Education (Downey . . ., 1992 05 07, 54-55). As in other provinces these committees were to be advisory in nature but their structure in New Brunswick differed in important respects from those in other provinces.
Parent committees in New Brunswick were mandated at the level of the school, the school district, and the province. They respected the constitutional guarantees of linguistically distinct educational institutions. This is achieved automatically at the school and district level by virtue of the requirement that all schools and school districts in New Brunswick be first-language unilingual. At the provincial level, two committees, called boards, were formed one for each official language, precisely mirroring the linguistic split in the provincial Department of Education.
The Education Act passed early in 1997 described the committees and their responsibilities at the three levels. They were called committees only at the school level. The official designations were "school parent advisory committees" at the school level (section 32(1)), "district parent advisory councils" at the district level (section 34(1)), and "provincial boards of education" at the provincial level (section 37(1)). The lower two levels were often referred to by the acronyms "SPAC", pronounced "es-pac", and "DPAC", pronounced "dee-pac".
Each school in the province was to have a school parent advisory committee of from six to twelve members but the Minister of Education was empowered to combine schools for this purpose or to exempt schools from the requirement for a committee. The majority of the committee members were to be elected by and from the parents of children in the school. From the school staff one teacher elected by the teachers was to be a member. In any school offering programs at the high school level, a high school student elected by all the students in the school was to be a member of the committee. Committees could appoint up to two additional members as community members. This allowed for the appointment of persons who had an interest in the schools but who were not parents of children in school. Although not named as a member, the principal was required to attend and participate in all advisory committee meetings. The largest set of formal responsibilities involved advising the principal on various aspects of the school improvement plan. In practice these committees could advise their principals on anything they chose. Under section 33(2)a the committee could designate a person to participate in the selection of a principal for the school. This responsibility was the closest thing that the committee had to any real power but it was not clear just what involvement the committee member was to have in the selection or how much actual power could be exercised by this member.
District parent advisory councils existed for every school district in the province. Each council had from six to ten members selected by and from the membership of the school parent advisory committees of the schools in the district. In addition to these members the council was to have one member who was a high school student in the district and, if appointed by the Minister of Education, another member from the Micmac or Maliseet aboriginal peoples of the district. Although not named as members, the superintendent or director of education was required to attend and participate in all advisory council meetings. The district parent advisory councils advised the superintendent and director of education with respect to the district education plan and reviewed the district education report. Each council designated one of its members to participate in the selection of the director of education and provided input into the annual performance review of the superintendent and director of education. Councils were given the responsibility of overseeing the expenditure of trust funds within the district.
Each of the two provincial boards of education consisted of twelve members elected by and from the parent members of the district parent advisory councils of the appropriate language. These boards exercised many of their powers in conjunction with the Minister of Education. For example, they were required to decide on, in conjunction with the minister, an annual provincial education plan and an annual provincial expenditure plan for education. They reviewed recommendations from various provincial advisory committees and established required qualifications for school personnel, again in conjunction with the minister. Section 39 of the Education Act required the minister to provide dedicated support staff to each provincial board. This contrasts with the other two levels where the provision of support staff was not required.
Do committees, councils, and boards such as these have any real power? To answer this question one must refer in the first instance to the laws, the statutes and regulations, that confer power on them. But this first step does not provide a final answer to the question. Legal power can remain unexercised because of time pressures, insufficient information, the absence of incentives, or other reasons. On the other hand, advisory bodies may be able to exercise considerably more power than legislatures have given them if they successfully mobilize public opinion.
For all three levels, the Education Act contained wording that mandated the committees, councils, and boards to preserve and promote the language and culture of the official language community being represented. The strongest provision, contained in section 38(2)a, directed the provincial boards to
require that the plans, policies, programs and services related to education, language and culture preserve and promote the language and culture of that official linguistic community,How the provincial boards were to require these things remains unclear. This may be a non-issue on the majority anglophone side but could be important for francophones in the presence of an unsympathetic minister or government.
The level that came closest to exercising power, at least on paper, was the second level, the district parent advisory councils. According to section 36 they had the right to veto appointments of new teachers and new principals to the district. But the veto could be exercised only if the candidates lacked legally required qualifications or if there had been procedural violations in the selection. This was a very strange power for parent advisory councils in that the sole grounds for rejecting candidates were technical. The councils had been given powers much more appropriate for a court conducting a judicial review or a grievance arbitration board examining an appointment or non-appointment under a collective agreement.
During the debates leading up to the abolition of school boards, the Commissioner of Official Languages, a federal government appointee with a mandate to protect official languages in minority situations, presented a brief (Commissioner . . .) to the legislative committee considering these changes in which he argued that the very limited powers given to parent committees by the proposed legislation violated the minority language education rights of the francophone minority as guaranteed by section 23 of the Constitution Act, 1982. This brief analyzed several of the numerous court decisions concerning section 23 including two by the Supreme Court of Canada. These decisions guarantee minority language parents in each province a significant level of control over the curriculum and management in their schools. The major loss of minority language control resulting from the abolition of school boards was not made up sufficiently by the limited powers given to parent committees according to the Commissioner. The Commissioner concluded that the legislation was unconstitutional. He did not attempt to suggest what structures would be required to ensure constitutionality, perhaps because all the court decisions on this issue had been made in the context of school systems incorporating school boards.
Early in 1998, the Minister of Education appointed a committee to review the functioning of parent committees up to that point. In October of that year the committee issued its report (Hansen . . .). The Committee recommended drastic changes to the existing structures including the abolition of parent committees at the district level, a major restructuring of school districts into regions, and the appointment of a chief superintendent of schools for each language group. The committee expressed a number of concerns over the cultural viability of isolated minority language schools and over disagreements concerning the constitutionality of the Education Act in relation to minority language education rights.
In a press release early in 1999 the Minister of Education (Minister . . .) rejected all the major recommendations of the review committee but accepted many of the minor ones. He did announce in this press release that he would refer to the appeals division of the New Brunswick Court of Queen's Bench, the question of the constitutionality of the Education Act with respect to minority language education rights. A negative decision would probably require another major restructuring of the school system and not just for the minority. The anglophone majority would not view with favour a system in which they were denied a level of control over their schools comparable to that of the minority.
Return to the table of contents.
School Structure
Two changes to the structure at the school level during the nineties are noteworthy. The first was the belated introduction in 1991-92 of kindergartens in all New Brunswick school districts. Although there had been some controversy over the way in which the introduction was handled, the change was generally welcomed and full-time kindergartens are now an integral part of the system of elementary education. The half-day model, common in other provinces, was rejected because of the extra transportation costs involved. The second is the replacement of junior high schools with grades seven to nine by middle schools with grades six to eight. Under this scheme, the elementary level loses grade six and the high school level gains grade nine. The introduction of middle schools has been accompanied by a modification of the fully departmentalized organization to one designed to give students more contact with fewer teachers. In New Brunswick this so-called middle level philosophy has been more completely implemented than the organizational changes that accompany it. In many parts of the province, a separate middle school will not be feasible for reasons of geography and language. An important consequence of this structural change is the introduction of departmentalization and of teacher subject specialization at an earlier grade level than in the past.
Return to the table of contents.
Financing
Since the implementation of the Equal Opportunity Program in 1967, the system of educational finance in New Brunswick has been one of full provincial assumption of virtually all educational costs with only the details of budgeting and fiscal control changing periodically. The essential characteristic of full provincial assumption is the elimination of earmarked local taxes, typically taxes on real property, levied by school boards to support education. Since 1967, there have been no local taxes for education and no taxes earmarked for education at any level. The taxing power of school boards was eliminated in 1967 and, as we have seen, the school boards themselves were eliminated in 1996. During the past thirty or more years, school district expenditure has been governed by a budget approval process with various formula elements appearing and disappearing from time to time. Some very important but somewhat indirect elements in the budgeting process are the provincially negotiated collective agreements covering most positions in the school system. The following paragraphs consider school finance for the final school year of the decade in the three conventional categories: recurrent expenditure, pupil transportation, and capital expenditure.
For the purpose of the main formula elements used to fund recurrent expenditure, the system was divided into two levels, the first consisting of the elementary and middle levels and the second of the high school level. The funding basis for the formula elements at the elementary and middle levels was the approved classroom and at the high school level, the pupil. Table One gives the numerical details for direct expenditures on school staff. The reason for the split was the generally smaller size of elementary and middle schools and the difficulty of identifying classes as such in high schools. Notwithstanding the formula, all high schools were entitled to at least five teachers. In Table One, teachers, at all levels, are defined to include classroom teachers as well as specialists without home rooms. At the elementary and middle school levels, classes were approved for each individual school based on the number of classes and the enrolment in the previous year. Elementary and secondary school enrolment in New Brunswick was in a state of stable decline of one to two percent per year. Thus current enrolments accurately predicted enrolments in the near future.
Allocation of full-time equivalent professional staff
positions in New Brunswick schools for 1999-2000
| level or function |
full-time equivalent teachers per approved class |
pupils per full- time equivalent teacher |
| kindergarten | 1.05 | |
| grades 1 to 5 | 1.10 | |
| grades 6 to 8 | 1.20 | |
|
grades 9 to 12 for first 100 pupils |
14.0 | |
|
grades 9 to 12 for next 300 pupils |
22.5 | |
|
grades 9 to 12 for next 400 pupils |
23.0 | |
|
grades 9 to 12 for pupils in excess of 800 |
23.5 | |
| administration | 325 | |
| guidance | 537 | |
| library | 2400 |
An important constraint on budgeting recurrent expenditure for elementary and secondary education was the class size article in the collective agreement covering teachers (Agreement . . ., article 20). This prescribed maximum class sizes at all levels. Table Two gives these maximums for the school year 1999-2000. Article 20.07 contained wording that incorporated into the collective agreement, where they could be enforced, all future announcements by the Minister of Education of reduced class sizes. Modest reductions of class size at the lower elementary level had been announced for the several following years. In many schools actual class sizes were below the maximum levels because of the size of the school or for programmatic reasons. School districts were not bound to hire the exact number of teachers prescribed by the formula in Table One, but were bound by the upper limits on class size.
New Brunswick Elementary and Secondary School
Maximum Class Sizes for 1999-2000
| grade levels |
classes with a single grade |
multiply-graded classes |
| K-1 | 25 | 20 |
| 2 | 28 | 24 |
| 3-6 | 32 | 27 |
| 7-12 | 33 | 28 |
There were many miscellaneous expenditure categories that were financed with reference to pupils or to teachers as defined in Table One. Instructional supplies, library materials, library assistants, professional development, and co-curricular field trips each received a per pupil grant. Special needs costs were funded by a per pupil grant that was restricted to spending within that category. Substitute teachers and office supplies were funded on a per teacher basis.
For many other expenditure categories, the approved amount was based on the amount budgeted or spent in the previous year. This included areas such as repairs, staff travel, telephone service, utilities, building cleaning, and snow removal.
The only recurrent expenditure that tends not to be proportional to pupil population is that of pupil transportation. In New Brunswick pupil transportation is further complicated by the fact that the province is served by two school systems, distinguished by language and operating independently. In general, expenditures related to pupil transportation were simple projections from the previous year. Much of the budgeting in this area was done jointly by the Department of Education and the Department of Transportation which owned and maintained the busses. The planning of routes was done by school districts in conjunction with the Department of Education. Routes are a major factor in determining the level of expenditure required and tend to be stable from year to year. Declining enrolments provide a few occasions for route changes and these take the form of route consolidations. The budget for contracted conveyance was based on the contracts themselves and these had to be approved by the Department of Education.
Capital expenditures have been entirely under provincial control since 1967 when school boards lost the right to own property. Prior to the abolition of school boards, each school board would put forth its case for new or renovated schools to the province and frequently to the public. But for more than 30 years, capital expenditure for schools has depended on a provincial priority list based on provincially assessed need. An important variable in the capital expenditure process has been the speed with which the province has moved down the priority list and this has depended on the general state of provincial finances and on overall provincial priorities. The long-run planning of capital expenditure has occasionally been interrupted by short-run problems. A recent one has been the greatly heightened concern over indoor air quality in schools.
Return to the table of contents.
Events Late in the Decade
Some significant events in the last year of the decade, while not influencing the structure of the education system during the nineties, gave a glimpse of likely developments in the early years of the third millennium. Shortly after the provincial government announced a reference of the minority language school board question to the courts, it called an election and was defeated. This was in June. The victorious Progressive Conservatives had promised, as part of their campaign, a restoration of school boards in some form in time for municipal elections due to be held in mid-2001. An immediate consequence of this was a delay in the reference to the courts of the question of the constitutionality of the abolition of school boards. If school boards are restored and the minority is satisfied with their powers, this question may never be addressed by the courts. Citizens of New Brunswick ended the second millennium with the expectation that locally elected education authorities abolished in 1996 would be restored by 2001.
Return to the table of contents.
Conclusions
The grades contained in the New Brunswick structural reform report card for the 1990s must be considered rather mixed and some of them are only preliminary pending a more thorough evaluation and a longer perspective. The government receives high marks for kindergartens in spite of the implementation problems. The same cannot be said for the 1992 school district consolidation which, at the very best, can be said to have achieved nothing. The consequences of school board abolition remain uncertain. If the province is considered to consist of one school system and if we imagine that system to be a school board, then that board would not be the largest in Canada. But an accurate analogy probably requires two school boards, one for each official language. In that case there would be a number of larger boards in several provinces. But "large" here refers to enrolment and not geography or culture. Parent committees would get high marks as an isolated innovation but as a replacement for school boards, they are unlikely to be successful. As the nineties reached their end, the question of the constitutionality of the school system in relation to minority language education rights was unresolved but the structure of the system seemed to be on the verge of changing in a manner that would enhance these rights.
Return to the table of contents.
Bibliography
"An Act to Amend the Schools Act". (1981 06 18). Acts of New Brunswick 1981. Fredericton: Queen's Printer for New Brunswick. 71: 1-7.
Move up one link.
Go to the N.B.C.E.A. home page.
Go to the University of New Brunswick home page.