As people prepare to vote in this year’s municipal elections, one of the positions they’ll be casting ballots for, school board trustee, has seen a number of changes to its mandate and powers. For instance, the budget is now the responsibility of the newly created role of school board Chief Executive Officer, and trustees have limited influence on something that used to fall under their purview. The change is due to a provincial bill that passed in the spring. It also requires school boards to have a student and family support office. The Minister of Education said the office is the place where families can bring concerns about their child’s education or other complex issues involving their school. “Trustees are really dealing with much softer kinds of issues about, if you will, the climate of education within the community, and the director of education, hiring that person, and overseeing what goes on in the management of the school board,” Robert Williams, a retired professor of political science at the University of Waterloo, said. “Their formal roles are much more limited than all that. I would almost call them advisory,” he said. Trustees do not control what is taught by schools; the province sets the curriculum. The province has also reduced the number of trustees at some boards to a maximum of 12, and honorariums have been limited to $9,000 a year. How the role has changed Jayne Herring was a trustee at the Waterloo Region District School Board (WRDSB) from 2018 to 2022, and said much of her time was spent responding to parent calls. Herring said she would get questions about busing, high school course selection, bullying concerns or issues with staff. While those weren’t issues she could directly solve, she could point people in the right direction. “Our role was to refer them on to the appropriate person at the education centre, say for instance superintendents or transportation,” Herring explained. Kathi Smith was a trustee for more than twenty years at the Waterloo Region District School Board before resigning in 2022. Smith said she remembers a time when she was involved in a group that was trying to find solutions for individual students who were having trouble attending school. “We’d try and sort out how, if we could help them to get back into school,” Smith recalled. Smith said that kind of work was “wonderful, because there was an opportunity for kids who didn’t have people looking after them or speaking up for them, or parents who didn’t know how to do that.” Smith said that program ended, and over the years she watched as the role of trustees changed and the make up of the board of trustees became increasingly split along political and ideological lines. “There was a division at the table in the last few years,” Smith said. The WRDSB Board of Trustees is set to see significant change, with most incumbents not running for re-election in the 2026 municipal election. Herring said candidates should know what the position involves. “Make sure you understand the role and what it’s limited to, so that you don’t make promises that you’re not able to keep.” The future of school board trustees Kristina Llewellyn, a professor at Wilson College of Leadership and Civic Engagement at McMaster University, said trustees going forward will need to take on a new mandate, one more focused on advocacy. “School board trustees really now need to be the voice of community, and they need to raise that voice quite loudly,” Llewellyn said. And while the provincial government cited financial mismanagement and other questionable spending decisions as reasons it needed to make changes to the role of school board trustees, Llewellyn pushed back against the narrative that boards of trustees are ineffective or the role isn’t being taken seriously. “I hope that those controversies really just put a spotlight on the need for great school trustees,” Llewellyn said. “I want voters to know that school trustees can be there for them. They can represent voices, they can advocate on their behalf. There’s still a role to be had.” Smith hopes that all voters will take the election of school board trustees seriously, and said the position does have an impact on the entire community, and not just parents with children in school. “This has a huge impact on us now and in the future. What are we going to do if the kids don’t have education?”
