Trustees shouldn’t put up barriers to information

School Watch by Katherine Wagner
The Maple Ridge Pitt Meadows Times, February 05, 2010

Pitt Meadows parent Karen Georgi is puzzled: “Didn’t all the new trustees run on an open and transparent platform, with the promise that they would be open to public questions?”

Georgi, who is also PAC chair at Davie Jones Elementary, regularly attends Board of Education meetings and began asking questions about the local Statement of Financial Information (SOFI) report soon after it was released in December.

“I basically asked what happened and how they could have spent so much in six months? I got non-answers …had ‘proper process’ explained to me and (they) suggested a Freedom of Information request.”

Trustee expenses are included in the SOFI report covering the district fiscal year — July 1, 2008 to June 30, 2009. Individual expenses have increased by 40 per cent overall.

Orientation materials for SD42 trustees explain trustee professional development expenses are limited to $2,500 annually and there is a $420 individual allotment for home Internet. Trustees are provided with a laptop computer, there is a general trustee expense budget, and each trustee receives $5,800 of their annual compensation tax-free because it is deemed “unreceipted expenses.”

Past chair Kathie Ward racked up the highest overall expenses of $5,260.52 for the full year. However, new trustees Ken Clarkson and Eleanor Palis claimed expenses of $3,781.93 and $4,460.14, respectively, during their first half year in office.

An e-mail I sent to all trustees asking for the details of their expense claims prompted Trustees Clarkson, Palis, Ward and Vdovine to respond with some information.

Trustee Susan Carr believes the board can improve how it tracks and shares expense information. She confirms the board has been discussing the issue but at the same time, Carr is “not sure if people really care for the most part.”

Two trustees ignored the request.

Like Georgi, my inquiries about trustee expense claims prompted the suggestion I might be asked to file an FOI request.

Six weeks later, I have yet to receive a board response to my questions about expense approval and trustee accountability for personal spending of public money.

Freedom of information and privacy legislation is meant to protect the privacy of individuals, increase public access to government information, and make government more transparent.

The act is not supposed to be used by governments to avoid accountability for their decisions and actions. FOI requests are cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive. Forcing an individual to file an FOI request for answers to questions clearly in the public interest is an abuse of the legislation.

As stated on the office of the commissioner’s website, “The FOIPP Act is not meant to replace existing means of obtaining information.”

The Board of Education’s limited understanding of FOI legislation highlights their confused understanding of the role of elected trustees. This was underscored during the Jan. 27 public board meeting.

Without comment or discussion, trustees unanimously approved a letter written by a staff member and submitted Jan. 18 to the organization which represents school trustees — the B.C. School Trustees Association — for use in a brief to the Special Committee to review B.C.’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.

In point form, with no elaboration or rationale, the letter to the BCSTA requests significant changes to existing legislation.

Trustees propose charging fees for FOI requests after one hour of staff time spent retrieving the requested information.

Currently, fees can only be levied after three hours and are not applicable to requests that are “in the public interest.”

Trustees also approved a request to shield the personal information of employees who earn less than $75,000 from any public scrutiny. Currently, SOFI reports on the salary and expenses of employees who earn more than $75,000.

Given the implications of these proposed changes, I e-mailed all trustees for their individual rationales for voting to approve the letter.

In a telephone interview, board chair Ken Clarkson suggested the board passed the letter because it seemed like “something routine” during a meeting with a “packed agenda.”

In an e-mail, he later added, “While trustees were invited and able to add to (the letter), we were advised that the work is really that of the secretary- treasurer and the district’s FOI coordinator.”

Carr explained information access is not her area of expertise. “I want to focus on stuff that affects kids in the classroom now.”

None of the other trustees acknowledged the question.

Trustees could have discussed barriers to information access and their impact on time required to respond to requests. For example, many documents on the district website are scanned as images, making it impossible to search the documents using key words. Search engines cannot index the written information contained in a picture.

The 2004 FOIPP review committee recommended governments make full use of information technology in making information accessible to the public. In practice, a 2009 Vancouver Sun FOI request to have already public district SOFI report data simply made available in spreadsheet format is still unresolved.

Before voting to approve the letter, trustees could have publicly debated the accountability implications of permanently hiding salary and expense information for employees based solely on the dollar amount of their compensation package.

Or they might have discussed why monthly expenditure reports on the district website have not been updated since February 2009 and the preliminary 2009/10 budget is nowhere to be found.

It is a little more than a year since the new board of trustees was elected and installed in office.

Their report card grade for “Understanding of Governance Role” — C-minus.