Trillium Lakelands District School Board (TLDSB) was formed in 1998 – with the amalgamation of the Victoria County Board of Education, the Muskoka Board of Education, and the Haliburton County Board of Education.
Today, the board covers a geographically-large and diverse region in the heart of Ontario’s cottage country.
It’s a superboard in size, alright; approximately 11,500 sq. km. There are 16,899 students at its 40 elementary schools, seven secondary schools, and six alternate education and training centres.
While the government of the day pitched the boards as ‘too big to fail’ one wonders, as the National Post touched on in a 2022 piece, if they are too big to succeed.
Case in point the prickly procedural decision to make students walk 1.6 km to elementary schools and 3.2 km to high school this year, when they were bused in the past.
Perhaps this policy works well in urban Lindsay and Bracebridge, but how about on the more rural roads coming in and out of Haliburton and Minden? The busing review done in the County’s two main towns is apparently similar to ones done in Bracebridge, Huntsville, Kirkield, Kilworthy and Fenelon Falls.
Incidentally, TLDSB doesn’t factor in things such as sidewalks in these reviews. Posted speed limits do factor in. In other words, it is up to Dysart et al and Minden Hills to put in sidewalks if they believe students are at risk. Perhaps, they could get around the speed limit issue by suddenly making all roads upwards of 40 km/hr in town, but they are not likely to do that for safety reasons.
The recent decision not to open Hal High’s cafeteria is also clearly questionable, as discussed in a recent editorial by Mike Baker. The fact the board is going with a contract for all schools – and that contractor cannot find sufficient staff – should result in TLDSB adopting a common-sense approach and finding alternatives, such as hiring a local who has offered to run the caf in Haliburton.
It appears to us that the role of elected officials – trustees – has also been watered down. In the days of the Haliburton County Board of Education, board members were allowed to freely express their opinions about issues. Today, trustees have to close ranks and speak as one board. There is no room for dissension lest they be slapped on the wrist. More and more, the message is controlled by communications hires.
It’s no wonder parents and the community feel disenfranchised by seemingly silly decisions.
We used to live in a world where communities could come up with their own solutions. Nowadays, the ship has often sailed before constituents even know about a problem or change.
It all reminds me of studying journalism at Carleton University back in the days of the dinosaur. Profs had us read Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message.
McLuhan created the phrase to mean that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. With all due respect to the hard-working folks at TLDSB, and our duly-elected school board trustee, one wonders if TLDSB is indeed too big to succeed.
