In its 13-year history, Parents for Choice in Education (PCE), an advocacy organization that promotes parental control and expanded school choice, has never endorsed candidates in trustee elections, until now.
Cindy Dubray (wards 1 and 2), Joanny Liu (wards 3 and 4), Jennifer Steward (wards 6 and 7), Tyzen Ario (wards 11 and 13) and Darvin Zuch (wards 12 and 14), are the candidates endorsed by PCE for the Calgary Board of Education Board of Trustees election. No Calgary Catholic School District or current CBE trustees were endorsed.
Endorsed candidates were chosen based on a PCE-made survey sent to all trustee candidates. These candidates have been specifically targeted by progressive activists over their pro-parent stands, according to a PCE-issued press release.
Tyzen Ario said that his main policies and platform include communication, finance and student results.
“I want to increase transparency, there needs to be a very clear line of communication between the schools and the parents. The second one is accountability. It’s very important that taxpayer money is being used very carefully and very well and I want to take a very close look at the CBE’s budget to make sure that we’re getting the best value we can from every dollar spent,” he said.
Ario said that the curriculum should be refocused on the core competencies like reading, writing, math and science.
Darvin Zuch said that parents have the primary responsibility in the lives of children and when they are at school, there needs to be a high level of transparency coming home. Zuch also said that classrooms as a whole need more funding.
“Certainly that funding comes from the province, but there’s a lot of opportunity to look for places inside the school system for that funding. We have about 50 per cent of our CBE staff in front of kids full time, the other 50 are doing administration and other work,” he said.
“We need, as trustees, to step forward and find out how we can get more of those resources in the classroom.”
PCE Executive Director John Hilton-O’Brien said that in his experience, many parents are still looking for the right candidate at the trustee level, despite being under a week away from election day.
“I have long since lost track of the number of emails that have come into my email box saying, Can you give us a suggestion about who to vote for in Ward x?” he said.
Corporate sponsors are playing bigger roles in trustee elections, Hilton-O’Brien said. Parents deserve to be heard just as loudly as the people who “write the big cheques,” he said.
With classroom supports and complexity remaining as a main tension point during the ongoing Alberta teachers’ strike, Hilton-O’Brien said that if teachers are feeling unsupported, a large part of that falls on trustees.
“(Feeling unsupported) means we’re not spending our education money efficiently, that’s on the trustees. They decide the governing policies and they decide how money will be spent. We want to reduce classroom size, that’s on trustees. Do we want to keep teachers safe in the classroom? That’s on trustees. Do we want to reduce classroom complexity? Trustees,” he said.
“The fact is that we are not managing resources on a school board level in a way that supports classroom teachers.”
