Once again, we have had to file a request under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy (FOIP) Act in order to, hopefully, get some answers about what exactly is going on over at Pembina Hills.
Unfortunately, if past experience tells us anything, we’re going to have to wait a long time to get any results — if we get any results at all.
It was more than a year ago that we filed a FOIP request to try to figure out the reasoning behind the sudden departure of former Supt. Richard Harvey. The response to our request was a fee estimate of about $4,000, which is prohibitively expensive, to say the least. While going through the process to appeal those fees, Harvey’s replacement Egbert Stang has also left the division under murky circumstances. One such incident could very well be a chance occurrence, but losing two superintendents in one year raises some serious red flags. Our real concern, however, is why we’re being forced to use the FOIP process to get any information about what a publicly funded body is doing.
Not only is the school division publicly funded, the board of trustees is meant to be accountable to the public. That’s the whole reason we go through the process of electing trustees instead of letting bureaucrats make all the decisions in secret.
It’s about accountability, and despite several of the new trustees having preached the importance of communication and accountability in their election campaigns, the board seems to have forgotten why they’re there. While many parents and staff at the division are undoubtedly concerned about this, every single taxpayer should also be concerned. We’re all paying for these clowns to tell us they can’t tell us anything.
Between Westlock, Westlock County and Clyde, municipal taxpayers forked over a total of just over $3.5 million to the board in 2011. That’s close to $270 for each of the approximately 13,000 people in those three municipalities. That doesn’t include the other Pembina Hills municipalities, and it doesn’t include funding received directly from the province.
How do the trustees even sleep at night refusing to be accountable to the very people who elected them, and knowing how much public money goes into their organization? We just want some answer; after all, we paid for them.
