During their election campaigns they preached openness and a more transparent school board.
Now, after his first official meeting with the new trustees, Don Sabo wants them to live up their promises.
Sabo, chair of the District 57 District Parent Advisory Council, is asking trustees to grant access to annual projected enrollment figures for each school. He said during the last round of school closures in 2010, when seven area schools were closed permanently to make up for a $7 million budget shortfall, the school district pointed to declining enrollments at those schools as justification for closing them.
As a result of the closures, enrollments at some schools increased and in some cases necessitated the use of portable classrooms because they were over capacity. Last year, three elementary schools were above their student capacity, including Heritage (136 per cent of capacity), Glenview (122 per cent) and College Heights elementary (112 per cent).
"They release the projected enrollments when they want to close schools, but now that they're closed and we're having capacity issues with the current schools they refuse to release projected enrollment figures, so we have a double standard there," said Sabo. "It's not top-secret stuff."
Sabo said parents want to know the estimate of how many students will be at each school when senior administration goes through its annual organizational process in March.
"If you live across from an elementary school, that school could be full and you might have to ship your child to another school," said Sabo. "That's why parents should have access and be able to see projected enrollment figures per school."
Trustee Trish Bella agreed enrollment projections should be made public and said she would raise that topic at the trustees' next meeting with senior administration.
In July, District 57 superintendent Brian Pepper denied Sabo's request for the release of figures for each of the schools because those estimates are at best guesses that could change considerably by the end of September, the time when the province's per student funding is determined. Pepper could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.
Sabo has also requested the school board release the list of each school's PAC membership, which he said would give the District 57 DPAC more voting clout when it attends meetings of the B.C. Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils (BCCPAC). PAC members who attend the BCCPAC meetings will also be reimbursed half of the $75 registration fee if they belong to a DPAC.
"We've been asking by the school district if we can access that information and for three years they've denied us," said Sabo. "We are a registered society and under the Society Act we are supposed to have a list of our membership. But during the past three years, the protection of information thing has always trumped our request, and we're looking for trustees and this new board to find a way of being able to provide us that information, with the consent of the PAC executives at the schools."
Bella suggested at Monday's DPAC meeting that PAC members who want to remain anonymous could simply check a box that could be added to the application form, and that would protect their right to privacy.
"Right now there isn't anything like that so we can't give any information and the district can't turnover that information," Bella said. "If we can have that put in place, then those who chose to get involved at the district level can continue on and then they are brought into the loop more of what DPAC is doing."
