Press Release April 24, 1985
A parents rights advocate today called for the dismantling of the school board system as one way to help youth better prepare for the future. Mrs. Audain, Co-ordinator of an advocacy service for parents said school boards have become irrelevant to education and in fact were an obstacle to meeting student needs. By being a buffer between parents and their schools, school boards prevented alienated parents from their duty to obtain the best education for their children.
Mrs. Audain said with the removal of school boards, parents would then sit on the managing boards of individual schools and would achieve far greater responsiveness than the present arm’s length system now in place. The school board is a totally unnecessary level of government, which is not only expensive and over-administered but also susceptible to partisan politics and captive of many vested interest groups such as teacher unions.
Parents are told to leave education to the experts but those who feel they should be involved too often are made to feel inadequate and unwelcome. With this hands-off attitude, parents become deskilled in their competencies and the cumulative effect is that parents fail to be useful resources to their children in career planning, character-building and employment seeking. “Parents cannot take their meaningful role in supervising their children’s education as long as we have this colonial structure called school boards telling parents what’s best for them” says Mrs. Audain.
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