By Pepper Parr

September 3rd, 2021

BURLINGTON, ON

 

Curtis Ennis started his new job as the Director of Education of the Halton District School Board on August 1^st.  There was a lot of work to be done and Ennis was confident that the staff he had was more than up to the job.

His job was to get to know them better and to get to know as much as he could about the Halton Region with its 2,934 elementary teachers, 1,373 secondary teachers and 2,500 non-teaching and support staff.  Add to that the more than 200 principals and vice-principals that are on the front line.

Ennis came to Halton Region from the Toronto District School Board.  His first career choice was not teaching – he studied business at Ryerson and spent more than a decade in the financial sector including a stint as an Assistant Manager with Bank of Nova Scotia.

It was when he found himself in front of students while volunteering in a school that he found his true calling.  “The missing link in my life was waiting for me in those classrooms” explained Ennis.

He returned to the classroom – this time as a student at York University where he earned a degree and was ready for a classroom filled with students.

Ennis takes a welcoming approach to what he does. “I made everyone of my students feel welcome; that I wanted them in my classroom and that they knew I was there to help them.

“I said good morning to every student and good day when they left the classroom.  They knew I was happy to see them.”

Curtis Ennis is a Jamaican.  He was born on the northern part of the Island – has four brothers and a sister.

His cultural base is West Indian.  That he was Black became evident when he came to Canada. ” I knew I was different; that awareness is something you learn to live with and adapt to as best you can.

“Yes it has an impact on you but I was fortunate to come out of it with an understanding that I was different but so were they”

“The big lesson for me was that  what matters is that there be a sense of equity – that we are all born equal.

“That has been the driving force that guided me as a teacher and what I took with me when I moved into management with the Toronto District School Board.

“It is what guides me as I get the feel of the people of Halton.”

He is married with four daughters; all study at the undergraduate level.  He and his wife Beverly; 29 years as a couple, face the challenges that every couple experience.

Heading up an organization that has more employees than the Ford motor plant in Oakville is not something you run into.

The approach Ennis takes is to know your people at the granular level – that takes time but if you are open and transparent and make it clear that you are there to listen you can lead and you will succeed.

The challenge for Ennis is just that much bigger as he, along with the rest of the province deal with having to operate while the 4th wave of the pandemic is dealt with; the predictions that by October the 4th wave will be worse then the third wave don’t make it easy.

Ennis leaves you with the impression that you take it all in stride.

During his Director’s Report at his first Board of Trustees meeting earlier this week we got a sense as to how he works with his people.

He delegates and follows through.

During the meeting we learned that the Halton District school Board is going to report a deficit for the third year in a row.

We don’t know yet what kind of a spender Ennis will be nor do we know what his big picture is.  Right now he is working with a Multi Year Plan the trustees approved last year.

There are some big issues and still some emotional baggage from the closing of the two high schools.

We learned that the expansion of Nelson High School needed to handle the students from Bateman that now attend Nelson is not complete.  The library is on the second floor and the second floor and the second elevator is not in place yet.

Curtis Ennis will-work his way through the problems; working with his team adapting to the pandemic problems.  We will need a year to get a sense as to just how well he is working with the trustees.

Right now they are as proud as punch with the choice they made.

 

By Pepper Parr

August 24th, 2021

BURLINGTON, ON

 

It turned out to be a more active and somewhat hectic term of office  for Stuart Miller who retired this month as the Halton District School Board Director of Education.

During the early part of his appointment the decision was made to hold a Program and Accommodation Review (PAR);  a process defined in a school board pupil accommodation review policy, undertaken by a school board to determine the future of a school or group of schools.

It proved to be contentious and divisive and ended up with the closing of two of the city’s seven high schools.

Miller’s tenure ended in the waning days of a pandemic that threw the education sector into a tail spin from which Miller said he doesn’t expect will come to an end for 18 months to a year.

With the active part of a career as an educator coming to an end Miller looks back at what he managed to achieve and has come to the conclusion that equity and inclusion are the words that sum up what education is about.

Miller is passionate about his view that every student is entitled to the best education we can give them.

“The pandemic highlighted where we are not meeting that challenge” said Miller

Adding, “the classroom is what makes education real – the casual conversation between a teacher and a student doesn’t happen in a virtual setting.

“There are some subjects, some situations and some students who excel in a virtual setting but that doesn’t and should suggest that we need more virtual experiences.

“There are those that learn a little slower than others; being slower shouldn’t be a reason to be left behind.

“I was fortunate”, said Miller “to have a staff that loved what they do.  It was my good fortune to watch teachers grow into principals and some principals become Superintendents.

“The struggle for my staff during the pandemic “was to find ways to insert some normality into situations that were far from normal.  The mental health of our students is always a concern but this pandemic brought to the surface the struggles the students have.  We had to pivot and find the resources to deal with these situations that began to overwhelm us.

“In a classroom you spot the student who is struggling – in a virtual setting it is another matter.

“The classroom teachers let me see just how professional they are – they were thrown into a situation they were not trained for – in a matter of days they had to learn how to use new technology and come up with different ways to teach. They were no longer able to turn to the blackboard and illustrate – there were no blackboards in that virtual classroom.

“The technology we had at the beginning was pretty rudimentary – that changed over time and going virtual began to be a little easier. Most of the teachers were able to make the leap from a classroom full of students to a computer screen.

“The students watched as their teachers adapted and in the process learned that they too could adapt.  There were some positives.

During the last week serving as the Director of Education Miller wasn’t certain that the system would not have to once again fall back to a virtual setting – “if that does happen we will be much more prepared.”

Equity has always been an issue for Miller who will say that we are not there yet.  Inclusion is a large part of equity – Miller believes significant strides have been made

Miller talks about what was achieved with the PAR that closed two high schools and emphasizes the upside.

The students who went from Lester B. Pearson to M.M. Robinson had 20 additional course choices and 10 additional extra curricular offerings.

There are now Community Pathway programs at M.M. Robinson and Nelson.

Aldershot High School, which looked as if it might be closed. is now one of the “hot” schools in the system.  The iStem program that came out of the PAR is now consistently over subscribed and there are now iStem programs in Milton and Oakville.

A program they stumbled into proved to be one of the best things Stuart Miller did – when the opportunity was not much more than an idea Miller and his staff were able to research, build community support and create something that became a stellar program Board wide.

Before Miller got into education he was working with a private company in the food sector and earning $30k a year which was very good money in the 80’s.

He left that work to become a teacher for $18k a year.  “The difference was that I was very happy” said Miller

Stuart Miller is still a young man who will be around education for a long time yet.  There have been some job offers and there is an opportunity in the north with the Indigenous community that he is excited about.

The Gazette found Miller to be very accessible. He would never duck an issue – he was quick to realize when he didn’t get it quite right.

He had a board of trustees that held him to account.  He will never forget the day that ward 5 trustee Amy Collard blind-sided him over his decision to close Bateman High  School.  She was passionate about keeping that school open and she wasn’t wrong.

We expect to hear more about Stuart Miller in the years ahead – the world of education isn’t finished with him yet – and he isn’t finished with education.

By Ryan O’Dowd: Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

April 18th, 2021

BURLINGTON, ON

 

Burlington NDP federal candidate, Nick Page, championed universal basic income(UBI) as the most impactful solution to Canada’s wealth gap in his interview with the Gazette. Page’s campaign will focus on a more equitable society for all members, he discussed building back a better Canada post-COVID-19, UBI’s role in combating poverty as well as how it benefits the economy, expanding healthcare, as well as electoral reform and how it may be the path to meaningful climate change action.

Page began with his vision for a post-pandemic Canada, focusing on re-thinking social security to avoid continued difficult economic times in the face of COVID-19 and whatever else the future holds.

“So the big thing for me, for building back better, is finding a way to make sure that everyone has access to the resources they need to have, food and shelter, without needing to worry about having a job that might go away to the pandemic or automation or to whatever is coming in the future. I am very interested in seeing a universal basic income of some kind implemented so that no matter what happens, everyone at least has the safety net they need to survive no matter what the outcome is,” said Page.

As of today, UBI is not on the NDP official party plan, instead what the party proposes is to “build toward” guaranteed livable income, which is not only less committal but also describes a different system.

A guaranteed liveable income establishes a baseline of earnings deemed “liveable,” if someone is not meeting that baseline their income will be supplemented, this process would essentially expand on existing social safety nets. UBI is much more comprehensive, as Page explains, and aims to cycle the money distributed to all citizens through the economy, theoretically helping not just those below the poverty line but small businesses as well.

“UBI should be just a flat amount of money for everyone regardless of how much money you make. So it’s really simple, you don’t have to worry about jumping through hoops to apply. It’s a really difficult thing to get on social support in this country, and just having it be easy and simple would save a lot of bureaucracy and make people’s lives better.

“So the great thing is when everyone has access to the money to buy food and shelter and to spend a little bit on extras like maybe going to a movie once a year, kind of thing, you’re just spending that money. It’s money that’s going from the government to people, to businesses and it’s circling. It’s taking money that is sometimes just spent sitting in offshore bank accounts from the really rich and the corporation’s and just getting it moving, it lets small businesses benefit because there are more people in the community to spend money on small businesses, instead of having to go through Amazon,” said Page.

As for how Canada would afford such measures, Page alluded to taxing the super-rich which the NDP official party platform identifies for their current agenda, without UBI, as a one-per-cent wealth tax applied to all households with assets exceeding $10 million.

Page discussed the importance of expanding our healthcare system to cover such areas as dental, optometric, and pharmaceutical. Tying benefits to employment in the current system “screws” the lower class, said Page.

“Right now you can go to the dentist if you have a good job but if you don’t have a good job you neither have dental coverage or the money to pay the dentist, so you’re screwed. If you don’t have a good job, you don’t have optometry coverage in Ontario. And so by decoupling those from jobs, from having a good job, you help everyone out. You also help the businesses not have to pay for insurance employees like that, which is a big expense for some companies like smaller companies who still need to pay benefits to their employees. That’s a cost they don’t need to have, they only really have it because the government doesn’t come through. And it’s interesting because that came about from wage tax in the US back in World War Two. It was a way to get around wage taxes by giving people more benefits, and then it just kind of became how we do things,” said Page.

One of Justin Trudeau’s most often maligned broken election promises was his vow that the 2015 election would be the last under the first past the post system. Page puts forward a case for a proportional representation system which would lead to federal representation more accurately reflecting the popular vote. Page also alludes to the use of ranked ballots which would theoretically diminish so-called “strategic voting,” particularly in conjunction with proportional representation. You would rank the candidates in order of preference so you don’t need to be dictated by who can win, and your vote would be more meaningfully represented in government.

“You have some of the people who are elected to government assigned to specific districts, and some of the people elected to government are assigned from a party list. And you do the normal voting in a district, probably with ranked voting to figure out who represents that district. And then you use the country-wide proportional ballots. So if, for example, the Green Party gets 8% across the country, it doesn’t all have to be focused on their one riding in Vancouver, or Victoria river is exactly to get a seat, they could have 8% votes across the country, and they’d get 8% of the seats, we would bump them up off their party list, and that way that 8% of people in our country would actually be listened to, they have a voice in government, as opposed to right now, where if after the 2015 election Trudeau only had, votes from like 38% of people, but he got to make all of the decisions because of how first past the post, but he should have had to work with people to make decisions after 2015,” said Page.

Page noted proportional representation may be the best opportunity to implement a government to deal with climate change.

“I don’t think any party with a majority would do what needs to be done to deal with climate change so I think proportional representation or some sort of voting change is what it’s going to take to get the environment under control,” said Page.

In the 2019 federal election, the Green Party received 6.6% of the popular vote and scored 3 seats out of 337, based on the methodology outlined in the 2016 report of the House of Commons Special Committee on Electoral Reform under a proportional representation system the Green Party would have scored 22 seats from the same percentage of the popular vote.

If we accept more Green Party seats at the table correlates to more climate change action then Page’s correlation between electoral reform and environmental action may have merit.

NDP candidate Nick Page has a Math degree in Computer Science and Combinatorics & Optimization from the University of Waterloo, Nick has worked in data analysis, online content creation on Twitch, and is now doing tech consulting in the board game design industry.

There are no campaign events scheduled as of today for the Burlington NDP candidate but the Gazette will monitor this as it proceeds.