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‘Academic excellence’ an issue in school board election

Five candidates for two Whistler trustee positions

Academic excellence will be a central issue for Sea to Sky’s next school board, if one candidate has anything to say about it.

Chris Vernon-Jarvis, who has served a term on the board of the Howe Sound School District, is running a second time to represent Whistler on the Sea to Sky corridor’s board of education. He’s one of five candidates jostling for two Whistler school trustee positions.

Other candidates for the two Whistler seats include Amy Allen, Christine Buttkus, Rachael Lythe and Connie Rabold, who lives in Squamish.

Candidates for the Pemberton seat include incumbent Dave Walden, who most recently served as chair of the school board, as well as John Burleson, who lost against Walden in the previous election.

The two Squamish seats are being contested by three people: incumbents Rick Price and Andrea Beaubien, and challenger Terrill Patterson.

A father to five children who’ve attended Whistler Secondary School, Vernon-Jarvis told Pique in an interview that there’s “unfinished business” he couldn’t attend to in his first term.

“Typically the board has to look at an awful lot of business,” he said. “In other words, keeping schools running, management stuff. I think the board is now looking at what it can do directly to improve academic success.”

Generally, Vernon-Jarvis said, a board of education spends a lot of time managing the business of a school district — matters such as the district’s budget, policies and capital plan.

“It has to deal with everything from the drains on the soccer pitches to the heating in the schools to bus drivers and everything,” he said. “Without all these people and all these things, the business doesn’t work.”

Now, however, he said the board has come to a place where it can focus more closely on improving academic success. And he said the board is already discussing ways it can do that, though he wasn’t specific on the matters.

“I wouldn’t want to rule out anything the board could do by suggesting something else,” Vernon-Jarvis said. “I think the most important thing is to engage our partners in this idea that academic success is the main criteria of schools.

“School boards very rarely sit down and discuss what academic success looks like, what would make you proud of it and how to improve it as a whole.”

Amy Allen is also jostling for one of the two Whistler seats. A mother to a son who’s attending Myrtle Philip elementary school, she’s running because she feels the school board needs someone who will be going to school in Whistler for a long time.

“I just see it that there needs to be representation from somebody whose child is going to be actively participating in the school system and going through,” she said.

“I feel strongly too that schools and students are an important component of the community, and I want to ensure that students remain in schools that are in their community.”

For Christine Buttkus, also a candidate in Whistler, the spark that got her to run was a lack of candidates coming forward — that was before five people put their names forward.

She has a son in kindergarten at Myrtle Philip and is concerned about possible school closures during the 2010 Olympics. A consultant to a number of non-profit organizations, she presently works with the Whistler Children’s Centre.

“The mandate of school boards has been or is in the process of being extended a little bit to cover the earliest students, those even before they reach kindergarten,” she said. “I think I’m well positioned to bring the partners together.”

Despite living in Squamish, Connie Rabold thinks she has a lot to bring to the school board through a position on one of the Whistler seats. She has long been a member of the District Parents Advisory Council and a member of her children’s school planning council for several years.

A communications manager with the City of North Vancouver, she has one child going to school at Mamquam Elementary School’s French immersion program and another who goes to Garibaldi Highlands Elementary.

The key issues for the next school board will be funding and the board’s budget, according to Rabold.

“They’re very sensitive items and they’re going to have to be handled very carefully,” she said, adding that class sizes and composition, as well as school rankings are all things the board should pay attention to.

Rick Price, who served as vice-chair of the previous school board, is running again as a Squamish trustee. A former principal of Myrtle Philip Community School and a father to two grown children who attended school in Squamish, he feels that a single term on the school board isn’t enough for him to make a valuable contribution to the district.

“There’s quite a learning curve to being on a school board,” Price said. “It seems to make sense that you serve at least a second term in order to take advantage of that.”

One of the biggest issues for the next school board will be the budget, according to Price, who said that the board will need to focus on providing a “quality education” to students with reduced budgets.

“Planning a budget means deciding what to cut or what not to fund in a lot of ways,” he said. “It’s a challenge to maintain all of the essential services in classrooms while still maintaining a reasonable infrastructure as well.

“You’ve got schools and school bus facilities which need upgrading and at the same time we have direct services to students in the way of class sizes, which need a good healthy budget.”

John Burleson is challenging Dave Walden for the Pemberton seat a second time. Scheduling conflicts made it difficult to arrange an interview with Pique , but he nevertheless sent a press release.

The founder and president of the Pemberton Baseball Association, he is also a former two-term co-chair of the Signal Hill Parents’ Advisory Council and a parent representative on the School Planning Council.

He wants to make the school board “more accessible and accountable” to the public by ensuring that parent and youth concerns get a voice at the board.

“Now is a time for change,” he wrote in his statement. “The elected trustee from Pemberton should be an advocate for the parents and children of our community and work to build a better vision for the future.”

Issues he intends to address include school enrolment, a growing need for special needs teachers and funding, as well as a perceived lack of opportunity for students in the dramatic arts and music programs.

Starting in 2009, the Howe Sound School District will be renamed the Sea to Sky School District in an effort to more accurately reflect the communities represented by the district. The district includes areas from Furry Creek to D’Arcy and several areas in between.