Quebec is finally moving forward with its plan to modify school boards and how their representatives are chosen, but English school boards are looking into challenge the legislation in court.

Education Minister Francois Blais tabled Bill 86 on Friday, and its official title is lengthy: An Act to modify the organization and governance of school boards to give schools a greater say in decision-making and ensure parents’ presence within each school board’s decision-making body.

Despite saying for most of the past year that the provincial government was going to eliminate school boards entirely, then to decrease the number of boards in Quebec, the bill will leave the number of school boards intact.

However boards will be "encouraged" to co-operate and to merge certain yet-to-be defined services.

Under the Act, school boards will have less power over individual schools.

The government says school board elections will be abolished, but there will still be votes to choose school board councillors.

However the number of people on each board, and how they are chosen, will change.

Once the act becomes law, school boards will be formed of a new body of councillors that will include:

  • six parents with children at school, (one of whom must be the parent of a child with a disability)
  • six members of the community at large,
  • one teacher and one non-teacher,
  • two principals.

How they will be chosen

The parents will be voted onto the council by the school board’s parents’ committee.

The parents’ committee will then decide if it will appoint representatives from the community, or hold a vote with residents living in the school board’s territory to elect them.

At least 15 per cent of the parents have to vote to decide if they want to hold a vote to select the community members to the School Council. There will be "ministerial oversight" for this process.

The way the system is structured at the English Montreal School Board right now, of the 11 commissioners, four are parents. But they can't vote at council meetings, where the real change happens – a point they've been fighting for years.

"When it comes to actual decision-making, parents are not involved and parents feel ... commissioners are not representing their point of view, and this [new system] brings parents into the process," said Andrew Ross, a member of the EMSB parents' committee.

The teachers and principals will be chosen by their peers through a vote.

Community members can come from four different sectors: cultural or communications, municipal, employer, and sports or health.

Simplified operation?

Blais said this will simplify the way school boards operate, and give principals more say in how their schools operate.

He also said it will maintain the constitutional right of anglophone Quebecers to control school boards.

"The issue is not about elections, the issue is about democracy and for the minority to continue to control their schools, and I think with this bill today this control is promoted," said Blais.

The CAQ says the reforms the party was expecting are absent.

"This is usless, it's a waste of time for now. Maybe after all the deputies, all the MNAs work on it, maybe we will put something in this. But for now, for now, just like this, this is useless," said Jean-Francois Roberge, CAQ education critic.

Parti Quebecois education critic Alexandre Cloutier says he has doubts the bill would withstand a constitutional challenge.

"It's obvious for me that there will be a challenge of the law if ever this law is passed," he said.

Angela Mancini, chair of the EMSB, said she is not sure what problem the bill is trying to solve.

"If it is parental participation, why does it have to be a 200-page document?" said Mancini, pointing out that the existing boards already having parents as members -- but that those parents are not allowed to vote on board matters.

"It is part and parcel of the problem we've had with this particular minister," said Mancini.

"He is completely disconnected from the reality of the English community. He has not once set foot into any of our schools, he has not sat down with any of the community leaders or the board leaders to look at a solution that would help him to increase the parental participation."

The voter turnout in the last school board elections was very low for francophone boards, about 5 per cent -- but was four times higher with English boards, reaching 22 percent at the EMSB.

Ultimately Mancini is not sure Bill 86 would survive a Charter challenge for the right of the English community to operate its own school boards in Quebec. The English boards are pouring over the bill and looking into challenging it in court.