VSB brings in new capital plan, bullying policy

As schools shut down for the summer, the Vancouver School Board passed a few new policies that I thought were worth commenting on.
The first is a new policy and regulation and bullying and workplace harassment. They are updates on previous policies, with new clarifications after there were findings of bullying of staff by trustees last year. Those trustees were fired by the provincial government for failing to pass a balanced budget, not for bullying, but the bullying allegations and findings happened around the same time.
I wrote about the findings of bullying here.
So now the official trustee, Dianne Turner, appointed by the provincial government to replace the fired trustees, has approved updated policies to try to prevent anything similar happening again.
The policy defines personal harassment, which includes bullying, as “any inappropriate conduct, comment, display, action, or gesture directed at another that a reasonable person knows or ought to know would have the effect of creating an intimidating, humiliating, hostile, or offensive work environment. To constitute Personal Harassment there must be: a. repeated conduct, comments, displays, actions or gestures; or b. a single serious occurrence that has a lasting, harmful effect on a person.”
What I like about the policy is that it calls for a person who thinks they have been bullied or harassed to first talk to the person who they think bullied them.
“The trustee who believes a violation has occurred will engage in an individual private conversation with the trustee affected,” the policy reads. “Failing resolution through the private conversation the parties will engage the Board Chair, Vice-Chair or designate to gain resolution. If the concern is with the Board Chairperson, the concern should be raised with the Vice-Chairperson.”
While the policy recognizes that conciliatory measures may not be appropriate, at least the policy starts with that.
I like this because it is always more empowering and a better solution when two people in conflict can work it out amongst themselves, particularly for the person who feels like they are being bullied.
The second item of interest is the district’s new capital plan, which recognizes that more than half of VSB schools still need seismic upgrading and that in order to get that done, there will have to be five to seven schools completed each year to meet the 2030 deadline.
Three schools have been closed: Henderson Annex, Laurier Annex and Maquinna Annex. But even with those, capacity utilization fell slightly last year, due to declining enrolment, the report says.
The new capital plan does not mention school closures and instead focuses on building smaller, new schools to replace schools that need seismic upgrades. To me, that sounds very much like what the elected trustees wanted before the government imposed a 95-per-cent capacity utilization requirement on them, which they later removed.
Building smaller schools will save money in maintenance and energy costs and will also “allow the district to build better business cases for new schools required in growth areas.” The capital plan calls for one new school to be built each year in areas like downtown or south False Creek, where the numbers of kids are growing.
It’s an ambitious plan and whether it gets implemented or not will likely depend on what happens with the provincial government.
tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Three historical novels that bring the past vividly to life

I've just come from interviewing three authors -- Janie Chang, Kate Quinn and Jennifer Robson -- at Book Warehouse on Main Street.
All three have written historical novels featuring strong, resilient women and all three were pleasures to interview and extremely well informed on their subjects.

Robson is the author of Goodnight from London. It’s the story of an American journalist, Ruby Sutton, who travels to London during the Second World War to report from England. She soon finds herself in the middle of the London Blitz. Robson said tonight that she was inspired to write about a female journalist in the 1940s by her grandmother, who was a journalist in Vancouver. Robson also had fascinating first-person accounts of the London Blitz because of research she did for her doctoral thesis many years ago. She was able to use the transcripts from those interviews for her descriptions of London during the war. Robson also described her storytelling process, specifically in how Ruby's secrets make her vulnerable so that her character is deeper and more interesting. Robson is the author of three other novels and she lives in Toronto.

Kate Quinn is the author of The Alice Network, a book about a female spy during the First World War and an American socialite searching for a cousin lost in the Second World War. She has done an incredible amount of research about female spies during the First and Second World Wars, and her book is based on an actual spy ring called the Alice Network. She said she likes to write "badass" female characters and she's definitely done that in Eve, the hardened woman who was once a spy in the Great War. The book also includes one scene that has a real massacre as its inspiration -- the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane in France, where one village's entire population of 600 people was wiped out by German soldiers. One woman who survived and testifies in a trial of the perpetrators became a minor character in the book. Quinn is the author of more than 10 other historical novels and is from California.

Janie Chang is the author most recently of Dragon Springs Road, a novel about a little girl who loses her mother in Shanghai in the early days of the 20th century. It's a heartbreaking and fascinating story about what it's like to grow up abandoned and to live as a Eurasian -- half white and half Chinese -- at that time in China. Chang is also the author of Three Souls, and like that novel, Dragon Springs Road weaves in some magical realism in the form of a fox spirit, something Chang said is common mythology in Chinese culture. I reviewed her two novels for the Vancouver Sun and the review of Dragon Springs Road can be found here.
tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Education and social issues in the throne speech

The Liberal throne speech made some spectacular promises for all levels of education in B.C. and for helping society's most vulnerable.
Even though the Liberals and their throne speech will likely get voted down on Thursday, it's worth noting what was promised, even if just to compare it with what is said in the future or what the NDP-Greens promise, should they gain power.
First, the Liberals promised a royal commission on education. What is a royal commission? It's a major public inquiry into any given issue. The last one for education was in 1988 in B.C., so it has been a while. None of the parties ran on a platform calling for a royal commission in the last election.
Questions that might be asked, according to the throne speech, include: "How do we train teachers? What do we teach? How do we fund schools? How do we engage the community? How do we make sure testing and standards remain rigorous? How do we reduce conflict in the system and ensure student needs are always put first?"
The Liberals also promised a review of the per-pupil funding formula, something now promised by all three major parties in B.C.
The Liberals also pledged to invest $1 billion in childcare and early childhood education, something they said wasn't necessary during the election. The NDP campaigned on a $1.5-billion $10-a-day childcare program, while the Greens said they would expand the education system to cover three and four year olds. The plan outlined in the throne speech would expand subsidies and create 60,000 new spaces. The throne speech also promised that partnerships would be explored with school districts, so that childcare spaces could be in elementary schools. So on childcare, the Liberals made promises somewhere in between the NDP and the Greens.
The Liberals promised a poverty reduction strategy, something they said wasn't necessary just weeks before the election campaign. When Vancouver Sun reporter Lori Culbert and I wrote about working poverty this past March, the Liberals said they were focused on getting everyone a job and a poverty strategy wasn't necessary. The federal government is also working on a national poverty reduction strategy.
They've promised to fully fund adult basic education and English as a Second Language programs, both promises the NDP and Greens also made during the election campaign. Many of the people featured in the recent series about working poverty said it is nearly impossible to afford an education without those supports and without an education, it's impossible to get a better job.
The Liberals also promised to raise welfare rates by $100 a month and annual increases in the future and to increase disability assistance as well. They're going to expand the Single Parent Employment Initiative and provide a basic income to all kids aging out of government care.
These are all wonderful promises, even if they will likely not see the light of day under a Liberal government. Simply the fact the Liberals are talking about these issues is a significant move forward.
tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Liberals promise basic income, free tuition for youth from care

Even though last week's Liberal throne speech is unlikely to be worth the paper it was written on, it did contain some amazing proposals that merit further discussion.
Most surprising was the promise to introduce a basic income support for youth aged 18 to 24 who have left government care. The B.C. Liberal government has refused to recognize that these young people need more support past 19 and has insisted that the programs that are in place are adequate.
In 2014, Vancouver Sun reporter Lori Culbert and myself wrote a series of articles about what happens when foster children turn 19 and lose their supports. We also did a cost-benefit analysis that found that for every dollar spent supporting foster children to age 24, the benefits to society would amount to $1.11.
Since then, several young people, including Alex Gervais and Paige Gauchier, have died either shortly before or shortly after aging out of care.
But the Liberals steadfastly stuck to their story that the programs B.C. already had were good enough.
Interestingly, it was the Green Party's platform that said they would introduce a basic income for former foster children. Their platform also said the party would introduce a pilot project for a basic income for everyone, something that is already underway in Ontario.
The NDP promised to increase funding to support youth aging out of care by $10 million a year, to increase educational supports in K-12 education for children in care and to work with universities and colleges to expand an existing tuition waiver program.
The tuition waiver program was started by Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, who got Vancouver Island University and the University of British Columbia to agree to allow former foster children to attend those schools tuition-free. Since then 10 universities and colleges have come on board.
The Liberal throne speech took that one a step further too — they pledged to provide free post-secondary tuition for all children in care.
Yesterday, the NDP-Green MLAs voted down two bills the Liberals tried to pass, even though both bills were proposals made by the two parties to begin with. It looks like on Thursday the Liberals will lose the confidence of the Leglislature and with that, their government will be over. It remains to be seen whether the Lieutentant-Governor will call a new election or allow the NDP-Greens a chance.
But either way, the Liberals must now stick with their promise to support a basic income for kids aging out of care. They've promised it -- and many other things -- in their throne speech and there's no backing down now.
tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Education in B.C. is a political hot potato

Here are links to two recent stories I've written. The first is in the Globe and Mail and is about the provincial uncertainty and how it is affecting the implementation of the teachers' Supreme Court win.
Read it here.
The second is a column in the Courier newspaper, which is about the political situation at the Vancouver School Board that has come to light after the departure of Superintendent Scott Robinson.
Read that one here.

Comments and story ideas accepted to tracy.sherlock@gmail.com.

Book Review: Hunger by Roxane Gay

Hunger:
A Memoir of My Body
By Roxane Gay
HarperCollinsCanada
Release date: June 13, 2017

Roxane Gay is a bestselling author, but she also happens to be obese. At her heaviest she weighed 577 pounds.
Hunger: A Memoir of My Body is Gay’s story of how and why she became so overweight.
“I don’t know how things got so out of control, or I do. This is my refrain. Losing control of my body was a matter of accretion. I began eating to change my body. I was willful in this,” Gay writes.
At 12, Gay was gang raped by a boy she thought she was in love with and a group of his friends. It’s a shocking story, one that Gay tells with heartbreaking honesty and straightforward truth.
“When it was all over, I pushed my bike home and I pretended to be the good daughter my parents knew, the good girl, the straight-A student,” she writes.
Gay told no one what had happened. Instead, she started eating.
“With every day that went by, I hated myself more. I disgusted myself more. I couldn’t get away from him. I couldn’t get away from what those boys did. … Hating myself became as natural as breathing,” she writes.
She ate for comfort and she ate to build a protective armour for her body.
“I was swallowing my secrets and making my body expand and explode. I found ways to hid in plain sight, to keep feeling a hunger that could never be satisfied — the hunger to stop hurting,” she writes.
Gay, who lives in Lafayette, Indiana, is the bestselling author of Bad Feminist, a collection of essays that made the New York Times bestseller list. She also wrote the novel Untamed State and the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti. She’s also an English professor at Purdue University.
She stoically tells her devastating story, not looking for pity or outrage, but expressing a deep need for others to understand her life.
Gay has dug deep into her own psyche and shared the results with readers in this unflinching, revelatory memoir. She speaks of things that aren’t often talked about – what it’s like to use a seatbelt expander, how humiliating it is to worry about whether a chair will hold you, or what it’s like to visit a doctor for anything other than your weight when you are morbidly obese.
She talks about a lifelong aversion to anyone touching her and an inability of letting anyone treat her with love and affection. She tells how when a friend offers her a bag of chips to eat on a long plane ride, she replies, “People like me don’t get to eat food like that in public.” She writes about how hard it is to go the gym, because people tend to stare and give her constant encouragement when she just wants to be left alone.
“There are days when I am feeling braver. There are days when I am feeling, finally, like I can shed some of this protection I have amassed and be okay,” she writes.
Hunger is not an easy read, but that’s due to the painfully traumatic subject matter, not the writing. Gay is a flawless, smooth writer, whose story is harrowing and all too familiar.
tracy.sherlock@gmail.com

Book Review: The Party by Vancouver author Robyn Harding

The Party
By Robyn Harding
Scout Press
Release date: June 6, 2017


As a parent of teenagers, I sometimes thought about all of the things that could go wrong. I’m like that – a little neurotic, a bit of a worrier.
I considered car crashes, bullying, sexual assault. I did the dance between wanting to be the cool parent and wanting to keep my children safe.
While I can breathe a little sigh of relief that my children are both adults now, a parent’s worry is never truly done. As they say, little kids, little problems; big kids, big problems.
In The Party, author Robyn Harding explores the idea of a teenage sweet-16 sleepover gone very wrong. Very, very wrong. In fact, someone even loses an eye.
Whose fault is it? That’s the central question in The Party. Is it the hosts’ fault – the parents of the girl whose birthday it was? The dad bought a bottle of champagne for the teens, the mom took a sleeping pill and drank wine to get a good sleep with the party going on. Were they negligent? Should they pay up for the lost eye?
The Party explores those questions while it exposes the secrets in the lives of everyone involved in the story. The Sanders family lives in San Francisco and appears to lead an idyllic life – key word: appears. Not everything is as it seems. Kim, the mom, is thinking of having an affair. Jeff, the dad, works too hard and even took a micro dose of LSD to ease his stress. Hannah, the daughter who is about to turn 16, is looking to leave her safe group of friends and link up with the cool kids, who are decidedly unsafe.
Bullying, sexting, threats and more are commonplace for the teens in this story, at least one of whom is either a budding psychopath or a badly neglected young girl.
One tragic incident destroys many lives in this fun, but devastating, story of a family falling apart. The narrative shifts perspective with each chapter, a technique that allows the reader to know more than any individual character in the story.
Vancouver author Robyn Harding says on her website that she has written four chick-lit novels, a young adult novel and a comedic memoir with an environmental focus. She’s also a screenwriter and executive producer of an independent film called the Steps.
The Party should catapult her work into the fiction mainstream – it’s well written, fast paced and topical.
Tracy.sherlock@gmail.com