Competing for a thankless job

Yes, it was held in the Lawn Bowling Clubhouse — much smaller than Victoria Hall, and for very good reason, for even with just a few dozen people in attendance, it seemed like a full house.

You have to hand it to the candidates and organizers behind these school board elections. They are out there knocking on doors, making what seems to be an endless series of phone calls and then, after all their efforts, see just a small fraction of eligible voters turn out at the polls. It’s even worse here, where the official voter list is in such a sorry state of chaos that even if a person can be coaxed out of their home on a Sunday afternoon, there is no guarantee that, once there, they will be allowed to cast a ballot.

The general apathy that surrounds school board elections in Westmount is understandable to a degree, for many people no longer have children in school and their grandchildren are attending school in another city or province. And many others have children who are enrolled in private schools — far removed from the very public system that receives their tax dollars anyway. Of the three EMSB schools in Westmount, only Roslyn has a fairly high percentage of students who actually live here. Westmount High and Westmount Park do have several local kids enrolled, of course, but the vast majority of students are bussed in from elsewhere. Luckily, many of their parents take an active interest in who represents this district on the board — otherwise these elections would be a total non-event, attended only by the handful of those who make it a point of attending every public event in Westmount. This is unfortunate, of course, because the choice of local school commissioner is a matter of interest to the entire community — not just the few hundred parents of kids in the local public schools.

The job of school commissioner is often a thankless one, requiring a lot of long hours with little remuneration. For this reason, both local candidates — the victorious Ginette Sauvé-Frankel and her worthy opponent, Nick Primiano, are both to be thanked for putting themselves out there to represent local interests in the vast bureaucracy that is our educational system.