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72 expensive white elephants
In 2008, the province of Ontario took over the supervision of the Toronto Catholic School Board, relinquishing power early this year. As outlined in this article, the extra costs to taxpayers (over and above the ongoing normal costs of running a school board, amounted to almost a million dollars. Some of these expenses were pretty eye-popping, for example the payment of $70,500 to a consultant for 47 days' work. Of course, the supervision was probably necessary, given the fact that the Toronto Catholic Board couldn't/wouldn't balance its own books.
And yet and yet. All this turmoil and expense to salvage what exactly? By and large, today's school boards are administrative structures that accomplish very little, if anything, that couldn't be carried out by the individual schools they hamper. Far from adding value, school boards cost a lot, do very little, and get in the way of classroom teachers. In Ontario, we're saddled with 72 of them.
School boards were probably a good idea back in the old days, with lots of localized rural schools and no modern telecommunications. Times have changed, though, and it's time to move on.