Random Access

Norbert Hartmann is ready for that martini now.
And who could really blame the man for taking up drink?
You could say that the trustees of the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board provided a bitter twist for garnish last night, when they rejected out-of-hand Hartmann’s carefully crafted strategy to allow them to extricate themselves from their budget deficit, complete with a one-year extension of the deadline.
The provincial supervisor, in everything but name, is caught between the rock of the Ontario government’s inflexible and inadequate funding formula and the hard place of intransigent board trustees who have drawn a line in the sand. They have decided that they will not be the ones to do the dirty work to balance their budget.
Hartmann is a co-manager without any co-managers.
The Ministry quite intentionally did not designate him a supervisor, although he is clearly carrying out the duties of that post.
It was created by the Harris Tories, who appointed supervisors to go in and teach those recalcitrant trustees in Hamilton, Ottawa and Toronto (including current Education Minister Kathleen Wynne) that the budget must always be balanced and Queen’s Park’s bottom line must always rule.
That is a tough argument to sell in education, where the product is people’s (read voters’) children whose lives really can be adversely affected by a decision to cut out a Reading Recovery program that could put them back on the rails of success.
It’s harder to argue that their lives will be damaged by a decision to cut out administrative spending or busing, however.
Hartmann’s report, Moving Forward Together, is a well-considered and pragmatic approach to the problem. He didn’t just cut busing blindly to St. Sofia, the Eastern rite school in Ward 3.
He retained busing for St. Sofia because it serves a special portion of Catholics who otherwise would not be served at all. Because French immersion programs “are wholly dependent on ability of students to get to the sites,” he retained busing there too.
But he nixed buses for Holy Name of Mary because it is a school of choice, in his opinion. That decision is undoubtedly made knowing that parents can organize and pay for their own busing and that Mississauga Transit will likely accede to a request for new service along Mississauga Rd.
A tiered response to Reading Recovery was proposed, saving a very valuable program that truly can be a lifeline for struggling students, especially new Canadians and those who start school with little or no English.
The long and short of it is that Hartmann’s report is a reasonable, measured approach to a tough job, which recognizes and responds to many of the community’s and trustees’ stated concerns.
It’s a sound agenda for cutting the budget. The problem is that trustees have decided that any more cuts will hit the bones of the system, and they will have nothing to do with it
The government, facing election Oct. 4, isn’t going to be in a hurry to promote any more confrontation, although their patience is clearly running thin, given the highly critical remarks about trustees recently from Mississauga West MPP Bob Delaney.
So, Mr. Hartmann may spend a lot of time in the next few months working on his headache and thinking about the cocktail hour. Maybe he should rename his report Moving Nowhere Together.
The moral of the story at this point seems to be that we elect people to make the easy decisions, and we appoint them to make the tough ones.

A note of explanation is required about the photo. At the board meeting Tuesday, students from Robert F. Hall Secondary School in Caledon lobbied for extension of a culinary arts program there which would eventually be linked to a similar program at Humber College. The students brought food and (non-alcoholic) drinks and provided the martini glass that sits beside Mr. Hartmann.