John Hilton-O’Brien is the Executive Director of Parents for Choice in Education, www.parentchoice.ca.It’s one of the worst things that can happen in a school system. This April, the Calgary Board of Education settled an expensive class-action lawsuit over the sexual abuse of students at its John Ware School. The settlement cost almost $16 million: only a portion of the estimated 200 victims participated in the lawsuit, and an investigative reporter accused the school board of “a culture of apathy — or at worst, complicity.” In response to cases like this, Alberta recently took teacher discipline away from the Alberta Teachers’ Association, which for decades had been the only teachers’ union in Canada to judge its own members. But it won’t solve the problem within our school boards that made the ongoing abuse possible.The John Ware case is not an outlier. The Toronto Star identified 27 cases between 2012 and 2017 where a teacher had been investigated by their school board, disciplined, and transferred at least once by the time their case made it to a Teacher’s College hearing, which substantiated the allegations. It’s no accident: a recent independent report showed that the system is structurally incentivized to underreport.Underlying this salacious issue is a prosaic one: school boards lack a coherent accountability system in general. That is why Ontario is now managing many school boards directly, citing “ongoing mismanagement.” An Alberta example saw a superintendent in Pembina Hills face five criminal charges, after trustees investigating an unrelated complaint stumbled onto the fraud. Alberta’s Auditor General has long suggested — with utmost tact — that Alberta school authorities lack “effective performance reporting.” Simply put, we are asking part-time trustees to oversee full-time superintendents with massive resources — a situation not conducive to effective oversight. Once a failure becomes visible, Alberta acts decisively. It sent in “official trustees” to run school systems four times in the 1980s and 1990s, and once for poor performance from 2010 to 2017. But there is no structure that reliably brings the problem to the provincial authorities in the first place. The situation is similar to a country that has an excellent criminal court, but no police force to investigate crimes and press charges. .The result? Children aren’t protected and teachers suffer too.With no independent investigator, nobody is cleared. Rumours rule. David Fletcher’s reputation was ruined by a vengeful parent, and the $70,000 defamation judgment was scant compensation. Henri Fournier was even less lucky — he was suspended without pay over rumours for 20 months. When he was exonerated, a court denied his suit for back pay on a technicality.But all these things — fraud and waste, sexual abuse, and false accusations — can be fixed with the same instrument. What we need is an “Inspector General for Education.”Scaled to a province of more than 800,000 students, an Office of the Inspector General (OIG) would employ around 100 people. Most of them would monitor school systems for fiscal impropriety and conduct regular audits. But one section would be a Sexual Allegations Unit — tasked with looking into any allegations of sexual abuse, and substantiating or debunking them. Critically, the OIG would stand inside the school system with access to all records and report directly to the Minister of Education. It can’t be stonewalled, and it can’t be threatened. .It is also important that we not try to make a sexual allegations unit as a stand-alone body. If we do, as soon as it enters a school, rumours will fly. Everyone will suspect someone. Teachers and staff will close ranks and cease cooperating — it is simple human nature. Only by being embedded into the larger enterprise of financial accountability does it become anonymous and safe enough to do its job effectively.There is one place where the model is actually working — Chicago, where the issues became so bad that investigative journalism forced just this solution in 2018. As I have written elsewhere, the Chicago OIG now investigates and prosecutes sexual abuse at double the Canadian average, while effectively protecting innocent teachers wrongly accused. At the same time, their OIG identifies waste, fraud, and mismanagement every year, at light speed, from an organizational perspective. This gives a level of transparency and accountability that we simply don’t have in Alberta.The bottom line is this. Sexual abuse, fraud, and the false accusations that grow in the silence are one problem with three faces, and the problem is that no one is looking. The total budget, based on the Chicago experience, runs about $20 million a year — a back-of-napkin figure scaled up from Chicago’s size and budget. A single lawsuit at one Calgary school nearly matched its annual cost. The alternative Alberta now reaches for is seizing whole boards after they fail. A watchdog is the smaller instrument.When Alberta took teacher discipline from the Alberta Teachers’ Association, it built a court. An Inspector General is the police force: the investigator the system has never had, for the children it failed and the teachers it could not clear.John Hilton-O’Brien is the Executive Director of Parents for Choice in Education, www.parentchoice.ca.
