Estrie school boards want Bill 40 withdrawn

The four school boards of the Estrie, the Commission scolaire de la Région-de-Sherbrooke, the Commission scolaire des Hauts-Cantons, the Commission scolaire des Sommets and the Eastern Townships School Board have joined forces in opposition to Bill 40, the provincial government’s proposed school board reform. The Chairs of the four boards held a press conference Wednesday calling on the Legault government to withdraw Bill 40 abolishing school boards, and asking for a broad consultation on the issue. “You can’t fix something that isn’t broken,” commented des Hauts-Cantons Chairman Yves Gilbert. “The world of education faces much more urgent challenges than modifying structures for ideological reasons,” he said, like reinvesting in education, repairing infrastructure and working towards the educational success of students. According to ETSB Chair Michael Murray, the Minister of Education is not only creating two classes of citizens, French-speaking and English-speaking citizens, with his project, “He will create new problems in the world of schools for purely ideological reasons,” he said. The proposed bill would preserve universal suffrage in English ‘service centres’ to fill certain positions, but not in French centres. See full story in the Thursday, Oct. 17 edition of The Record.