Francophone education chair laments 'stormy' relationship with Higgs government

The chair of the province's largest francophone school district says battles with the Higgs government are consuming more than half the district's time, time that could be otherwise spent improving the education of students.

Michel Côté says the problem began about two years ago when the government proposed to limit the powers of district education councils. 

Now they are feuding about how districts should implement the education department's Policy 713 on the sexual orientation and gender identity of students.

"The door is completely closed to the Department of Education. We do our work as a DEC. We try to progress," Côté told Radio-Canada.

"But a lot of time — I would say more than half our time — is spent not working on things to help our students succeed, but on putting out fires set by the government." 

Last week Education Minister Bill Hogan wrote to the chairs of four district education councils — three francophone districts plus Anglophone East — to notify them he was repealing policies they adopted at the council level on implementing Policy 713.

He told the councils to remove their policies from their websites. As of this week, the policies for all three francophone districts remain on their sites.

The three education councils issued a statement Tuesday afternoon saying they haven't responded to Hogan yet because they haven't had a chance to meet since the letters.

The statement said the councils will each meet "in the coming weeks to allow its members to evaluate the different options available to them."

Côté said he could not comment on the letters until the Francophone South council meets but he described the education councils' relationship with the province as "stormy."

"The majority of our time is spent defending ourselves against approaches by the government that are trying to bypass districts to implement their policies or their ideology."

He called it "very exhausting."

According to Côté, the province proposed a new model for educational governance to the councils two years ago that would have reduced their decision making powers, turning them into little more than consultative committees and taking away "almost all of our rights."

Under Section 23 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, minority language communities in all provinces have a constitutional right to manage their own schools.