A year after being placed under guardianship by Quebec, the Montreal school service center (CSSDM) has formed a board of directors which will be “fully functional” as of next July.
Posted at 4:57 p.m.
The school service center and the Parents’ Committee of Montreal schools made the announcement in a joint press release published late Friday afternoon. There is no mention of the supervision under which the school service center has been placed for more than a year.
Finding parents wishing to sit on this board of directors was not an easy task, we explain in the press release.
” […] the Parents’ Committee nevertheless notes a loss of breath in parental commitment, at all levels, at the end of the school year, in the midst of the end of the pandemic, ”we read there. It took two calls for applications for seven parents interested in getting involved to show up, “exactly the same number as in 2020”.
In April 2021, the five members who represented the parents had resigned en bloc from the board of directors, including its president, Mélisandre Shanks.
Three other members representing the community had also resigned, so that only a few months after its formation, only seven of the 15 members initially appointed remained on the board.
Faced with the crisis of governance, the Ministry of Education had placed the CSSDM under supervision two months later, citing an audit which had “made it possible to identify significant shortcomings in terms of governance”, but also “failures on the administrative management plan of the school service centre”.
The administrator of the trusteeship, Jean-François Lachance, was then responsible for “carrying out the functions of governance of the CSSDM”. His mandate was to see to the appointment of a new board of directors.
Since October 2020, school service centers have been governed by a board of directors made up of equal numbers of parents, community members and staff members.
Is this the end of guardianship for the CSSDM? If it is “too early” to know the intentions of the Ministry of Education on this subject, “we can think” that it will examine the question, indicates Alain Perron, spokesperson for the school service center.