Fractured Limestone

Jeff Green | Oct 08, 2014

The most interesting aspect of the 2014 municipal election in Frontenac County and Addington Highlands thus far has been the races for Limestone School Board Trustee.

In the Township of South Frontenac, the election has become bitter and personal thanks to the arrival of Kingstonian Lindsay Davidson onto the campaign scene, where she is doing battle with incumbent Suzanne Ruttan.

(see candidate profiles and video at http://www.frontenacnews.ca/south-frontenac-municipal-election-2014)

Essentially, Davidson is calling Ruttan a puppet of the school board's senior administration. Ruttan voted to close two schools in Kingston and build a new school at an as yet undetermined location.

Davidson, whose son attends one of those schools, Kingston Collegiate (KCVI), sat on the committee that was set up to look at the future of secondary schools in downtown Kingston, and is now one of five people who are requesting a judicial review of the decision to close KCVI and Queen Elizabeth (QECVI) schools.

Suzanne Ruttan has struck back. On two occasions, Ruttan has asked why Davidson is seeking to become a trustee of an institution that she is suing.

Davidson's response that she is not suing the board, that she is merely seeking a judicial review of the process, doesn't seem to get much traction.

At an all-candidates meeting at the Sydenham Legion on Monday night, Oct. 6, all of the questioners during the school board segment of the meeting took dead aim at Davidson, asking why she was not running in North Kingston, where she lives.

Although she said she is running in South Frontenac because she is basically a rural gal at heart, and chose to live in rural Kingston, on Glenburnie Road, for that reason, some of the very public assertions that Davidson has made in recent months reveal a tendency to blame the rural schools for the troubles facing the urban Kingston high schools.

In an op-ed published in the Globe and Mail, Davidson compared the closing of PDCI in Peterborough with the plan to close KCVI In Kingston, and said this: “It was noted by observers in Peterborough’s school debate that rural trustees representing districts outside the city limits drove the final closure vote. The vote in Kingston exhibited the same rural-urban divide seen in Peterborough. Four of the five votes supporting KCVI closure came from trustees representing municipalities outside of Kingston.”

All things considered, voters in South Frontenac have grounds to be suspicious of Lindsay Davidson's commitment to their municipality, but the trustee election has given her a forum to launch a full on critique of the way the Limestone Board operates, and some of those criticisms are pretty effective.

That critique, coupled with lingering controversies about Granite Ridge Education Centre, has set the stage for the trustee election in North and Central Frontenac and Addington Highlands.

All three candidates in that election, (Dave Kendall, Steve Magee, and Karen McGregor) who are profiled on page 12 of this edition, are critical of the board in various ways.

The cumulative effect of what has been written and is now being voiced at all-candidates meetings, is to question just about everything about the way the board's administration operates. It is being called unresponsive, opaque, anti-rural (and perhaps anti-urban in Lindsay Davidson's case) among other things - and this is by the people who want to become its trustees.

The Limestone Board, like all institutions of its size and constraints, likes to present a carefully constructed, wholesome image for itself. Problems are downplayed as sunshine sketches are released for public consumption almost daily. Disgruntled staff, and there are many, voice their critiques quietly, in whispers, way off the record.

It is hard to say where all these critiques of the board's operations will go once the ballots are cast and everything gets back to normal.

But, at least for now, all the fissures and cracks have been revealed underneath that polished limestone.

Maybe the board should have been made of harsher, stronger rock - say pink granite.