Dave Kendall

Oct 09, 2014

Trustee

Dave Kendall – union rep to trustee

Dave Kendall has had a long career in education, both as a teacher and as a teachers’ federation employee.

He also has experience in governance. In 1994, he was elected as a trustee in the North York Board, and served a three-year term. However, provincial legislation, brought in by the Harris government, made it impossible for him to run again because his wife worked for the board as a school secretary.

He started his career as a elementary classroom teacher in 1970, and between 1982 and 1990 he was on the provincial executive of the teachers’ federation. This eventually resulted in him migrating from the classroom to the federation office and he spent the last 20 years of his career working in the federation office.

“I spent a lot of years providing assistance in rural Ontario, including Eastern Ontario. I am familiar with the funding formula. We argued with the government to change the formula, to provide more support for rural and remote schools - all that sort of thing.”

After retiring in 2010, Kendall moved to Kennebec Lake on a full time basis with his wife, to property they had purchased 10 years earlier. He has become involved with the local retired teachers’ branch, and after thinking about it for a while, decided to run for trustee just before the nomination deadline on September 12.

He brings a somewhat sceptical perspective about how school boards operate. For example, he said that school boards tend to keep their finances under wraps.

“They keep everything hush hush; they are always hiding money. We sometimes accuse them of being like Enron, burying money all over the place. A trustee needs to ask a lot of questions.”

He said he is concerned about what he hears about Clarendon Central School.

“We are far away from the board office out here and we get short changed a lot. When a community is successful in keeping a school like Clarendon Central open, it often gets treated the way Clarendon was. Now they have a ridiculous situation with one teacher teaching five grades. Those kids aren't getting any benefit out of that.”

He also said that there are a high number of special needs students in the area, “and we need to ensure that we are getting sufficient support. I want to see the formula and the budget to see where the money is flowing and if our fair share is flowing to us,” he said.

But as a single trustee he knows that he cannot make anything happen unless he can convince the other trustees to support his proposals.

“As an individual you don't have any power at all. You need to do your homework, make your arguments, support them with facts, and convince your colleagues to support the changes you want to see.

One thing that he does not support, and thinks the province wastes money on, is the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO), which conducts math and reading assessments for grade 3, 6, and 9 students throughout the province.

“The EQAO is just a public relations campaign, it does nothing to help our kids in this area. Schools are getting all tied up into teaching kids to take the test, which is also a waste of resources. The whole thing costs just about $100 million, and now they are looking at investing more. You could hire a number of Special Education teachers for that kind of money,” he said.

He said the board might not be happy about a trustee asking so many questions about budgets and where money is being spent because that is not something trustees normally do.

“But I can say I'm up to the challenge, and I'm ready to travel around the whole area to get the job done.”