Whitby Shores Community Forums

Has anyone been following the situation up in Brooklin with two parents being sued by the Durham District School Board for organizing an online petition to draw attention to challenges they say they had with their kids' school administration?

Read the news reports here:
School board sues parents over online petition
http://www.thestar.com/article/275034

Petition on principal brings threat of lawsuit from board
http://www.newsdurhamregion.com/news/edu...icle/87687

The petition in question can be found here:
http://www.petitiononline.com/reedbvps/petition.html

I can't believe the School Board is doing this. Does anyone else think this is a big waste of taxpayer's money, especially when we're fighting hard for more funding for our education system?

I wrote to our school trustees to protest, and encourage everyone to do the same. Visit http://ddsb.durham.edu.on.ca/DDSBmain.htm and follow the "contact us" link at the top of the page. Just in case, I am in no way involved with the parents actions but I am concerned that the board is sending out the wrong message. Our school administrators should be listening to parents’ concerns and working constructively with them to resolve any conflicts rather than resorting to legal action.

I think what is being missed is the following:

The Principal and Vice Principal are accountable to the Superintendant who is accountable to the Board.  The Board is accountable to the elected Trustees.  The Trustees are of course accountable to the electorate and subsequently the parents. Therefore the statement that the Principle is not accountable to parents is not without merit. Why this couple put out a petition regarding this Principal is beyond me when what they really should be doing is bringing forth their concerns to their Trustree.  If their Trustee informed them to launch a petition against this Principal than I would claim that the Trustree is being neglegent in his/her responsibilities to the parents and not dealing with the concerns these parents have regarding the enviroment at this School.  They did themselves no favours in attacking this Principal and were misguided, in my opinion, in drawing up a petition stating that the Principal needs to be accountable to parents. This is not how the system works.  Their petition should be to the Board and the Trustees to examine the administrative conditions at this school as it seems that the Board and the Trustees are the ones not being accountable to these parents.

I am certain that there would have been no lawsuit had this couple chose to deal with the overall conditions and the inaction of the Board and Trustees to respond accordingly rather than directly going after the Principal. The Board, in my opinion, is well within their rights to come to the defense of their employee and I think anyone of us would hope our employer would do the same for us.

Again, my question remains - why hasn't the Board and the Trustees stepped in to address these parent's concerns? Is there more to this story that isn't being reported? I suspect there is.

I can't remember who the trustee was that suggested the parents launch a petition. That is the person who appears to be negligent in this case. Very sad situation... Well put jenadam!


Jabber.

The Durham News article mentions that the parents were told by John Dolstra that in order for him to consider this a problem, he needed a signed petition with a few hundred signatures. The article also states that Dolstra would not confirm or deny this suggestion.

Bottom line to me is that I would hope that if a concern was brought forward to a trustee, it would not require a few hundred people in order for it to be listened to (or at the very least looked into). It would be like buying a product from a store that proved not to do what it was advertised to do. When you return it to the store, could you image if they told you "please go out and find a couple hundred people with a similar problem and then we'll consider taking it back."

So, in my opinion, either the trustee is negligent or there is more to this story then we are being told.

John Dolstra! That's the guy. I've talked to him before concerning the school in our community. It was very colourful to say the least. Smells fishy to me too.


Jabber.