GUELPH POLITICAST #94 - The Chairs of Guelph’s School Boards

It's the last days of August, which also means that it's the official end of summer. If you're a student anyway. This time next week, students of all ages will back at class, making new friends, learning stuff, and begrudging that their summertime freedom was taken away from them just when they were getting the hang of it. So who do we blame for this madness?

Well, society in general, the provincial government a bit more specifically, but locally our schools are overseen by two school boards: the Upper Grand District School Board and the Wellington Catholic District School Board. This week on the podcast, I host the Chairmen of the Boards, who are presently Mark Bailey of the UGDSB and Marino Gazzola of the WCDSB.

In all seriousness, there are serious things to talk about in regards to our local boards, not the least of which is the fact that these are people elected by our community every four years to monitor the proper dispensation of funds to give our local pre-kindergarten to grade 12 students the education they need and deserve. School boards sometimes seem like a forgotten democratic institution, and we seem to gloss over their existence in an era when newsroom resources are dwindling, and in danger of becoming non-existent.

So we're going to put the spotlight on our local school boards in this week's edition of the podcast. For those of you that wonder how the school board works in relation to the administration of an individual school, we have an answer for that. If you're wondering why you should care about what happens at the local school board if you don't have kids or have non-school aged kids, we have an answer for that. And if you're curious about what the chairs of our local school boards think about the possibility of amalgamating, at the end of the show, there's answer for that too!

So let's go back to school with those responsible for our schools on this week's Guelph Politicast.

So the first day of school is on September 5. To find out more about what's going on with the Upper Grand District School Board click here, and to find out what's going on with the Wellington Catholic District School Board, click here.

The theme music for the Guelph Politicast is from the KPM Klassics collection by Syd Dale.

The host for the Guelph Politicast is Podbean. Find more episodes of the Politicast here.

Remember that the Politicast Podbean channel is also the host for podcast versions of Open Sources Guelph. The previous Thursday's episode of Open Sources will be posted on Mondays.