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Rainy River District School Board meeting June 2 (1)

Few school board elections required in northwestern Ontario

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School board elections coincide with this year’s municipal election, but interest this year is lower than it has been.

Only a handful of races are taking place across northwestern Ontario, including in Kenora, Dryden and Thunder Bay.

Most other positions were filled by acclamation.

Some communities, including Kenora and Atikokan, needed extended nomination periods to secure candidates.

In Kenora, no one filed for the three positions available on the Keewatin-Patricia District School Board by the original deadline.

The extended nomination period brought in five candidates, forcing the need for an election.

Vacancies still remain in Ear Falls and Rainy River and will be left to the respective school boards to decide how they will be filled.

The situation in northwestern Ontario is not unusual.

The Ontario Public School Boards Association (OPSBA) counts 84 trustee positions across the province as being acclaimed.

It acknowledges that it is a modest increase over previous election years.

Changes impacting the role of school board trustees are seen as the main reason for the lack of interest in some areas.

Earlier this year, Education Minister Paul Calandra mused about doing away with elected school board trustees.

Legislation was later introduced that dismissed trustees’ powers and reduced honorariums.

Several school boards in southern Ontario remain under provincial supervision.

OPSBA still views trustees as providing an essential connection between the education system and the public.

“School board trustees have served Ontario communities since before Confederation because public education is simply too important to be governed at a distance,” states OPSBA President Kathleen Woodcock in a release.

“In some respects, recent legislative changes have brought the trustee role closer to that of a board director in other organizations. But trustees retain something fundamentally different: direct democratic accountability to the students, families and communities they serve.”

Woodbeck is pleased to see many people still wanting to be a school board trustee, suggesting to her that local education governance still matters deeply to Ontarians.

Here is a list of all candidates running in school boards in northwestern Ontario.

Kenora-Keewatin Patricia District School Board

Dryden (one to be elected)

Jason Owen

Barbara Gauthier

Judi Green

Ear Falls – Vacant                                                                      

Ignace – Steve Poling (acclaimed)

Kenora/Sioux Narrows/Nestor Falls (3 to be elected)

Dave Cornish

Anita Cameron

Grant Erickson

Malcolm (Rory) McMillan

Pickle Lake – Norine Van Breda (acclaimed)

Red Lake – Dave McLeod (acclaimed)

Sioux Lookout – Sylvia Davis (acclaimed)

Machin – Roger Griffiths  (acclaimed)

Kenora Catholic District School Board

Kenora (5 to be elected)

Derek Favreau (acclaimed)

Teresa Gallik (acclaimed)

Paul Landry (acclaimed)

Marie Lundin (acclaimed)

Irene Richards (acclaimed)

Red Lake – Angela Bishop (acclaimed)

Northwest Catholic District School Board

Dryden/Machin (2 to be elected)

Peter Marshall

Kathy Bryck

Michael Cortens

Fort Frances/Alberton/La Vallee (2 to be elected)

Lisa Cousineau (acclaimed)

Kenny Desjardins (acclaimed)

Morley/Stratton/Emo/Chapple/Dawson/Rainy River/Lake of the Woods/Sioux Narrows-Nestor Falls – David Sharp (acclaimed)

Atikokan – Teresa Larson (acclaimed)

Sioux Lookout and Ignace (2 to be elected)

Jim Kulchyski (acclaimed)

Cathy Bowen (acclaimed)

Rainy River District School Board

Fort Frances (2 to be elected)

Heather Latter (acclaimed)

Mike Walchuk (acclaimed)

La Vallee/Alberton – Kathryn Pierroz (acclaimed)

Atikokan – Kristi Langer (acclaimed)

Emo/Chapple/Nestor Falls – Barbara Kyro (acclaimed)

Rainy River/Morley/Lake of the Woods/Dawson – Vacant

Lakehead District School Board (8 to be elected)

Susan Frattaroli

CJ Goater

Kathleen Heikkinen

Patricia Johansen

Scotia-Leigh Kauppi

Lex MacArthur

Deborah Massaro

Ian Morgan

Vish Nayyar

George Saarinen

Ryan Sitch

Trudy Tuchenhagen

Thunder Bay Catholic District School Board (6 to be elected)

Eleanor Ashe

Lawrence Badanai

Mike Bertoldo

Anthony Foglia

Leanne Fonso

Olivia Kembel

Matt Pearson

Tony Romeo

Rainy River District School Board

Make up of Rainy River District School Board to be discussed

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Trustees with the Rainy River District School Board are being asked to declare the west end of the district as a “low population area.”

It is a move that allows for three trustees to be elected in the area between Alberton and Rainy River.

The board has made this declaration since 1997 to facilitate fairer representation.

The move would not change the total number of trustees to be elected in this fall’s school board elections, nor the representation of Fort Frances, Atikokan or the First Nations.

However, if the trustees reject the recommendation from the board’s finance committee, voters in the west end would elect just two trustees.

Fort Frances would gain a trustee, increasing its representation to three.

The representation for Atikokan and the area First Nations would remain at one trustee each.

A report notes that the district’s electoral population has declined by 478 voters since the last general election in 2022.

School boards are responsible for determining the number of trustee positions and the areas they represent before each general election.

Those decisions must be provided to the Ministry of Education by the end of the month.

Trustees with the Rainy River Board will discuss the issue at their meeting on Tuesday night.

Rainy River District School Board office

“Unusual activity” forces shutdown of Rainy River District School Board IT systems

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Public schools across the Rainy River District School were without certain IT services on Wednesday.

The Rainy River District School Board was forced to shut down its IT system after monitoring what it described as unusual activity the previous night.

Education Director Heather Campbell says the move was precautionary.

“We always are very proactive and work really diligently as far as network security,” says Campbell.

“So we took this as a precaution to investigate and also to protect all our systems and our data while we investigate.”

Parents were notified by early morning phone calls on Wednesday about the issue and provided updates during the day.

Schools were allowed to open, but Campbell says certain online services and programs were not available to staff and students.

“There are so many things that we do rely on information technology for, but there are a lot of things that occur every day within classrooms across our system that do not rely on our information technology infrastructure for, so I am confident that our staff and students are still teaching and learning.”

The outage impacted the board’s Internet service and interrupted grade 10 students from writing the provincewide literacy test.

Campbell says the board’s IT team continues to investigate before bringing services back online.

She says there was no immediate timetable as to when services would be fully restored.

“I’ve heard from my colleagues, and I understand that sometimes these attacks are not immediate, so it’s very important to ensure that we are free from any sort of malicious activity,” says Campbell.

School boards across Ontario and North America have been the target of hackers of late.

Last December, PowerSchool, a system widely used by school boards, including the Rainy River District School Board, was compromised by a cyberattack, impacting an estimated 5.2 million Canadians.

A recent report from the Ontario and Alberta Securities Commissions suggested school boards were not prepared to prevent such an attack.