New West group endorses five candidates as the “parents’ choice”

A local parents’ group has deemed five candidates to be the “parents’ choice” in the Nov. 15 election.
Parents for Public Education New Westminster (P4PE) has endorsed five candidates who are seeking seats on school board: Jonina Campbell, Mark Gifford, MaryAnn Mortensen, Jeremy Perry and Kelly Slade-Kerr.

According to a press release from P4PE, the endorsements were made at a Nov. 6 membership meeting and were based on responses to a detailed questionnaire sent to all candidates.  The responses were evaluated against the priorities identified by parents at P4PE’s inaugural meeting in April.
“P4PE was formed by a group of parents concerned about issues such as the replacement of the high school and financial accountability,” said P4PE co-chair Sandra Coll.  “We believe these candidates have the right skills and experience to restore parents’ confidence in the district.”
Thor Borgford, co-chair of P4PE, said the five candidates endorsed by P4PE expressed support for the values of the parent group, such as transparency in decision-making and sound financial governance.
“These candidates bring a range of experience and new ideas,” Borgford said.  “We need both to get this district back on track.”
Twelve of the 13 candidates running for school trustee submitted responses to the P4PE questionnaire.  All of the responses can be found on the group’s website at www.p4pe.ca.

P4PE formed in response to concerns about the school district’s fiscal management and invited community members to attend its inaugural meeting in April.

Borgford said various parents were having discussions about the district’s deficit and the high school project. Those parents came together as a result of the “angst” parents were feeling about the school district.

“We decided we needed to mobilize outside the PAC system because that’s not a political animal – in cannot be a political animal. It was just to find a place to give parents some voice in this whole process of selecting school trustees,” he said. “The feeling at the time was that school board was not functioning well and the trustees were not working well together to solve our problems.”

Borgford said P4PE has endorsed some incumbents, which reflects some improvement in how the board has functioned over the course of the past six months.

“A lot of the angst has dissipated in the past while but we still do want to have some voice with the school board and we want to hold them accountable, not just at election time, but beyond election time,” he said. “Our major job, I think has been done. We wanted to identify candidates that we feel could make some informed decision with respect to their candidacy for school board. I think we have done our major job in that sense. Are we disbanding and packing up our tents for the next election? No. … I do think we have staying power.”

Borgford said he was pleased to see that 12 of 13 school trustee candidates completed the questionnaires, which is, in a way, an endorsement of P4PE.

“You’ll note that we endorsed five candidates, not seven,” he said. “At the beginning of our meeting we said ‘we need to have some type of threshold for endorsement, we want our endorsement to mean something.’”

At its selection meeting, the parents reviewed the questionnaires, had a fulsome discussion about the candidates and unanimously agreed to select candidates by a show of hands rather than a balloting process.

“We really only had enough information and confidence in the candidates we endorsed,” Borgford said.

Slade-Kerr was one of the group’s initial organizers, Borg said, but she had no involvement in the selection process.

“Let’s make it very clear, none of the candidates were present at our meeting. Had they shown up, we would have asked them to recuse themselves from the meeting,” he said. “Frankly, about half the people there do know Kelly Slade-Kerr from her participation. We can’t ignore the fact that we know her.”

Borgford stressed that P4PD has no links to any other organizations or political groups.

“We are not a front for any other organization,” he said. “We are, emphatically, a nonpartisan group. Our only interest is to ensure that we have a functioning school board and a functioning school district. Nothing else matters.”