The board of education will discuss a recently proposed parents' "bill of rights" at its next meeting, but the debate about the topic has already started between two trustees who routinely butt heads on issues.
Trustee Casey Cook developed the bill to increase parent engagement in the district and ease ongoing tension between some parents and the school district, he said.
But Trustee Michael Ewen said he doesn't like Cook's parents' bill of rights because it was pulled from an American website.
Instead, he thinks the board should consider parents' rights as laid out by the British Columbia Confederation of Parent Advisory Councils - which he plans to propose to the board when it discusses the issue at its next meeting on Tuesday.
"I find the adversarial nature of the bill of rights Casey proposed to be kind of disturbing - parents get this, parents get that - but there's no sense that parents have any responsibility," Ewen said. "On BCCPAC, it talks about (how) you have a right and a responsibility. I like it; it's British Columbian. In Casey's, it's all: parents get, parents get, parents get. In BCCPAC, it's collaborative."
The bill of rights isn't adversarial, said Cook. The trustee added that he brought the bill forward in the "spirit of collaboration" and didn't anticipate the response to be so "vitriolic."
"I didn't expect it would be accepted verbatim, of course not, it was put on the table to start the discussion," Cook said, adding that it didn't matter that he found the bill on an American website.
"If it's good, it's good regardless of where it comes from," he said.
Cook thought by developing a bill of rights, the board could be clear about what it stood for, he said.
"People have been treated with disrespect at a board level for decades," Cook said. "All I was trying to do was put an end to that."
