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Live from the web, it’s the Toronto District School Board show.

February 04, 2010

Louise Brown
Education Reporter
Parent.central.ca

They took a recorded vote…on whether to take a 10-minute pee break.

They argued for more than an hour about throwing a $345,000 teachers’ day at the Air Canada Centre.

And one trustee was told to watch her words after saying an idea was “about effing time.”

Live, from your computer screen, it’s the Toronto District School Board’s new webcast.

With rants, rambles and a 10-minute blank screen during the “biology break” (it passed), the politics of Canada’s largest school board went wireless this week with its first webcast board meeting.

“There’s a 10-second delay but we don’t have a kill switch — maybe that’s something we’ll have to install,” said Chair Bruce Davis, who proposed the online broadcast as a way to boost public awareness as well as the tone of debate.

With a $2.4 billion budget, 22 elected trustees and more than a quarter of a million of the most diverse students in the country, the board is long known for political infighting as much as cutting-edge programs.

Now that meetings are going public, it could remind trustees to play nice, said Davis.

There was earnest debate Wednesday about the need to hire two or three teams of trained facilitators to referee some of the angry community meetings underway across the city about school closings, in which some trustees are said to have been harassed and even threatened by distraught parents. The director of education will report back on the idea of such teams Feb. 22.

But the board stopped short of voting to “stand down” any of the school closing discussions, no matter how unpopular, and there was heartfelt talk about whether to compensate neighbourhoods where schools close by directing the savings to other schools in the area.

Not all debates were as lofty.

When Davis called a 10-minute recess during a particularly prolonged debate, several trustees claimed he had no right to stop the proceedings.

So he called for a recorded vote.

“It’s important people get some insight into how their elected representative performs, and votes, and behaves – it is with any level of government,” said Davis, who pegged the cost of the webcast at about $300 to $400, largely to cover an extra technician to work the mikes and cameras that already were there.

Toronto City Council meetings are webcast, as is Question Period at the Ontario Legislature and monthly board meetings at the Upper Canada District School Board in eastern Ontario.

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