Elections
Looking for School Board Trustee Election Information?
Check out the Government of British Columbia website for guidance and videos at:
What is a school trustee?
School trustees are ordinary citizens elected by other citizens to represent the interest of the entire public in the education process of creating our next generation of citizens to strengthen Canadian democracy.
Locally elected school trustees, who make up boards of education in British Columbia, represent a unique form of democratic governance. Unlike municipal councils, provincial legislative assemblies and the federal parliament, boards of education have one primary mandate: improving learning for all students.
All board decisions, policies, regulations and actions must support the vision of improving learning outcomes for all students so that the most important objective of student learning can be achieved, which is to create citizens. More specifically, these student citizens must be capable of achieving their full potential and achieving their civic responsibility to give their informed consent to be governed in our Canadian democracy. Responsibility for continuously building this foundation of our society is given to boards of education.
How do school trustees do this? In a co-governance partnership with the provincial government’s Ministry of Education and Child Care, trustees serve to represent the needs of their communities in public education using tools granted to their board by provincial legislation. Defining those needs requires locally elected school trustees to learn and listen to citizens who voted for them, as well as those who voted against them or not at all. Once elected to a board, trustees must commit themselves to learning about the interests and views of students, parents, school district management, teachers and public education agencies such as francophone and First Nation authorities.
