To the editor:
Re: Rookie trustee bumps Vision chair,” Dec. 12.
Green school board candidate Janet Fraser received our votes because she campaigned on promising to review each issue on its merits and to act in the best interests of Vancouver schoolchildren. Now, at the very first opportunity to vote, she has given control of the school board to the right-wing, so-called non-partisan party — probably the most partisan of them all.
If she thinks, as she claims, that this will achieve better treatment from this anti-education Liberal government than was achieved by the relentless and stalwart advocacy of Patti Bacchus, then she needs to give her head a violent shake. How she could even consider handing over the chair to the inexperienced Christopher Richardson, whose only educational interest seems to be focussed on personal concerns and bringing the private sector into the classroom, is a mystery to all those who have campaigned and lobbied to get adequate public investment in public education. And public funding of education, we might remind her, does not mean giving in to corporate self-interests.
By this action she has successfully lost Green support from many of us who, obviously naively, thought she would act in accord with her professed values. Shame on her.
Bruce and Valerie Levens,
Vancouver
