School trustees have very limited authority.
Board of education public meetings are mostly show-and-tell events where they hear about good works going on in schools, with the occasional decision based on staff recommendations.
Mostly, they have to make decisions with the limited dollars given to them by the provincial government and if they don't make those tough choices they risk being fired.
So why have them at all? That's the question that could be raised now that the provincial government has fired the Vancouver School Board because it did not pass a balanced budget.
A few years ago, School District 43 trustees could have been in the same boat when faced with $12 million in budget overruns but decided to cut programs and teachers instead. It has also closed schools and sold school land, raising more than $30 million to pay for capital costs.
But many of the trustees who made those decisions lost their seats in the last school board election.
It could be argued they were just doing the province's bidding and suffered the consequences — convenient scapegoats, like TransLink often is.
So who's really in charged of public education? The provincial government, of course.
