Meet Your Elected School Trustees and the Board of Education

You already know some of the people who make decisions about your school: your principal, your teachers, maybe your school council. But there is another group of people, elected by your community, who also make important decisions about your school. They are called school trustees.

A school trustee is an elected local official. That means people in your community vote for them, the same way they vote for other elected representatives. Unlike your teacher or principal, who are hired staff, trustees are chosen by voters to represent families and students in a particular area.

Most school trustees are elected every few years, often at the same time as municipal elections for mayors and councillors. Depending on where you live in Canada, your community might be divided into zones or wards, with one trustee elected for each area, or trustees might be elected to represent the whole school district.

Anyone who meets the voting requirements in their area can cast a ballot for a trustee, usually a parent, guardian, or any adult resident of the school district, even if they do not currently have children in school. This is part of the same democratic process you may have already learned about in earlier lessons on civic engagement.

A single trustee does not run a school district alone. Once elected, trustees join together with the other trustees from across the district to form a board of education, sometimes called a school board. Together, this board reviews budgets, sets learning priorities, hires senior staff, and plans services like transportation.

The step-by-step process the board follows to reach these decisions is covered in more detail in how school boards make decisions about your school, and one concrete example, planning bus routes and staffing, is explored in school boards planning transportation and staffing.

Canada has several levels of government, and each one has its own elected representatives. A Member of Parliament, or MP, represents you federally. Provincially, your representative might be called an MLA, MPP, MNA, or MHA, depending on your province or territory. Municipally, you have a mayor and councillors. School trustees are the elected representatives for the local level of school governance.

Trustees are one of the elected officials closest to your everyday life. A decision made by the board of education, about class sizes, a new program, or a school closure, can directly affect your school. Knowing who your trustee is means you know who to contact, or whose decisions to pay attention to, when something about your school changes.

Getting familiar with trustees is also a good way to see democracy at work close to home, building on what you may have already explored about local government and community decision-making.

Related lessons

• Grade 6 Social Studies