Former Protestant district superintendent Joe Demko will run for a seat on the school board in the fall.
The retired Demko announced his intention on Monday, saying he wants to bring more local autonomy to the board.
“I see a kind of an eroding of the local autonomy that school boards once held,” said the 61-year-old. “I’m hoping that I can do some work, if I can get elected … to move some of the decision-making back to the local level.”
Demko began his career as a student teacher at Sir George Simpson Junior High School in 1969. He became the school’s principal in the late 1970s. He later spent about 17 years in administration at the district level, serving as superintendent from 2000 to 2005.
Among his proudest accomplishments are the creation of a “girl power” program while serving as principal of Lorne Akins and working to educate teachers about issues faced by lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered students in the last months of his time as superintendent, Demko said.
A more recent trend that Demko finds troubling is a move toward deficits in some schools and boards.
“I was an administrator in the time of Ralph Klein when we were running these deficits and rollbacks had to be put in place to tend to those deficits,” he said. “In all of the positions I’ve been in, I’ve always tried to make sure that our budgets were balanced.”
School boards are under financial pressure because the last provincial budget didn’t include funding for a three per cent increase in teacher salaries. Protestant district superintendent Barry Wowk said the district will dip into reserves and three schools will run deficits in the upcoming year.
The Protestant board currently has a vacancy, due to the cancer death of trustee Ernie Wynychuk in April. Wynychuk’s seat will remain vacant until municipal elections are held Oct. 18.
All four current trustees said they intend to run again.
Current chair Morag Pansegrau will seek a seventh term, Joan Trettler will seek her fifth, while Judy Huisman and Gerry Martins will seek their third terms.
Pansegrau, Trettler and Huisman all identified provincial funding as their primary concern.
“We can’t meet the needs of students without staff. In order to hire the staff we need the money,” said Pansegrau.
“I think we’re into turbulent times again,” Trettler said. “We’re already seeing no money to pay for the teachers’ contracts. In my mind, that’s a huge issue.”
“It’s got to be reconciled because the not knowing is worse than knowing,” Huisman said. “Are they going to come again and tackle boards’ reserves? Nobody knows.”
Martins said his top priorities are lobbying for a new school in the city’s northeast and the addition of career and technology space to W.D. Cuts school, one of the few junior highs in the province without such facilities.
“In order to help us with students that perhaps would like to get into the trades, we need to start at the junior high level,” he said.
