Bob Beckett comes into his new role as a Sooke school board trustee just over a year after retiring as Langford’s fire chief.
It’s a good fit for him, he said, especially as he still has two children in the school system.
Vying for municipal office was another option, Beckett said, noting Langford Mayor Stew Young reached out to him about running for council. He said he gave it serious thought, but decided it wasn’t quite what he wanted to do to give back to the community.
Then a speaker at a Rotary meeting got him thinking about running for school board, Beckett said. “He was talking about the public school system and the role that it plays in shaping not only our children but our communities.”
So Beckett signed on as a trustee candidate. The only person to finish above him in the polls was the incumbent board chairman, 23-year-old Ravi Parmar. Parmar was believed to be one of the youngest board chairpersons ever in B.C. when he was selected for the post in 2017.
Beckett is one of two new Sooke district trustees. Allison Watson is the other.
The Greater Victoria school district welcomes three new trustees, after incumbents Peg Orcherton, Deborah Nohr and Edith Loring-Kuhanga decided not to stand for re-election. Nicole Duncan, Ryan Painter and Angie Hentze were all newly elected.
For Hentze, it was being a Strawberry Vale Preschool parent concerned with a jump in the rent charged by the district spurred her to seek office. She was part of a large group of parents who attended a board meeting in May to talk about the issue.
But with children in kindergarten and Grade 3, she said, she has many other issues she would like to tackle, as well.
“It was not so much about the specific issue of the preschool but the way that it was handled and the lack of communication and collaboration,” Hentze said. “I wanted to make sure that other people reaching out to the school board didn’t go through the same thing that we did.”
She acknowledged that she has a lot to learn about how things work in the school district. “But definitely space in schools is something that is a concern,” she said. “We’ve got some schools with portables going up like crazy and other schools that have been closed. And there’s a lot of issues with equity across the district.”
Some programs and opportunities aren’t spread evenly from school to school, Hentze said.
At the Saanich school board, where trustees run in four zones, five people were elected by acclamation — two in Saanich, two in North Saanich and one in Sidney. The only race was in the Central Saanich zone, where three candidates vied for two spots.
Board chairwoman Victoria Martin said it was nice to be acclaimed, but contested seats are the better option.
“I think that all of us were disappointed there wasn’t a race because of the opportunity to have the conversations,” she said. “There’s always a concern that there just wasn’t the interest.”
By contrast, the 2014 trustee election had races in all four zones, Martin said.
“For the first time ever, in every single zone.”
Three incumbents and four newcomers make up the new board.
Acclamation was the buzzword in the Gulf Islands School District, as well, where voting is done island-by-island. The only race was on Galiano. Just two of the seven elected trustees are incumbents.
