What are natural person powers? And how will they help school boards serve our communities?
Over the past two weeks, the Public School Boards’ Association of Alberta has received numerous School Act review submissions from our member school boards to the Minister of Education. We have made them available on this blog (on the Other Submissions and Discussion Papers page along the top), and as more submissions arrive, we will continue to post each of them with a brief summary of their recommendations on new school legislation.
Several common threads within these submissions are becoming apparent. All across Alberta, communities want similar opportunities to participate in the governing of their schools at the local level. Communities want their school boards to have the tools they need to build strong educational opportunities for their children. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the tools they want are very similar across the province.
Echoing the recommendations made by the PSBAA to the Minister in September, an overwhelming majority of submissions have called for new education legislation to empower school boards with ‘natural person powers’. School boards are not alone in calling for these powers either. The College of Alberta School Superintendents (CASS) and the Association of School Business Officials of Alberta (ASBOA) are the professional organizations that represent Alberta’s superintendents of schools and school board secretary-treasurers. Their joint School Act review submission includes a survey of their members on what they feel should be included in new school legislation. An astounding 71.9% of respondents agree that extending natural person powers to school boards is either important, very important, or critical. More recently, the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association (AUMA) passed a resolution supporting natural person powers for school boards. Clearly, natural person powers have considerable momentum behind them within the education stakeholder community. But, what are they? And, how will they help school boards serve our communities?
Natural person powers are essentially the powers enjoyed by a real person when granted to some form of corporate body. Generally, these corporate bodies are businesses, but increasingly these powers are being extended to local forms of government. In 1995, for instance, Alberta’s Municipal Government Act was amendment to provide our municipalities with natural person powers. These powers grant corporate bodies the right to own, sell, and use property with the full discretion of any natural person. They permit corporate bodies to enter into contracts, to sue, and to be sued. Finally, they accord corporate bodies the freedom to do anything the law does not expressly prohibit.
This last feature of natural person powers is perhaps the most important. Currently, school boards are limited in the way they serve their communities by what the School Act explicitly permits them to do. Put simply, the Act tells school boards what they must do, but only acknowledges a small handful of ways for them to do it. A new School Act extending natural person powers to school boards would reverse this. The Act would continue to lay out the duties and responsibilities of school boards towards their students and their communities, but it would grant them complete discretion in fulfilling their responsibilities, with the limits placed on what they cannot do instead of what they can do.
These powers would grant school boards flexibility that would not only allow, but inspire creative solutions to education in the community. This has already been demonstrated in our cities, where natural person powers have allowed them to unleash their potential since 1995. The same would hold true for school boards. Citizens could approach their school boards with fresh ideas and valuable concerns, and trustees could address them without straining to contort themselves through the hoops of a cumbersome, twenty-year old piece of legislation. Our school boards are not meant to operate as branch offices for Alberta Education headquartered in Edmonton. They are meant to operate as the servants of their communities, where local citizens know best and local trustees have intimate connections with their constituents. This puts them in the unique position to make the best decisions for our children, their students, and everyone’s future. Natural person powers would expand the range of decisions trustees could make to improve upon Alberta’s education system.
