Competing school board visions

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Top-down

As the current one-man school board Howard Windsor sees it, the board answers to provincial education minister Karen Casey. Future school-board members should work as “team players” and should not overly worry about representing the voters who elected them. The school board should be “exercising balanced judgment in the best interests of the system as a whole,” says Windsor.

Bottom-up

When Doug Sparks was on the school board, he saw himself as a representative of the interests of his community; after all, the African Nova Scotian seat on the school board was created precisely for the purpose of addressing the historic institutional injustices done to black students. Sparks therefore forcefully opposed what he saw as continued racism on the part of the school board.