Sloat vs Grand Erie District School Board

So there's recently been some litigation in the family, and I wanted to give a full recounting of what's happened, why it's such an affront to decency and justice, and why my mother got to spend a day having her case heard in front of a panel of provincial judges. This'll be long, so strap in. 

Carol Ann Sloat

My mother, Carol Ann Sloat, has been a trustee for the Grand Erie District School Board (GEDSB) since 2003. And even then, this wasn't new for her - I remember going with her to meetings of the Dufferin County board back when I was about ten years old, because she'd actually go to most of the meetings, just as a regular member of the public. (It's funny the things that seem normal when you're a kid - I didn't really understand how unusual it was for a mom of two young-ish children to be that deeply involved in the meetings of a government body. She wasn't there to pester the board, she just wanted to know what was happening.)

If any of you have met my mom, you know she's a real believer in this stuff. Before the current unpleasantness, she'd never missed a board meeting in 20+ years as a trustee. She reads the lengthy board packages before every meeting, she tries to know people all through the school system so she can hear about issues, she volunteers for all kinds of different events, and she's always been extremely focused on how to do the best job of educating kids with the resources available. I'm a political activist on many issues, but she's really not - she tries to stay away from the hot-button culture war fights, other than to point out the obvious truisms - stuff like "Be nice to people who are different from you". (After that, get back to improving education.)

As you might be able to tell, I love my mom. She's a damn good person, and always has been. She really cares about this issue, she knows it like the back of her hand, and she's invested literal decades of her life into making her society a better place for student learning. Which is why it has been so bloody enraging to see what happened next. 

Ontario School Boards

School boards in Ontario used to be quite independent, but back in the mid-90s, a series of spendthrift boards abusing their taxation powers led the provincial government to clamp down on trustees. Boards lost their power to set their own tax rates, they lost some of their ability to bargain contracts with teacher unions, and so on. This greatly reduced the powers of trustees, and the position has become less than it used to be. 

Into that void has stepped the position of Director of Education. This is basically the CEO of the Board. Directors are still employees, and the trustees are still their bosses, but the directors of the province have pushed hard for greater independence and less accountability. With trustees commanding less respect, past governments have given directors a lot of their wishlist - the Director is officially the only employee the trustees should interact with directly, and the trustees are to set policies which the Director is fully in control of implementing. And the Director is the boss of all the lower-level staff, which gives them a ton of leverage over day-to-day operations. As you can imagine, if you get the wrong sort of personality in that slot, they can rapidly create an incredibly toxic work environment. (You can probably see where this is going.) 

JoAnna Roberto and the Public's Right to KnowNo

Back in 2020, a new director was appointed by the name of JoAnna Roberto. And while there's been occasional strife with previous directors, this ushered in a much uglier state of affairs. I can't think of any way to describe what happened next other than "she is terrified of the idea that she might someday be held accountable for something". Even as an outside observer, it's pretty easy to verify a lot of the facts that have led me to believe this. 

Like most government agencies in the modern era, the GEDSB used to live-stream its meetings for public consumption. They would then leave the archived videos up, because obviously, that's what anyone who cares about open government would do. So naturally, early in the Roberto years, the archives all got deleted. I've logged onto live streams of 6:30 meetings, had the meeting sit at a "The meeting hasn't yet started" screen until after 10:00, the meeting video consisted almost entirely of voting to adjourn, and then right after adjournment the meeting video was deleted. 

But of course, that was still too much accountability. Now they've totally stopped the Youtube live-streams, and use Teams meetings instead. If they don't want you seeing the meeting, they simply never let you in. (I've watched a couple using a pseudonym, because I'm sure they would never let a Sloat view anything. It's actually pretty funny, in a dark way, just how incompetent this new regime is - they're tyrants about this kind of thing, but never stop to think about how easy it is to go around them.)

The Board has also taken to abusing rules for holding meetings in closed "in camera" sessions. Naturally, I don't know what exactly is discussed in there, but I've seen school boards operate in the past, I've been on nonprofit boards myself, and I know how much time should usually be spent in closed sessions. The GEDSB is currently spending ten or twenty times as much of their meetings in camera as any other board I've ever seen, including the GEDSB itself pre-Roberto. There's no way that this could possibly be legitimate, so it's obviously just a tactic for keeping things out of the public eye. We don't even need to guess about this - for example, they've had votes to ratify board policies passed in-camera. That's a very clear violation of provincial law. 

And this is systematic, and affects every channel they can think of. I've never before heard of a public official on this level who leaves their official Twitter account locked for years at a time, for example. 

Crushing The Trustees

The one group that can hold a Director to account is the Board's trustees - they can discipline or fire her, when nobody else can. So naturally, controlling the trustees has been a big focus of Ms. Roberto. 

In practice, that's mostly boiled down to having her pet lawyers yell at the trustees until enough of them comply with whatever the Director wants. For most boards of public agencies, there's no lawyer in a typical meeting, because why would you ever need one? For the GEDSB, there's always at least one, and often two, there for every board meeting. If a meeting isn't going the "right" way, the lawyers interrupt to say that something's required/prohibited. They always seem to get the floor faster than the actual trustees do, as well - that seems grossly inappropriate. 

If someone points out that the legislation doesn't actually agree with what the lawyers are saying, one will angrily tell the Board that he knows the guy who drafted the law, and they need to follow his interpretation of what that guy wanted, instead of following the actual law of the province. (I should check if that can be reported to the Law Society of Ontario, come to think of it - it's got to be discipline-worthy to explicitly instruct a client to disregard the law...)

And honestly, I get why a lot of trustees go along with this. They're not lawyers, and a lawyer telling you what the law demands is going to be pretty convincing to most laypeople. I get annoyed at the trustees who follow along, but honestly, I don't hate them for it. They're doing what they think is right for the board. I just hope that they come to understand what mistakes they've made, and then work on fixing up this mess. 

Opening Salvoes 

Of course, you can't cow all the trustees just by waving a lawyer around. Someone like my mom has been around forever, knows education law pretty well (because she'll actually go read the laws if she has a question about them), and has a very low BS tolerance. Worst of all, my mom likes to ask questions. And since it seems like this Director never wants to be asked a real question, I'm not surprised that there's been a lot of strife. 

For a year or so, there was raised blood pressure all around, but no open warfare yet. The first serious salvo was accusing my mom of misusing meeting minutes. This is an absurd allegation - yes, she kept all her minutes going back to the day she became a trustee, because record-keeping is good. And yes, that includes in-camera minutes, because she's got just as much of a right to those as she does to the public minutes. But the "misuse" in question was really just "You're using records to contradict my claims" - in other words, exactly what the trustees are supposed to do. The Roberto administration seemingly found this annoying, so it demanded that the records all be destroyed. I don't know all the details here, but it was clear that there were some pretty stern legal threats to insist upon complete destruction of her archives. The Board's own archives were also purged pretty thoroughly - for example, you used to be able to see several years of meeting minutes on the website, and now there's less than a year's worth. The minutes are also much less complete than they used to be. 

This is how you know you're on the side of the angels - burning archives to the ground is clearly a thing that good people do, right? 

Side note: Even what they still have posted is messed up - for example, on that list of past meetings, the Dec 11 2023 meeting links to the agenda for Feb 12 2024, and a set of minutes that are *named* Feb 12 2024, but actually describe the meeting of Jan 29 2024. All this with no Feb 12 2024 meeting being in the list of meetings. You actually can still get the Dec 11 2023 documents, but you have to filter the meeting list differently, and then the same link goes to a different document. It's bafflingly terrible. 

All of this had to come to a head eventually. And, sure enough...

Code of Conduct "Violation" #1 - Whistleblowing

(Note: I'm organizing these next few sections by topic, not in chronological order. There's been four separate batches of code of conduct complaints, with a mix of these issues in each.)

My mom eventually got fed up with abuses of the in-camera meeting process, and walked out of an in-camera session in protest, then sent a complaint to the province's ombudsman asking about whether the Board's practices here were acceptable under provincial law. 

As you might imagine, this was an intolerable affront, and the powers that be decided to strike back. The method chosen here was to use the trustee code of conduct. This has become pretty common for school boards across the province who want to make an annoying trustee go away, but most have the decency to pick something the trustee did that was actually bad, and punish them for that. But you can't use that approach if you want to punish someone who didn't do anything wrong, so they just ignored any pretense of doing the right thing. 

Allegedly, going to the ombudsman about potential misuse of closed sessions was a violation of the closed-session rules, which is just absurdity. That argument would imply that nobody can ever challenge them on their use of closed sessions, and they can hide anything they want from public view at any time. I'm not sure if they were trying to get that argument to stand up, or if this is just a naked attempt to punish a whistleblower. Likely a bit of both. 

But whatever the reasons, another trustee put forward a complaint, alleging that my mom had violated half a dozen different sections of the code of conduct. And apparently, the GEDSB's idea of due process is for the hearing to happen in a two-hour closed session where the accused is not allowed to participate in any way. Seriously, this is the actual rule from the code of conduct, section 4.4(f): 

The Trustee who was alleged to have breached the Code of Conduct may be present during the deliberations but shall not participate, answer questions, or vote. 

(Also, two hours? From a board that knocks off the $400M+ annual budget in five minutes? I don't know what happened in that room, but I'd bet good money that the browbeating from the lawyers was truly horrendous.) 

Anyway, after two of Roberto's lawyers did their thing, the other trustees decided to ban my mom from three months of meetings. After twenty years of never missing a single meeting - scheduling family vacations around the meeting schedule, all that - they kicked her out. But that's just the beginning of our sordid little tale. 

Code of Conduct "Violation" #2 - Talking To Her Lawyer

There's apparently a legal principle in Canada called the "Doctrine of Absolute Privilege", which basically says that you can always present all of your evidence to a court. With a name like that, and stating a principle so simple and common-sense, it seems to be pretty bedrock to a lot of Canadian law. 

One of the Code of Conduct complaints was that she had violated Board confidentiality by passing evidence to her lawyer, and having that evidence get submitted to the court. It's not like this was just dumping twenty years of personnel matters and contract negotiations to him (remember how she had to destroy her archives?) - my mom's a pretty sensible person, and only gave him stuff directly related to the case. 

And when the stuff was submitted to the court, and the Board disliked it being filed in a publicly-accessible court document, did they ask for the court to seal it? Nah, they mostly didn't bother. (They did get a couple things sealed, but not nearly all of the things they were complaining about.) 

Also, confidential information was sent to the Board itself, which allegedly let staff members see things they weren't entitled to. But this happened in the context of her lawyer sending legal filings to the board. Does the GEDSB claim that its own staff members are opening things that were clearly marked as legal filings, and rifling through the contents? If so, that seems like a pretty serious failure to supervise. "You've been served" "Ooh, I wonder what's inside!" is not how clerical work is typically done. 

Interlude 1 - Code of Conduct Procedures

It's worth noting that these allegations aren't just absurd, they also fail on a whole host of procedural grounds. In the Code of Conduct, sections 4.2 (b-c), there's three time limits - six weeks to report a complaint, six months to investigate it, and ten days to give the Board that investigation report. Naturally, all three have been violated at various points. The first two are not so bad, relative to everything else - an eight month timeline for an investigation is a sign of a poorly-managed process, and does void the complaint. But compared to everything else, I won't focus too much on it. 

But the Board getting a copy of the investigation report? There's some where it's been over a year, and the report has still not been provided. Indeed, they weren't even available as documents to the court in this hearing, meaning that the GEDSB didn't even want to publicize them in its own defense, against a pretty significant legal challenge. They're probably a bit of a mess for the board's case, I would wager. Which is especially bad, given that the Director's team is picking out these investigators, and I doubt that neutrality is their main goal. If their own people can't even produce a report that makes their side look good, eep.

Instead of providing the report as required, they instead just used PowerPoint slide decks to present the report's findings. Nobody is entirely clear on who prepared these, but it was clearly a biased source, since any evidence for the defense is always mysteriously absent from the slides. Instead, they cherry-pick the heck out of it, exclude anything that might be exculpatory, and present that biased version to the trustees as if it was a complete investigation. 

Also, the trustees never voted for this procedure, it just kind of happened. (Anyone want to bet that it was Roberto and friends who made and submitted the slide deck, and their legal team who shut down any criticisms of it? I don't know for sure, and I doubt the answer is public, but you can make your own guess.) 

Code of Conduct "Violation" #3 - Watching Public Meetings

You remember up at the top, where I said that my mom sat in on meetings even when she wasn't a trustee? As you might imagine, as soon as she was expelled from the board table, she walked back to the public seating area, sat down, and kept observing. That's what you do when you actually care about the topic at hand. 

And at first, this seemed fine. Nobody said anything for a few months, and seeing as she was off the board, she went out into the hall for in-camera sessions. But that was clearly not going to last. (The timelines are complex here, so let's just hit the high points.) 

- My mom, who's had two knee replacements, was ordered to sit on chairs that would obviously not work for her knees. Her failure to follow that order from a random staff member? That's a Code of Conduct complaint. 

- Sitting outside the doors playing Candy Crush while the board is in another long closed session? Apparently that's eavesdropping, so it's a Code of Conduct complaint. Now, I've sat in that exact area myself during closed sessions, and you can't hear the discussion - occasional words at most. And my mom said as much to the investigator, but naturally that defense never made it into the Powerpoint. 

- She wanted to go wait in the kitchen, which has been the traditional hang-out area for decades, and was ordered to go elsewhere, for no apparent reason. (At a later meeting, she was ordered to go *to* the kitchen instead - this is clearly not any kind of coherent principle, it's just arbitrary diktats.) Going to the kitchen anyway? You guessed it, Code of Conduct complaint. 

- Even the fact that she shows up to meetings as a member of the public eventually featured in a Code of Conduct complaint. One trustee complained that "you don't expect someone who was kicked off the board to stick around and watch". And maybe this trustee didn't expect it, but there's no rule against it - if anything, it just shows that my mom actually wants to be there. But again, this was something the board found offensive. 

- She also made a sound once during one meeting (because she bumped her arthritic finger, and it hurt), which was allegedly some form of heckling. Hey look, another Code of Conduct complaint! 

This one has also featured in the punishments. Starting with the third round of punishments, my mom was prohibited from attending meetings. Of note, this included virtual attendance, where eavesdropping and interruption are total non-issues. You can just mute her or go into a private channel, there's no risks there. So any random person halfway around the world can listen to these public meetings, and one member of the board is the only person in the world who can't. This is not an allowable punishment under provincial law, but of course they did it anyway.

Code of Conduct "Violation" #4 - Talking To Her Husband

In the context of that last "eavesdropping" bit above, my mom also called up my dad to complain that the board had tasked a staff member with "babysitting" her. Naturally, the board was offended by this description, and thought it was a slight against board staff. 

Two problems here: 

1) The board later admitted to having sent the staff member there to watch her, so this seems like a pretty accurate description. 
2) This was a private phone call, and happened a ways away from the board room. My mom's not exactly one to bellow into the phone. So I guess the person who reported her was also, ironically, an eavesdropper. 

Interlude 2 - Eternal Damnation

You might have noticed that these allegations are not merely absurd, but also quite numerous. There's a reason for that. Punishments for code of conduct violations are limited under provincial law - basically, they've been operating on the assumption that they can't kick her out for more than three meetings at a time. (They can't even do that right, though - they once banned her from three specific meetings, and used that ban to keep her out of a fourth, unrelated meeting.)

Since the board doesn't meet over the summer, and the first ejection was May 2023, that means that October 2024 is now 14 meetings into the suspension. There's been four separate code of conduct penalties assessed, each for three months, as well as a short period where she was brought back to the table by a provincial judge's court order. 

For some odd reason, the board always seems to find that she's broken the code of conduct about three months since the last time she broke the code of conduct. And it doesn't seem to matter much when the complaint was filed - sometimes it takes eight months to get through the investigation, sometimes it takes three days, but they always seem to get decided right around the time when she might be able to come back to the table. 

Now, maybe that's just a coincidence, but it sure looks to me like there's a very obvious effort to ensure that she is never again allowed to attend any meetings. The board's lawyer has even openly stated that more is pending. I look forward to finding out what the alleged misconduct will be next time - are they going to say that my kindly 67 year old mother is so scary that their hearts might explode if they have to be in the same room? (Is this blog post itself going to feature?) Only time will tell! 

Code of Conduct "Violation" #5 - Answering Constituent Questions

At some point last year, a parent had some questions. The parent had talked to a superintendent (one step below the Director), didn't like the answer they got, so they sent an inquiry to their local trustee. My mom answered with "Her boss is Director Roberto, or you can take your concerns to a board meeting if you prefer - here's the form where you can ask to speak at a meeting." These were public links she gave, nothing even slightly secretive. So naturally, the next code of conduct complaint accused her of violating board secrecy, going against board decisions, and encouraging public condemnation of the board. 

Apparently part of the rationale used here was that the parent in question was part of a fairly sketchy Facebook group. But it was a closed group, and my mom had no way of knowing about it. The whole email chain was only about as long as this section is, it's not like they saw into each other's hearts. 

Code of Conduct "Violation" #6 - Small Talk

Before a meeting, a school principal ran into my mom, and made a comment about how he hoped to see her at his school soon. My mom mentioned that the board had a new policy preventing trustees from vising schools without permission. Which is completely insane, but that is actually what the policy says - here's the Code of Conduct, 1.5 (e-f): 

e) Trustees are not permitted to attend any School or facility within the Grand Erie District School Board without the prior approval of the Director of Education or direction of the Board... 

f) Trustees are not permitted to communicate with Senior Board staff, without the prior approval of the Director of Education or direction of the Board. Senior Board staff includes Supervisory Officers, Principals, Vice-Principals and Managers.

The principal said that was unfortunate, and my mom mentioned that he could talk to his superiors if he wanted something to change. In other words "these are the rules, go through the chain of command to make any complaints" - exactly what someone ought to do here. 

And then a complaint comes in that she had placed the principal in "an awkward situation", and "encouraged criticism of board decisions". The principal denied this and said it wasn't awkward, but that didn't make it into the Powerpoint. And surely people are allowed to disagree with things - one decision doesn't bind everyone's casual commentary for the rest of their lives. That'd be a ridiculous position to argue. 

Legal Action

While a school board is an independent level of government with some self-governing powers, it is not sovereign. In Ontario, the decisions of school boards on things like code of conduct violations are subject to judicial review, and there's been a bunch of cases like this in the last few years (most notably, McNicol, Del Grande, and Ramsay - all of whom acted far worse than my mom is alleged to have done, and all of whom received far lighter punishments from their respective boards, as it happens). 

So after long, long strings of abuses, my mom decided it was time to take the gloves off, and seek a legal remedy. There's been a lot of minor motions here that I won't bore you with, but a few noteworthy things happened along the way. 

First, there was a Board motion that my mom even asking for a judicial review was an abuse of process. They lost that one, of course, with the decision coming down lightning-fast. (Same day as the hearing!) 

Second, there was a hearing on a motion to stay the sanctions, decided back in June of this year. My mom won that, which is why she's been able to attend a few board meetings recently. 

Third, the GEDSB has been oddly slow to get its case ready to be heard. My mom's lawyer was ready for a hearing in the fall of 2023, and my mom was bitterly disappointed when a scheduled hearing this June got delayed until October. But the GEDSB kept saying that it wasn't ready for hearings, despite a much larger legal team working on the case. 

Unfortunately, this isn't too surprising - it's a pretty common strategy for a big organization to try to bleed out small litigants, by delaying the legal process and making it more expensive. The school board is a large organization that has hundreds of millions to play with, whereas my parents have their retirement savings, and not much more. Maybe the board's lawyers are slow and/or incompetent, but maybe they're intentionally dragging their heels in hopes that this all goes away. 

October 29th, 2024

All of the above has led us here, and this is why I'm making this post. My mother finally, after more than a year of waiting, had her day in court on the 29th. And it was a Zoom call, which meant a lot of people could be there. I saw at least eight of the twelve trustees on the call, for example. The Director herself was on the call, along with no less than three Board lawyers (one talked, one who was there as backup, and one who was just observing. I'd love to know how much money the third one charged the board to sit quietly in the audience for seven hours...)

The arguments made by my mom's lawyer are about what you would expect, from my recounting above. A lot of explanations of just how atrocious all of this was, a lot of citations to common-sense legal principles ("Every government agency is required to respect people's constitutional rights", "You can't punish someone multiple times for a single offense", "Decisions need to have a reasonable basis", etc.), and a lot of deep dives into specifics of the above claims. The judges had a few small questions, but overall it seemed pretty tame. 

Then, after lunch, it was the turn of the GEDSB's lawyer. And the questions posed to him were neither small nor tame. Even before he had finished his preamble, the judges were cutting in to ask some pretty pointed questions, mostly on the topic of the whole "Powerpoint summary" issue. They pushed back hard on the question of who actually decides what - in particular, they seemed to be worried that the board was trying to make the investigator into the de facto judge of the case, instead of a true decision being given to trustees. Questions like "Do trustees have to accept the investigator's facts?", "Can the investigator weigh evidence, and choose what to give to the trustees and what to exclude?", and so on came fast and furious - at one point, all three judges were talking over each other in their rush to ask questions. 

I'm no lawyer, but to my eyes the Board's lawyer was really trying to eat his cake and still have it. The board's policy prohibiting trustees from conducting their own investigation featured prominently, but he also went on at length about how trustees are experts in things like the physical layout of the boardroom, and should be respected as experts on questions like that. Not sure how you can square "they can weigh facts from their own personal experience" with "they cannot use their own judgement to try to determine facts", but he sure tried. 

The defenses were also really weak ones. Things like "Just because our procedures are different from every other board, that doesn't mean they're wrong", or "We're an independent body and can make our own rules" (which is a pretty weak argument when you're accused of Charter violations), or "The court will need to decide if this was okay". There was very little in the way of actual positive defenses, or reasons why any of it was supposed to be good. It was the sort of puffery you use when you know you're wrong, and just don't want to be on the hook for it. And then there was the truly spectacular argument that the ability of elected officials to attend their board's meetings "is really a privilege, when you think about it". (And I think that's a direct quote!) 

Also, a fun side note - of the other cases linked above, McNicol is the one where the trustee won in court. And one of the judges from the McNicol case was also the senior judge of the three on my mom's panel. 

Nothing is certain in the world of law, and until the decision is released, we won't know for sure how it went. But I've watched more court proceedings and read more law than almost all non-lawyers, and it looked really bad for the board, to my eyes. 

Final Thoughts

This is not a happy situation. Bluntly, it's awful. The GEDSB has abdicated its responsibility to the students, in favour of pursuing a vendetta against somebody who might make them look bad. They've acted like thin-skinned cowards, to the point where I've actually had a friend ask if the whole thing might be about covering up embezzlement, because this level of secrecy and vengeance is often a big red flag for that kind of criminal activity. (And the friend in question is a Certified Fraud Examiner, not some random guy spewing hot air.)

It's also been pretty expensive. My mom's more than sixty thousand dollars into legal fees at this point, just for her side. And she's been trying to be frugal about it - the board hasn't been frugal at all, so I'd be surprised if it was less than two or three times as much. The "Administration" line of the budget has gone from $7.9M in 2021-22 up to $9.4M in 2024-25, and "Contingency & Non-Operating" has gone from $5.2M to $9.7M over the same period, so there's a lot of room for money to have been spent here. 

Actually, a distant friend of mine from Brantford had heard about the situation, and since he did freedom of information requests professionally, he decided to make an FOI request to see what the board has spent on this litigation. Apparently, the board dismissed his request as "frivolous and vexatious", which is not a plausible reading of the laws, but they clearly didn't want to share the info. They also decided to go look up his social media presence, and reply to his inquiry with a bunch of designations he hadn't used in his request. Which is pretty bloody creepy, I have to say. And if they're trying so hard to cover it up, maybe it's even worse than I think.

I don't know if my mom's planning to launch a GoFundMe or anything - if she does, I'll post it here. (She's doing this for her community, and if the community wants to support her in her efforts, that seems only fair to me.) 

If you want to support her, then the best bet is probably to communicate with trustees - here's the full board, with contact info. If you do, though, please don't be a jerk. These are people who do care about the board, and whose goodwill is important if anything's going to change before the next election. And a number of them have voted against at least some of the Code of Conduct motions - Greg Anderson and Rita Collver have been reliably on the right side (and I'd wager Rita would have been next in line for this kind of treatment if my mom actually had resigned), but others have also opposed a few things here and there. 

Also, in general, keep an eye on your local government. It's not as dramatic as national or world affairs, but if you get the wrong person in, they can screw things up pretty badly. 

Thank you all for reading this far.