After months of looking like both English and French Centretown school board trustee positions would be acclaimed, last minute nominations mean the race is on.
Megan Carroll will now challenge incumbent Jennifer McKenzie in the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board race.
“I decided that now is the time to get involved and make a difference,” Carroll says of her late decision to get involved.
Although this is Carroll’s first foray into education, being a mother she says she has children’s best interests at heart.
Carroll is a stay-at-home mom and spent her teenage years as a counsellor at summer camps across the country.
Veteran Jennifer McKenzie worked as an electrical engineer in Ottawa for more than 20 years before leaving the profession a decade ago to get involved in education.
She says despite her previous tenure as trustee, “there is still work to be done.”
The Ontario Education Quality and Accountability Office’s release of standardized test results last week showed Centretown elementary students are falling behind.
However both Carroll and McKenzie say they aren’t discouraged.
“The children in this area are bright, creative, and energetic. With the right programs in place, they will soon be scoring the highest in Ottawa and beyond,” says Carroll.
McKenzie points out that it isn’t all bad news. Literacy scores have been steadily going up over the past four years, she says, and if re-elected she intends to focus more on mathematics and the arts.
In the Ottawa Catholic School Board race, incumbent Therese Maloney Cousineau will face former principal Tom Duggan, after having represented zone 10 for 25 years, as well as undergraduate University of Ottawa student Megan Crowe.
Duggan has worked in the school system for 34 years and was a principal for 15, in addition to serving on the parish council.
He says he believes that funding and declining enrolment are the major issues Catholic schools in the area face.
Ontario is now the only province in eastern Canada that has a fully-funded Catholic school system, but Duggan says more work still needs to be done to ensure that this remains the case.
“I think we as a school system have got to bring it out into the open and make sure that Catholic schools will be here for a long, long time,” Duggan says.
Another area of concern for Duggan and Crowe is updating and modernizing schools.
“More needs to be done to bring our schools into the 21st century and promote internet learning,” says Crowe.
In both the French-Catholic and French-Public boards, Centretown candidates won by acclamation.
Jean-Paul Lafond will continue for a seventh term representing the French-Public board and Diane Doré will stay on for a third term as the trustee for Centretown’s French-Catholic board.