LangleyAdvance
Preserving history pg A15
Your community newspaper since 1931
Friday, September 24, 2010
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Cops for Cancer
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Tour means more than just cycling Reflections
Waters on the Mighty Fraser River were calm enough recently to offer a picture perfect view of a lovely fall day along the shoreline.
Education
Ouster debate heats up The parent group for the Langley School District would like the Ministry of Education to remove current trustees.
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by Heather Colpitts hcolpitts@langleyadvance.com
www.dbmlaw.ca 604.534.2131 Good advice. Good law. Good people.
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Troy Landreville/Langley Advance
President Megan DykemanPorohowski, first vice-president Tracy Wright and treasurer Bernice Kristoff-Trowell announced the DPAC’s upcoming vote to remove the entire school board.
The District Parent Advisory Council would rather see an Heather Colpitts appointed bureaucrat at the helm Langley Advance of the Langley School District. But the Langley Teachers’ Association feels there’s always Langley Advance. more accountability with a fully Ross added that the district elected board. remains commmitted to following On Tuesday, three of DPAC’s the Auditor General’s recommennine-member executive dations that were announced last announced the intention to hold week in an AG’s report critical of a vote for all the PACs within the board and district operations. this school district. “The report from the governOn Sept. 29, the PACs within ment was not news to us,” Ross DPAC will be asked to vote on a said. motion demanding that the prov“It’s a little incial government embarassing but it’s remove the current still the truth.” school trustees and This story first He said the district put an appointee appeared as will be better off for in place to run the breaking news at having gone through district until the next the process. school election in www.langleyadvance.com DPAC contends November 2011. that the board is too After Tuesday evendysfunctional to accomplish what ing’s school board meeting, new needs to be done. A new person interim chair Rod Ross said the from the by-election would be trustees hadn’t had a chance to joining the already dysfunctional discuss DPACs announcement group, which is pointless, it also and so didn’t have a position to claims. announce publicly. “As parents, we believe it is “It’s a very good board and it’s necessary, in the interests of our productive because it has differchildren, to end the dysfunction ences of opinion,” he told the
that has come to characterize our school district,” DPAC president Megan Dykeman-Porohowski said in the Tuesday morning news conference. The group is also citing the cost of a by-election as another reason why there should be an appointed trustee – one possibility described under the School Act – and the recent sudden resignation of school board chair Joan Bech. The latest controversy will interfere with the district carrying out the recommendations from the Auditor General’s report. That report released earlier this month cites board dysfunction as a key reason why the district is having problems. The district is grappling with a $13.5-million combined debt and deficit and will be making more than $3 million cuts each of the next four years to balance the books.
continued on page A6…
The first rule of the Cops for Cancer Tour de Valley is simple: no whining. I learned that rule the day of our first meeting, more than six months ago. Rule two was handed down by Wayne Norris, Crown prosecutor, motorcyclist, and Abbotsford Police special constable. “Never pass on the left,” Norris told us. Wednesday, the night before we left for our 800kilometre fundraising ride in support of pediatric cancer patients, Norris gave the bike riders the rundown of how we’ll be kept safe on the roads. The members of the Integrated Rider Escort Team will scout ahead to watch out for traffic, and keep us riders – known as “the package” – safe in the middle and away from, for example, giant trucks that could grind us into goo under their wheels. Norris told us what we need to do to keep ourselves and the motorcyclists safe at all times. In exchange for us being good cyclists, we get to own the road on tour. Norris’s speech was part of our introduction to the vast array of support crew volunteers who will shepherd us from place to place, starting in Delta. Some of them I already know, like Steve Andronyk, who is a past rider and once set a punishing 40 km/h pace when he joined us for a “practise” ride a few months back. There’s Craig Van Herk, who arrived in Delta with a shiny head, fresh from being shaved at a fundraiser at Aldergrove Community Secondary School.
continued on page A35…