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Criminals Breaking Court Orders, School Trustees Give Themselves Huge Raise, Stop On Red Week Starts

By Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter

The Star does a little digging and pulls out the startling fact that 21 of the 32 accused murderers this year were under court orders. Toronto homicide detectives are concerned that so many people accused of violent and gun crimes are able to get bail so easily.
Police and residents near Keele and Sheppard are on guard after a brutal sexual assault last night outside an apartment building in the area.
School Trustees have given themselves a 420% pay raise. No, we didn’t add a digit. Trustee salaries will balloon to $26,000 from $5000. With the school board suffering a major crash crunch the move seems incredibly bone-headed.
2006_8_8caribana.jpgThe feud between the Carribean Cultural Committee, the original organizers of Caribana and the city appointed Festival Management Committee starts up again. The CCC have vowed to wrest control of the festival back from the FMC. The new organizers argued that they did a pretty good job this year under difficult circumstances. We’re happy that this story gives us a reason to run another pretty Caribana photo.
The 2006 Dragon Boat Club Crew championships start this week. Over 2000 paddlers will descend on Lake Ontario. They’ll be racing on a new $23 million course.
Apparently “Stop on Red” week starts today. So for all of you idiots who can’t follow this most basic rule of the road don’t make me roll-up my free Bengie Molina poster and beat you with it. If that doesn’t scare you maybe the OPP blitz will.

Photo from Sandela’s Flickr Feed and the Torontoist Photo Pool

Comments

  • Gloria

    The pay raise is somewhat old news … I recall that the money comes from the province, not the school board’s budget, so money for textbooks and students is not directly affected.

  • Val

    That raise is still indicative of horrible accounting. If money can be found for such a hefty raise, why could it not be found for things that actually benefit the schools? Who cares where it comes from??

  • http://www.unknowntoronto.blogspot.com SarahBHood

    You must remember, intrepid Boy Reporter, that the demanding position of school trustee used to be a true, salaried one. When it was cut (during the Harris downloading era) to a mere $5,000, it meant that few qualified people could afford to give the job their full attention. (How much time would you give to a position that paid $20 per workday, with no pay at all two weeks a year?) The new rate of $26,000 (a living wage, though barely) seems a modest price to pay for a dedicated, full-time trustee.

  • http://www.flickr.com/photos/dstopping David Topping

    Yeah, if that’s the case, $5000 is a ridiculously unfair salary, to the point where it’s almost negligible. Many of the problems I saw when I was in high school (not too long ago) got blamed on incompetent trustees (among other suspects), so the money may attract better people.

  • slm

    $5,000 is a bit ridiculous given the demands of the position, I admit. But that stipend was meant to reflect the fact that school trustee is not supposed to be a full-time job or profession, but rather a form of public service that one does for a limited period of time while maintaining a permanent line of work. Admittedly, there a number of trustees who used it as a platform to build profile and run provincially, but the idea isn’t to create yet another class of tenured politicians. It may be quaint Jeffersonian politics to hope that our school boards be run by a group of citizen legislators rather than a group of professional politicians-in-training, but so be it.

  • v

    Even at $26,000, it’s hard to call school trustees “tenured politicians”. Compared to the $95,000 that city councillors are getting (which also seems somewhat ridiculous), this is nothing. Even if the change is ill-timed.