Trustees at Hamilton’s public school board have taken a step toward developing a whistleblower policy that aims to make it easier for students and staff to report incidents of harassment, discrimination or other wrongdoing.
The Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) will work with a third party to create an avenue for people to anonymously report incidents without fear of reprisal.
It’s one of a number of policy changes that HWDSB has been making over the past few years, ever since a former student trustee’s allegations of racism and discrimination at the board were backed up by an independent investigation.
Maria Felix Miller, trustee for Ward 3 and chair of the policy committee, said not many school boards have whistleblower policies but said the community has been calling for something like this.
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“We at the board table and the HWDSB as a whole, we acknowledge that there are members in our community who have been harmed by some of our actions, by some of our previous decisions,” Miller told Global News.
She said there are other ways for people to report issues but those methods don’t go far enough to encourage people to come forward.
“We have heard from our community that often those avenues are not anonymous and that the protections there really aren’t sufficient to make people coming forward feel as comfortable as we would hope. So the whistleblower policy, ideally, is going to provide extra protections.”
Trustees approved its creation during a Jan. 30 board meeting, despite some wondering if it needed more refining before getting ratified.
Miller said she’s heard from some community members who may have been hoping for an even more “arm’s length” approach with the policy but said it needs to be an additional tool, not something that completely replaces the existing system.
She also said it has gone back and forth between staff and the policy committee enough times that waiting even longer to get the ball rolling on the policy will mean that fewer people will get to take advantage of it.
“We’re at the point where it’s a very strong policy and we actually need to get it on the books to start to see what types of complaints we’re seeing, where the gaps are once it’s in action … and other trustees agreed that if we sent it back, it would probably be months before we saw it again, and that would also stall the development of the associated procedures.”
There will be additional costs associated with the policy but it’s unclear what those will be at this time, since it depends on how many people actually use the reporting system.
Staff will come back to the board twice a year to report on how it’s being used and will review the policy every two years.
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