The Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, is committed to making school service centers more accountable to parents and the media.
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“We are the ones who will appoint [les directeurs des centres de services] and, obviously, there are going to be accountability contracts,” Mr. Drainville declared to Benoît Dutrizac on Tuesday on QUB radio at 99.5 FM Montreal.
“In other words, there will be things, expectations, that we will communicate to the directors, then to the general directors of the service centers,” he added.
The minister, who has given himself the power to cancel certain decisions of the service centers if necessary, insists on the need for the latter to be more transparent with the public and the media.
“When you have an issue in your school service center, you have to come out publicly to give answers,” he argued.
Recent intervention
The minister recently had to intervene in the case of a 14-year-old student from the Samares School Service Center.
This young girl, sexually assaulted at the age of 12 in a room at her school, was only able to obtain a transfer after the publication of an article in The Journal and the intervention of the minister, despite repeated requests since March 2023.
“At the same time, I can’t intervene all the time like that,” he said. What do you want, at some point, you are right to say that the general management of the service centers must do their job,” he said.
“I have 72 school service centers in Quebec […] It’s not normal for it to end up on the minister’s desk, so let’s see, I can’t,” he stressed.
Despite the challenges, Mr. Drainville remains optimistic about the state of the education system in Quebec.
“The foundations are healthy,” he said, emphasizing that “budgets have increased by 50%” in six years.
*This text, generated with the help of artificial intelligence, was reviewed and validated by our team based on an interview carried out at QUB.
