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One Man's Opinion

COLLINS: Next step in the mayor’s saga comes tomorrow

Feb 5, 2023 | 6:40 AM

TOMORROW NIGHT (Feb. 6), the Board of Education for School District 73 jumps into the best-seller, The Saga of RHJ. The mayor, who has already jumped into the mud with councillors and administration, has now muddied the floors of a local high school.

In late January, a nurse was helping a student at Sa-Hali Secondary with a presentation on opioids. As part of the presentation, the public health nurse had some naloxone kits for demonstration. At the end of the presentation, some of the kids mistakenly thought the kits were available for the taking, and brought them home. Some parents complained, and one of them contacted the mayor, who says he shared the email with councillors.

But here’s where the story goes off the rails. The mayor, who is faster than a speeding bullet and able to leap tall buildings at a single bound, decided to find out what was going on. So, totally unannounced, he went into the school to meet with the principal. The principal, by all accounts, kept his control and the two had an amiable meeting where all was cleared up and the mayor left.

But that meeting had no business taking place. The mayor had no right to be at that meeting. The situation was totally outside his mandate. If he was concerned, there are procedures to follow, and the mayor didn’t follow them.

And as much as I appreciate the way the situation was handled by the principal, he should have treated the mayor like any other unauthorized person who entered the school and told him to bugger off.

I have received lots of comments from educators who are livid about the mayor’s actions. It’s not the first time he has shown up unannounced somewhere, as if he has the right to do so. He doesn’t.

The school board will deal with the situation at its meeting tomorrow night. I don’t expect they will do much, given the way the meeting went down. But I do expect the mayor and council will get a nice little letter from the board, asking the city to follow the proper procedures in future.

The mayor should also know that the parents’ concerns were blown out of proportion. Any student could walk into a drug store and get a naloxone kit for free. They also have easy access to menstrual products, birth control advice, and just about anything else they need, from a variety of sources. If the mayor had taken a couple of minutes to check that out, or picked up his phone and made a call, this whole incident would likely never have happened.

The mayor may think he is more powerful than a locomotive when he has his collar of office on, but he is not. He still has a steep learning curve. There are courses put on by various groups for elected officials. Perhaps the mayor should use some of his seemingly boundless energy and enroll in one of them. It certainly might give him a better grounding to handle the next three years ahead.

I’m Doug Collins and that’s One Man’s Opinion.

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Editor’s Note: This opinion piece reflects the views of its author, and does not necessarily represent the views of CFJC Today or Pattison Media.

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