"This is like déjÀ vu all over again," said baseball legend Yogi Berra in his famous and oft-quoted malapropism. And so it is for the board of trustees of the School District of Mystery Lake (SDML), where Rob Pellizzaro and Guido Oliveira returned after a two-year hiatus- by acclamation, as they were unchallenged - to the chair and vice-chair positions Sept. 10 at the first school board meeting of the new academic year.
It's the first time Pellizzaro and Oliveira have been at the helm together since the 2010-11 academic year, which saw the beginning of the long-running soap opera involving Bev Hammond and Ryan Land and the board get under way in earnest, after a preliminary dust-up in April 2010 where Land's probation was initially extended.
By the time the dust had settled a year later, both Land, still the probationary principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate, and Hammond, the superintendent of the School District of Mystery Lake, were both gone from their jobs, with no one eventually found at fault and the general public none the wiser as to most of the events that had transpired behind the scenes in their parallel public personnel dramas that transfixed Thompson for most of 2011.
Land, however, quickly enough landed on his feet in May 2011 as Vale's Manitoba Operations manager of corporate affairs [his title today is manager of corporate affairs and organizational development and he's a senior member of he executive team] less than four months after no longer being principal of R.D. Parker.
Hammond wound up resigning Jan. 18, 2012 as superintendent of the School District of Mystery Lake, after a short medical leave, and quickly left town.
Pellizzaro, however, has not been far from the apex of power on the board of trustees for the last two years, serving consecutive one-year terms as vice-chair under chair Alexander Ashton, who did not seek the chair's job for a third year.
Ashton teaches at University College of the North and is the younger brother of two-term Churchill NDP MP Niki Ashton and the son of Thompson NDP MLA and minister of infrastructure and transportation Steve Ashton and Hari Dimitrakopoulou-Ashton, an economist and university lecturer in economics, management, and women's studies, who is also a former SDML school board trustee.
Pellizzaro, a local lawyer, was first elected in 1998, and is the longest serving trustee on the board. He did not seek re-election as chair after serving for slightly more than 10 months in the wake of incumbent trustee and chair Cheryl Davies defeat in the last school board election Oct. 27, 2010. Trustees serve a four-year term. The next election is Oct. 22, 2014.
SDML trustees pick a chair and vice-chair from among their own seven-member ranks at a September re-organizational meeting for a one-year term, except in general election years every four years, when the chair is not chosen until after the October election.
Trustee Leslie Tucker went down to a double defeat in 2011 in her attempts to become both the board chair, and when she was defeated in that bid, the vice-chair, losing first to Ashton then Pellizzaro.
Janet Brady, who won a byelection to replace Valerie Wilson on the board in November 2011, met exactly the same fate last year as Tucker the year before, going down to a double defeat in her attempts to become both the board chair, and when she was defeated in that bid, the vice-chair, being bested first by Ashton then Pellizzaro.
Neither Brady nor Tucker sought the chair or vice-chair's position Sept. 10.
Brady, and trustee Sya Gregovski, were acclaimed as the board's management representatives for the negotiating committee that bargains with Thompson Teachers' Association No. 45-3 of the Manitoba Teachers' Society. The current four-year collective agreement, signed on Nov. 22, 2011, covers the period July 1, 2010 to June 30, 2014. The contract remains in full effect for a period of four years from July 1, 2010 and continues in effect from year-to-year, unless either party gives notice by April 30, 2014 by registered mail of intention to terminate or to seek amendment to the agreement - a virtual certainty. When that happens, management and the union are to present proposals to the other party before May 1, 2014.
