On September 2, the Hanover School Division (HSD) announced their trustee board’s newly appointed chairs for the 2025–26 school year.
Trustees from Ward 1, Dallas Wiebe and Jeff Friesen, have respectively agreed to the positions of chairperson and vice chair. Ward 1 covers the schools of Bothwell, Kleefeld, Crystal Springs, and Niverville. Both were voted in by acclamation by their peers.
Wiebe and Friesen provided the trustee board with this same leadership last year, only in reverse roles. This year, Friesen says he found himself getting a little busier with family matters and chose not to run for the chair position.
Friesen looks forward to another year of working together with Wiebe, who he says holds many of the same values and passions he does. He also feels that one of the reasons they’re good candidates for these roles is their flexibility, which comes from being self-employed farmers.
“I’m happy to follow if there’s a strong leader [like Dallas],” Friesen says. “We have a lot of great trustees, but not everybody has the same strengths. And some have different time constraints.”
The position of chairperson, he says, is not an easy one. They must attend meetings on behalf of the board and sift through countless emails coming in daily from the province, the Manitoba Teachers’ Society (MTS), the Manitoba School Boards Association, as well as regular correspondence from individuals and organizations in the community.
Then the appropriate information must be relayed to the board at their regular meetings.
Last year, Friesen says that he and Wiebe became a much tighter collaborative team than the board has likely experienced in years prior.
“In the past, the vice chair has been kept at arm’s length,” Friesen says. “Conversations were had with the chair that the vice chair didn’t even know about.”
Now, says Friesen, there is a mutual agreement to include each other in every relevant conversation.
Even so, he doesn’t want to fill either of these positions indefinitely.
“I would like to see everyone [on the board] take a chair term because it builds a very strong board,” says Friesen. “You get better board members if they understand what it takes to lead.”
Perhaps one factor responsible for others’ hesitancy in letting their names stand is the fact that the role comes with much greater responsibility and expectations with little more compensation.
All HSD trustees, Friesen says, serve as volunteers. While they are compensated with nominal stipends for attending meetings and mileage reimbursement, it doesn’t reflect, in today’s day and age, the countless hours everyone invests.
“We are one of the lowest paid divisions and one of the biggest divisions,” says Friesen.
This topic has been discussed around the board table on more than one occasion in recent years. One argument for giving trustees a salary is to attract more people to the board. Others on the board believe that trustees should be driven by a passion to serve.
Going into the new school term, Friesen says he plans to maintain the same ideals which drove him to serve three years ago: to be a voice for the values that matter to HSD parents in the face of what many see as government and MTS overreach.
“Keeping the local HSD values and traditions relevant and respected in the schools,” Friesen says of his mandate. “That is actually in the Public Schools Act as to what we are supposed to do as trustees.”
It’s the erosion of these values and traditions, he says, that pushes parents to look for alternative options, such as private schools and homeschooling. Not everyone can afford these options, says Friesen.