| The Brad Badiuk situation could have been such a teachable moment for a city trying to come to grips with being identified as the most racist city in Canada.

Instead, utter silence.

The Kelvin High School website lists Badiuk as an electronics teacher for the 2015-2016 school year. I haven’t heard from anyone who’s had a confirmed sighting of Badiuk in the school.

| As dysfunctional as the ongoing Mike Babinsky saga makes Winnipeg School Division’s board of trustees, it’s also clear that the other seven trustees have frozen out Cathy Collins.

She was the finance chair not so long ago, and along with Babinsky and board chair Mark Wasyliw, Collins is one of only three veterans among the nine trustees. And she’s a member of the NDP majority, too.

Monday night, the board shut Collins out of any significant committee chair’s role. Wasyliw is chair, Sherri Rollins vice-chair, Chris Broughton has finance, Lisa Naylor the pivotal committee handling policy and program, Allan Beach chairs building and transportation, Dean Koshelanyk gets communications. I haven’t asked, but I suspect Kevin Freedman would have been given much more responsibility had he and his wife not just had their first child.

It was extraordinary that no other school board in Manitoba has ever gone so far in disciplining a school trustee as Winnipeg School Division trustees did this week in barring Mike Babinsky from board and committee meetings for a month.

No other board has ever used Section 35 of the Public Schools Act to go beyond censure and give a trustee the temporary boot.

Still...

It sounds as though the WSD board went a long way, but you have to wonder what any trustee would have to do to warrant the even greater sanctions available under the act. WSD could have barred Babinsky for three months, and could have suspended him from any access to information and any activities as a trustee.

| I got a call a while back from Tory MLA Wayne Ewasko, the opposition's education critic, who was pretty miffed that I hadn’t asked him to comment on an education story we ran.

I can’t recall what the story was about, but Ewasko pitched a really strong case that the party wants to be asked to comment on any kind of systemic education story I do, or anything in which the government is quoted.

Which makes sense, and that’s why I’d been doing it pretty often.

| I’ve been trying to figure out why the University of Winnipeg wasn’t ready Friday with a communications strategy when the Alberta government named president Annette Trimbee to a four-person panel reviewing the highly-contentious royalty rates on Alberta’s oil and gas industry.

I should point out right up front that the person with whom I usually deal at UW was not working that day.

This review is a national story — I think the Alberta panel made second story on CBC radio’s national news that day.

| Whoever you are who’s flooding Canada Post with those vicious and vile 12-page diatribes alleging a scandal centred around Winnipeg School Division custodians, you really need to seek some help.

And you really, really need to stop mailing that stuff. |

| It was quite the legend while it lasted.

Alas, it wasn’t true.

One of the most popular stories on our website for a few days last week was my story on new Red River College president Paul Vogt’s contract being made public, and particularly the detail that Vogt not only pays for his own parking spot, he has to scramble for a parking spot just like everyone else on campus.

 It was cringeworthy.

You could feel for Winnipeg School Division trustee Chris Broughton Friday as fellow school board member Cathy Collins humiliated him in front of the entire public meeting.

Do these people not understand irony, that one of their members would pull such a stunt just as they were trying to refute Prof. John Wiens’s contentious report — whoops, the word "scathing" always has to be used to describe it — that called the board out of control and guilty of reckless dysfunction?

The trustees had been doing a half-decent job up to that point of making the case that, as board chair Mark Wasyliw has put it a bunch of times, that Wiens was at times over-the-top in his attack on WSD’s governance, openness, and transparency.

| School trustee Colleen Mayer’s ambition could cost Louis Riel School Division taxpayers more than $100,000 if Mayer wins a provincial seat next April.

The Ward 2 trustee was re-elected to another four-year term this past October, but a few months later won the Conservative nomination in the St. Vital provincial riding now held by retiring New Democrat Nancy Allan.

City election officials say a by-election could cost as much as $6 a voter for the ward, in which 17,625 voters were registered last fall.

| New Red River College president Paul Vogt was telling me how much he appreciated it that I leave him alone at the Reh-Fit Centre.

There’s an unwritten rule about talking business at Reh-Fit, said Vogt. |

| There was a lot of talk right after the October election about a new era of openness and transparency dawning in the secretive Winnipeg School Division.

This was the board infamous for 20 minutes of public rubber-stamping followed by hours of secret business.

And, OK, yes, the trustees are doing more business in public, and I have to say that they’re very good about getting back to me immediately when I contact them, and commenting publicly, especially board chair Mark Wasyliw, Lisa Naylor, Sherri Rollins and Kevin Freedman.

| The University of Manitoba has another disgruntled young doctor.

We told you recently about another doctor who’s sued U of M, alleging widespread human rights abuses centred around his inability to get a residency to his liking. That’s his father who’s been conducting a hunger strike on Route 90. The ‘evidence’ the doctor and his family and the family friend who’s acted as an aggressive go-between provided had seemed to indicate that the medical faculty’s ongoing academic evaluation of the young man's performance and of his interpersonal skills had not been to his family’s satisfaction.

Now comes a second young doctor, who included an amazing six-page CV of his medical and academic achievements to date in his email to me so that, as he put it, "Just so I can prove that I am not a looney."

| So now I know what it feels like to be a local when the Jets play in Miami or Phoenix.

Being surrounded by American soccer fanatics wasn’t like being in Rogers Centre for a Yankees’ game — I didn’t hear any homophobia or putting down of Canada, the F-bombs were all directed at the referee, the spectators didn’t hassle the Aussies, and I never felt as though it could get physical in the stands.

But being in the middle of all that, I felt for the referee, who I thought was doing a terrific job keeping the match under control, and who was standing up to Abby Wambach’s intimidation routine just fine.

| Here’s a combination soccer/education controversy that’s yet to happen in Manitoba — but it could just be a matter of time.

It’s all over the Ontario media, a high school boys’ soccer tournament in which two girls were entitled to play on their high school team, and their opponent was a Muslim private high school which said its faith did not allow the boys on its team to be in physical contact with the girls on the other team.

| So close.

I reported last year that seven teachers in Thompson had become the first classroom teachers in Manitoba to make more than $100,000 a year. They were class 7 teachers with at least 10 years’ experience, the top classification for teachers and which includes teachers with two masters degrees or a PhD. |