It's an issue the new Thames Valley District School Board chair wanted to tackle head on and she did it with her inaugural address to trustees.

"You know what, we can't just stick our head in the sand," says Ruth Tisdale.

She was responding to mounting calls for eliminating trustees from the education system.

With much of the discontent stemming from alleged mismanagement and dysfunction with the Toronto School Board that and a watered down role for trustees with queens park taking over taxation and collective bargaining powers.

But Tisdale still believes in the work trustees do.

"We understand our communities. If you lose that local voice, then you have a big, centralized bureaucracy that's making decisions and you don't have that ability to have the local distinction," she says.

The arguments in recent weeks have ranged from moving from elected trustees to appointed trustees to getting rid of trustees altogether to getting rid of school boards altogether.

Bill Tucker worked at the Thames Valley board headquarters for 10 years as superintendent and director and also sees value in the work the boards do.

"In our region alone, trustees of the four area boards oversee a billion dollars of budget. They hire directors, they hold the directors responsible and accountable to the public. And a parent, or a family, can't have a better advocate than a trustee," says Tucker, who is now with Western's Faculty of Education.

Tisdale says boards must recognize the economic pressures on the province and admits one solution to that is more co-operation between boards.

"If we could find ways to better collaborate and share facilities and share the resources we have, I think we'd be better off," says Tisdale.