Cameron Commission, 1944-45
On 27 November 1944 Dr. Maxwell A. Cameron was appointed as a one-man commission of inquiry on education administration. Cameron had been a principal of Powell River high school. A graduate of The University of British Columbia (UBC), he held a doctorate in education from the University of Toronto. He was a faculty member in the Department of Education at UBC when he was appointed commissioner by the Minister of Education, Dr. George W. Weir.
Cameron recommended a new formula for school finance and the reorganization of the province into large, regionally defined administrative units. The commissioner proposed several criteria for establishing the new units, which were to be called school districts.
The units were to embrace a school age population large enough to support Grades 1 to 12; the units should be large enough to employ at least 60 teachers, and ideally 100 teachers; the units should disregard municipal government boundaries and should include, if necessary, extra- municipal areas and unpopulated areas; and each unit should be "comprehensible to local people" and should constitute "a community or economic entity."
In contrast to Dr. Herbert B. King (who authored the 1935 Report on School Finance in British Columbia ), Cameron advocated strong local authorities, controlled by elected school trustees and managed by provincially-appointed district superintendents.
Cameron's report was tabled in the Legislature on 25 February 1946. His recommendations were accepted by the coalition government led by Premier John Hart and were enacted through the Public Schools Act Amendment Act of 1946 [10 Geo. 6, c.64]. Seventy-four large school districts were created, amalgamating almost all of the rural, municipal and city school districts which had existed previously.
