As far as some Toronto District School Board trustees are concerned, former mayor Barbara Hall’s report on their organization looks to treat problems that are already well on the way to being cured.

And board chair Robin Pilkey said Sunday that she and her trustees do not need supervision to make the changes called for in Hall’s scathing report to the Education Ministry that was released Friday.

“You can’t change everything overnight, it’s not a light switch,” Pilkey told the Star. But the tone at the board has changed and improvement has occurred. “I don’t think supervision is necessary.”

In a four-month-old report that the Ontario Education Ministry got around to releasing last Friday (only then after it had been posted in error online), Hall recommended the TDSB be given a year to get itself in acceptable order or be broken up into smaller boards.

Trustee Chris Tonks said the province carries “a huge stick, but breaking up this board isn’t going to be as easy as they think it’ll be.

“Do we want to go to a heckuva lot more bureaucratic layers in trying to facilitate a breakup of this board? I don’t think so.”

Tonks said some of the less incendiary recommendations were reasonable. But the more populist magnets — such as limiting trustees to three consecutive terms — should be resolved in broader discussion about “democracy and what we want in terms of representation” at municipal and provincial levels as well.

Parthi Kandavel, trustee for Scarborough Southwest, said “a lot of us, including myself, were disappointed that the changes that we’ve acted on and the reforms we’ve brought in from December 2014 . . . weren’t spoken to or appreciated.”

Still, Kandavel thought there were “some strong recommendations.” For instance, he liked the idea of creating two or more smaller “education centres” in different areas of the city, headed by an associate director, to deal with local issues, give superintendents a base in neighbourhoods and foster closer ties with parents communities.

“For a lot of my parents, whether it’s committee meetings, hearings or deputations, it’s very intimidating and distant to them to make it out there to” TDSB headquarters at Yonge and Sheppard, he said.

While some of its 20 recommendations were deemed useful by trustees interviewed Sunday by the Star, the report’s reiteration that the TDSB is plagued by “governance dysfunction” and a “culture of fear” struck some as insulting.

There’s also the fact that any breaking up of the board into smaller units — in a city that remains amalgamated — will require the spending of scarce education dollars on new bureaucracy when those dollars could be going into classrooms or to address a school repair backlog.

Pilkey — whose board oversees more than 550 schools and 250,000 students — said “once you get into the weeds of how to apply some of those recommendations” the province might decide “that’s not the best idea.”

The release of the report while Hall was out of the country caught most players by surprise.

“Happy first Friday as vice-chair,” joked Jennifer Arp, rookie trustee for Eglinton-Lawrence just elected to her new post this week.

A report is merely that, she said. The key will be what Education Minister Liz Sandals signals will be made of it by the government. “I hope that the minister will acknowledge the progress that’s been made.”

Since becoming notorious across Canada for relentless turmoil, 11 of the board’s 22 seats — soon to become 12 when a vacancy is filled — have been won by new trustees. The board will soon have a new director, has rookie trustees as new chair and vice-chair, a newcomer as chair of its budget committee.

Trustee Ken Lister, elected as part of the new wave in 2014 to represent Don Valley East, said the Hall report was “very much living in the past.

“We’ve got a great leadership team and things have changed significantly at our board,” he told the Star. “I think we’ve made a lot of great progress.”

The first of 20 recommendations urges the province to immediately send in a supervisor to work with trustees and staff to make improvements, including addressing the often-cited “culture of fear” — but gives the board one year to make significant progress or be “expeditiously” broken into two or more “independent, smaller boards.”

“I find comments of that nature hurtful and disturbing that someone would suggest it’s still at the same level and hasn’t improved,” Lister said.

“I get along very well with my colleagues. I have no fear of my colleagues. I’m not aware of anyone who’s fearful of me. The board’s been functioning well.”

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In all, the haphazard nature of the report’s release hints that it’s regarded with something less than top priority by a provincial government with huge demands on its education budget.

Especially at a time when the TDSB has enjoyed a sustained run of peaceful operation and, as Lister noted, there are the more pressing problems of school roofs and windows that leak, old furnaces, classrooms without air-conditioning.

“And the fact,” he said. “That that problem is getting worse.”