Democracy may be messy, but at the Toronto District School Board it’s a disaster zone.

Armed police at meetings, locked doors to keep trustees from bothering staff, reports of sexual harassment, temper tantrums and conflict of interest — and that’s just in the past week.

Since the mega-board was created 16 years ago through the forced marriage of six fiercely independent school systems, its 22 trustees can’t seem to stay out of trouble. More than one team of auditors has scolded them for interfering in everyday operations and creating a “culture of fear” from top to bottom. Don’t even get started on their financial fiascos — just last year Queen’s Park froze all funds for construction until they got capital spending in order.

If you set a reality show based on Canada’s largest school board, you’d call it Trustees Gone Wild.

Yet, get past the headlines to the classrooms that are home to 232,000 of the country’s most diverse young learners, and you find a system that in many ways is hailed around the world.

The award-winning “Model Schools for Inner Cities” project that provides children in needy neighbourhoods with mentors, doctors, free eye exams, hearing tests, extra staff and after-school programs has drawn researchers from Korea, Germany, China and Russia.

The model for Ontario’s landmark full-day kindergarten program began with a pilot project in five TDSB elementary schools that blended daycare and kindergarten and offered learning through play — ground-breaking at the time.

The board seems unafraid to experiment with new ways to help kids learn, sometimes despite the rolled eyes of others. To see if the teenaged brain would learn better if classes began an hour later, the board tried a “late start” high school and found it did (plus teens got more sleep). It has drawn acclaim — and criticism — for trying to help struggling students in particular ethnic communities, from Somali and aboriginal to Portuguese and Spanish-speaking.

If this educational ship is on course, what’s wrong with all its captains?

Whatever the reasons, they’re not the only school board members behaving badly.

Nick Caruso earns a living trying to get trustees in the United States to play nice. He gives some 300 talks a year on the 12 biggest mistakes school board members make, from playing the “lone ranger” or board bully (“One chased out nine superintendents in three years”) to general bad behaviour, and recently added a 13th crime to his list; “MUI — Meetings Under the Influence,” says Caruso, senior staff associate for field services for the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education.

“I’ve seen board members throw temper tantrums, use off-colour language, throw things, insult or threaten other board members or staff,” he says. One Connecticut school board member was forced to resign before he was even sworn in in January for making a tasteless joke on Facebook about the Newtown massacre. Responding to that town’s call for 26 acts of kindness to honour each victim, the new trustee vowed to hand out ammunition for 26 days.

“You can’t legislate ethics,” says Caruso. “Another board had a member who went to Florida to meet a 14-year-old girl he met on the Internet, who turned out to be an undercover cop.

“He no longer resides in the district.”

Has Caruso ever seen police called to meetings?

“Rarely, but yes — at a board with quite a bit of dysfunction and yelling, and board members would stack the crowd with supporters, so police would be required to help the chair clear the room.

“Sadly, I warn boards that when that happens, that will be the headline.”

That’s precisely what happened Wednesday when TDSB chair Chris Bolton ordered police officers be present at the meeting, sparked by a letter from four senior staff members complaining about trustee bullying and intimidation. A recent outburst by trustee Howard Goodman proved the last straw for education director Donna Quan, who helped write the letter.

Bolton says he decided to call for police because of the growing number of worrisome incidents in recent months, noting “staff were concerned about what further escalation could look like.”

Sure enough, it was the police presence that grabbed the headlines, instead of the board balancing its first budget without cuts to school staff or programs.

Why do the very people who oversee a system charged with teaching children how to behave often fail to do so themselves?

Part of the problem seems to be that school boards often attract political rookies.

“There’s a steep learning curve — most of them were owners or managers before and think, ‘I didn’t have to go to a committee or get consensus when I was in business,’ ” says Caruso, who was a plumber before becoming a trustee 30 years ago.

“Many of them aren’t used to playing in the sandbox with others.”

And school trustees, like city councillors, don’t wear their party colours, which means there’s no party to keep them in line, suggests Myer Siemiatycki, a political science professor at Ryerson University.

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“School boards are an individual sport, not a team sport, so you don’t have a party ‘whip’ to rein people in and set parameters,” he says.

Once elected, school trustees have a longer term than provincial or federal politicians, Siemiatycki adds. “There’s a huge advantage to being an incumbent as a trustee, so maybe you’re less likely to look over your shoulder and wonder if you’re going to say something that could get you dumped out of office.”

It may explain why trustee Sam Sotiropoulos felt he could email colleague Mari Rutka last December turning down her invitation to a dinner party for all trustees to foster better relations, saying, “Some of our colleagues positively make my skin crawl; I don’t need to subject myself to their malicious misery, ill-breeding and sourpusses. It would be bad for my digestion. I would probably end up puking in someone’s face as I wouldn’t want to mess up your legendary kitchen.”

Sotiropoulos copied all trustees on the email, which he said was an accident, but rather than apologize, the first-term trustee asked people to think about what makes him feel this way.

Rudeness is said to be more common in big cities, notes business professor Jim Fisher, who calls it part of the “big-city phenomenon.” But it’s not the size of the city that troubles Fisher but the size of the TDSB board.

With 22 trustees, almost twice as many as any other school board in Ontario (the next biggest all have 12) it has far too many people to work together effectively, says Fisher, a leadership expert and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

“Any board the size of the TDSB will be useless and dysfunctional. Board members have to respect each other and understand each other, and while they don’t have to like each other, they do have to feel part of the same community rather than each just doing their own thing.”

He says of the top 100 public boards in Canada, 78 have no more than 12 board members and the most common size is nine.

But there’s something else that may frustrate Ontario school trustees in particular, he says. They have had little of importance to do since former premier Mike Harris handed the purse strings of education to Queen’s Park along with control over curriculum, testing, special education and other areas of policy.

“Henry Kissinger once said university politics are so vicious because the issues are so trivial — and that came to mind this week with the TDSB,” says Fisher. “All that (fuss and police presence) was sparked by whether they had paid an invoice. How trivial.

“But with all the meaty issues booted up to the province, it becomes ‘all about me.’ They should not be meddling on behalf of schools in their ward. They should be concerned with strategy and direction and providing oversight to financial accountability.

“If I were king of the world, I’d cut the number of TDSB trustees down to 12, take away their offices so it’s not so easy to meddle with staff and pay them less so they don’t feel they have to do so much.”

This would turn them into a proper governing body, he says, “not empire-building meddlers, and it would let the professionals get on with their jobs.”

Indeed, TDSB trustees have become notorious for what some see as micro-managing. It’s no wonder they have a hard time recruiting new directors. Before Quan landed the job, trustees struggled for more than a year to find a leader. A number of favoured choices refused even to apply.

Yet Siemiatycki suggests Toronto trustees might be cut a little slack, because the city has always had an “activist, hands-on political culture” in its local politicians, which has served the city well.

“We’re a pretty peculiar fishbowl in Toronto. Hands-on activism was a distinctive downtown culture and Toronto has been well-served by a school board that has let trustees set much of the course,” says Siemiatycki. “The TDSB has been heralded as exemplary for inclusive, accessible, high-quality public education.”

But he adds that sometimes that control has “been pushed too far. On the one hand, there are problems when a preponderance of control is handed to the hired staff — it’s less democratic. On the other hand, trustees have to realize where their role ends and bureaucracy takes over.

“This really is very much a balancing act.”