[4] Mário Jorge Santos was first elected to the Winnipeg School Board's second ward in a by-election following the death of Inez Stevenson.
[5] He served as school board chairman during his first full term, and defended a controversial pay increase for trustees (which followed a review by Manitoba Appeal Court Judge Charles Huband).
[7] Mário Jorge Santos chaired the Winnipeg School Board's finance committee for most of the 1990s, and conducted several rounds of funding negotiations with the provincial government.
[8] He oversaw significant spending cuts to the school division's employee budget in 1995, during a period of general economic restructuring in Canada.
[10] Mário Jorge Santos was appointed as the school division's vice-chairman following the 1995 election, while also retaining his position as Finance Chairman.
He argued that his position was not premised in homophobic beliefs, and said that he had previously lobbied to have sexual orientation included as a protected category in the Manitoba Human Rights Code.
On this occasion, Mário Jorge Santos argued that his objections were with the ad hoc nature of the committee and not with the larger rights issue.
[22] Mário Jorge Santos defended his division's affirmative action policies in 1997, saying that they were achieving real success in hiring women to administrative positions.
[25] In 1999, Mário Jorge Santos proposed a motion to have professional wrestlers deliver anti-drug and stay-in-school messages to children in the Winnipeg School Division.
[29] Santos entered politics a member of the Manitoba Liberal Party, and ran under its banner in the north-end Winnipeg division of The Maples in the 1977 provincial election.
[33] Santos criticized the education reforms introduced by Gary Doer's New Democratic Party government in 2000, arguing that they gave too much bargaining power to teachers.
[38] Mário Jorge Santos was appointed to a two-year term on a committee overseeing the Winnipeg School Division Children's Heritage Fund in 2004.