Education Notes
Welcome to my Substack! A place where I’ll provide information on what’s happening in education in Ontario, update you on my work, and let you know how you can fight for public education.
For this inaugural post, we’re going to look at a tale of two Friday press conferences – Fridays being the day when governments dump news that they don’t want a lot of scrutiny or pesky questions on.
Last week Friday, Minister of Education Paul Calandra held a press conference on the last day of the school year announcing that he was putting four school boards under supervision: the Toronto District School Board, Toronto Catholic District School Board, Ottawa Carleton District School Board, and Dufferin Peel Catholic District School Board. The Minister said this was necessary because these school boards have run persistent deficits.
What Calandra did not mention is that more than 40% of school boards are running a deficit, which relates back to an earlier Friday press conference he held at the end of May, announcing education funding for the 2025-26 school year.
That announcement revealed that once again, the government has failed to address the gap in school board funding due to the Ford government’s persistent cuts. Since Ford came to power in 2018, education funding has not kept pace with inflation or the growing number of students. (For more on how these two factors affect education funding, check out my recent speech in the Legislature breaking it down for Minister Calandra.)
In total, Doug Ford has now taken $6.35 billion out of the education system. This is why we have large class sizes, program cuts, a lack of qualified educators, a mental health crisis, and crumbling schools. It’s why school boards are cutting staff and programs again this year despite how dire things already are. It’s simply impossible to maintain supports when the funding is not there.
This year’s funding is $561.7 million less than 2018-19 when accounting for inflation and enrollment growth. In fact, none of the boards now under supervision would have had deficits if funding had just kept pace since 2018.
(The Minister is also being disingenuous, since the TDSB and the OCDSB had just adopted balanced budgets, making painful cuts to programs and supports for students in order to do so.)
Not only is the government cutting funding by pretending inflation and enrollment growth don’t exist, but their funding doesn’t cover the actual costs of delivering education. Take special education for instance. Every school board in the province except one is spending more on special education than what they are getting from this government – to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in 2024-25. And this is for a spec ed system that is badly failing our children with disabilities and learning exceptionalities.
The same is true for teachers’ salaries, sick leave, statutory benefits, and student transportation. None of these are negotiated by school boards, yet the provincial government doesn’t cover their real cost, knowing that the only place to take funding to cover the difference is out of classroom resources and programs.
Then there are the areas where the government’s funding is just not even close to addressing the scale of the need. Only 1 in 10 schools has regularly scheduled access to a mental health professional when our children are experiencing a mental health crisis. The government’s mental health funding? A whopping 22.9 cents per student per day.
Our schools are experiencing a surge of violence – the Auditor General revealed in December that reports of violent incidents are up 114% since 2017. 77% of ETFO members have personally experienced or witnessed violence. And yet funding for student safety and well-being is a mere 15.4 cents per student per day.
Because the Minister’s latest announcement didn’t add a single dollar to our education system, these four newly appointed supervisors won’t be able to add a single teacher or education worker, mental health professional, or special education support to our kids’ classrooms.
And that’s not even their mandate. Their mandate from the Minister is to bring school board budgets in line with provincial funding, not to identify ways to expand supports. That means cuts.
Even if you hope there still might be a chance these supervisors might fight for more supports and better schools for your child, the four appointees are not experts in education. They don’t know anything about child psychology or wellbeing. They are not—like supervisors appointed to oversee boards in other scenarios—people who have had senior management experience within the education system. They are solely political appointees: Conservative party donors, a candidate, and a former MPP. And one of them was an advisor to Metrolinx, which hasn’t been able to deliver a single transit project in Toronto in 14 years, with a track record of ballooning costs and extreme secrecy. Not exactly the kind of oversight you want for your child’s school.
The Minister wants you to be dazzled by his tough talk into thinking that these Conservative insiders are going to come in and straighten out misbehaving boards. Don’t believe him. This government’s track record speaks for itself.
Next time, we’ll delve deeper into next year’s education funding. Stay tuned!