Parents on guard as OCDSB shifts supports for special needs
Michelle Bertram used to spend two hours a day sitting in her car in the parking lot of her son's Ottawa school, on standby in case her boy had one of his regular severe seizures in class and stopped breathing.
Eventually, she and nurses from the children's hospital worked to train teachers and educational assistants to give rescue medication through his nose. These days, Bertram can be on call from home instead.
But that doesn't mean 10-year-old Kyle has a normal school life.
He attends school just three-and-a-half hours a day, because the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board can only provide an educational assistant for that long. His mom says he spends those hours at the back of a regular Grade 4 classroom, wearing a seizure helmet at all times to protect him. He gets one-on-one help to shape letters and do school work Bertram knows he might have produced in kindergarten — before he got sick.
"The best that I can get him is half an education," says Bertram. "That's after hiring an educational advocate. That's after having [children's hospital] CHEO behind me. That's with English as my first language.
"I'm one of the lucky ones."
Kyle has refractory epilepsy, a severe form which sees him get aggressive seizures two or three times a week. Most anti-epilepsy drugs don't work. He also has autism so he has sometimes bolted out of the school, a behaviour known as elopement. Like many parents of children with special needs, Bertram had to stop working to care for him, and has fought hard to get him supports so he can go to school.
I've been advocating hard from my son Kyle for two years, and the best that I can get him is half an education.- Michelle Bertram
Until last month, she had kept her advocacy to the many meetings with medical and school officials.
But after Bertram saw the Ottawa-Carleton board might cut educational assistants as it tries to find $20 million in savings for the 2025-26 school year, she hired a respite worker so she could tell trustees directly: don't cut educational assistants.
"Why do you not hear from parents typically like me? We're too exhausted," Bertram says, in explaining why she wrote a letter to the board, signed by dozens of others, and copied to CBC.
"But enough is enough. It's not okay to cut EAs [educational assistants]. They're literally the most affordable and valuable resource that this school board has."
Phasing out classes and budget cuts
Two big things are taking place at the board offices and boardroom of the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB).
Like many districts across the province, Ottawa's public board is struggling with a deficit. The Ford government might routinely point to the billions it puts toward education, but board officials and unions across Ontario say the system is underfunded — getting $1,500 less per student since 2018 when adjusted for inflation.
Special education is delivered differently board by board, and Ottawa's English public board has more special education programs than counterparts around Ontario. Seeing the great demand for services for kids with needs, it has pinched from other areas over the years.
But now, needing to avoid a fifth straight deficit, and having spent reserves during the pandemic, it's looking at cuts. At a meeting March 19, board staff said it needed to reduce staffing by 178 positions, which could include 14 of its educational assistants for the coming September. That aspect of the staffing plan for next year has yet to be approved.
Meanwhile, the OCDSB is also in the midst of its biggest overhaul of its elementary schools since the 1990s. Its goal is to address inequities and put French immersion in all schools. That's especially important in 15 English-only schools, it says, where children are more likely to come from low-income households or have special needs.
The board's plan involves redrawing school boundaries, and proposes to end the alternative schools that have existed for decades.
But it would also phase out 39 of the board's 142 specialized classes, affecting about a third of the 1,200 children with special needs not placed in the OCDSB's mainstream classrooms. Those classes typically offer lower ratios, and have an educational assistant to help the teacher, who is trained in special education.
The philosophy and best practice is to meet children's needs in regular classrooms whenever possible, says Kate Stoudt, the OCDSB's superintendent of learning support services.
"Ottawa is a bit of an anomaly in that we do have one of the highest numbers of different types of programs," she says. "It's time for us to start to shift to some more inclusive practices. I think that this is evolutionary work."
Philosophy of inclusion
Stoudt says most students with special needs are already having those needs met in the board's regular classrooms. She says education research shows expectations for students' learning end up being lower when they're a specialized class.
"We want students wherever possible to be with their same aged peers in a classroom, learning alongside each other, learning from each other," says Stoudt.
In all, the board runs 11 special programs. It will maintain eight types, including those for children who are deaf, require behaviour intervention, and the three dozen autism classes. But, it will phase out five others:
- Primary Special Needs (Grades 1 to 3, 10 students per class, significant developmental delays).
- Gifted (Grades 1 to 3, up to 20 students, test very high on the Canadian Cognitive Abilities Test).
- Language Learning Disability (Grades 1 to 3 and 4 to 6, classes of up to 10 and 12 students, severe language learning difficulties on a speech/language assessment).
- General Learning (Grades 4 to 6, up to 16 students, working at up to two years below grade level).
- Learning Disabilities - Specialized Intervention (Grades 5 to 8, up to eight students).
The board expects those 400 spots would eventually return to mainstream classrooms, and 42 teachers and 13 educational assistants would be redistributed among schools.
The board thought carefully about the five types of specialized classes it plans to phase out, she says. No student will be re-integrated, she added. The changes would affect future students.
"We do believe their learning profiles can be supported within the regular program," says Stoudt, adding that teams in schools and board-wide will target each student's particular needs.
Worried about supports
Many parents, teachers, and unions aren't convinced children will be better off.
Sonja Elliott's son is in Grade 8 in the general learning program, but learns many levels below that. She says he was bullied in a mainstream class, but got into a specialized one, found his people, and thrives.
"My sons peers are kids like him, kids who understand him, kids who get his quirks, kids who are quirky like him," says Elliott.
Elliott made a request to trustees last month, asking to see a staffing plan or cost analysis comparing the cost of keeping these classrooms open versus spreading these supports across hundreds of schools.
I haven't seen anything that suggests it's going to be better than the way things are right now.- Stephen Skoutajan, Ottawa-Carleton Elementary Teachers' Federation
Teachers and students alike need trained educational assistants who can build relationships with children, and be there to coach them through regulating their behaviour so they don't become frustrated or withdraw from the group, says the president of the Ottawa-Carleton Elementary Teachers' Federation.
"I think that's a noble idea that those kids can feel like they can be with their peers that live in their neighborhood, but it can't be without the supports," says Stephen Skoutajan.
Skoutajan says the math simply doesn't work if 42 special education teachers and 13 educational assistants are redistributed to classrooms across dozens of Ottawa schools for September 2025, a year after other job cuts were made.
"I haven't seen anything that suggests it's going to be better than the way things are right now," says Skoutajan.
Classrooms evacuated
And things are not good. The OCDSB has seen soaring replacement costs as teachers and educational assistants take sick leave.
Survey after survey in Ontario has described a rise in violence in classrooms, and teachers and educational assistants leaving the profession. Skoutajan's parent union, ETFO, published a paper in March saying special education is in crisis and the Ontario government is failing children with disabilities.
Across Ontario, Skoutajan says some 50,000 teachers have decided not to teach.
In another Ottawa neighbourhood, Gemma Nicholson is empathetic to those teachers, and to kids who have behavioural issues they can't regulate on their own that leave them ostracized by peers. She worries for her own son, too.
Every single day this school year, she says he has come home from Grade 3, describing how another child threw pencils at a teacher, swore and screamed, jumped on a desk, or ran from the room. Often, her son and his classmates have to evacuate the classroom and sit in the hall.
Months ago, this used to make her son refuse to go to school. Now, he describes stomachaches he has come to consider normal, which she thinks is worse.
"It's not what school is supposed to be. You're not supposed to feel like that at school. School is supposed to be fun. School is supposed to be safe," says Nicholson.
"There are some kids where school is the only safe place they have."
Demand for funding
Skoutajan traces many of the issues back to a funding formula of the 1990s, and how boards get most of their funding based on the number of pupils enrolled.
CBC News asked the office of Paul Calandra — the province's new and fourth education minister in a year — to comment for this story, but did not receive responses. His predecessor told CBC News in January that the government was spending "historic" levels on public education, and that special education funding for the OCDSB had gone up by $29.4 million since the Ford government was elected in 2018.
But the OCDSB regularly finds it needs to spend more on special education than it gets in core funding from the Ontario government. For the coming school year, it projects a $4.3 million deficit.
The extra attention to meet the requirements of children with complex needs does indeed cost more. Specialized classes can cost two or three times more than a regular class, according to superintendent Stoudt.
When OCDSB chair Lynn Scott addressed MPPs at a budget consultation in January, she told them the funding formula in Ontario wasn't keeping up with costs for the board to meet its obligations under the education and human rights acts.
Scott told leaders the board needed to provide more educational assistants to help classroom teachers deal with a rise in dysregulated behaviour.
That's what most worries Bertram, who doesn't want to lose the support that allows Kyle to stay in school.
Last year, his educational assistant left and he couldn't go to school for 10 weeks because the board couldn't find an emergency replacement.
"It's not OK," Bertram says. "It's not fair to Kyle because his world becomes so small."
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