Coalition of parents, teachers, trustees speaks out against Ontario's school board takeover
Fund Our Schools says there is no ‘mismanagement' at boards, only ‘chronic underfunding'
A coalition of parents, teachers and trustees is speaking out after the Ontario government announced it would be taking over four school boards where it says "mismanagement" took place.
At the end of June, the province appointed supervisors to the Toronto District School Board, the Toronto Catholic District School Board, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board and the Dufferin-Peel Catholic School Board.
The move came after Minister of Education Paul Calandra said financial investigations into the boards showed growing deficits and depletion of reserves.
But the Fund Our Schools coalition said in a news release Monday that the decision is a "sham."
TDSB Chair and Scarborough Centre trustee Neethan Shan, who is a part of the coalition, said the audit had not found any kind of "wrongdoing."
"There was no reason for taking over, except [for] the fact they were tired of having us as trustees stand up for public education and stand up as community champions," he said outside of an east-end high school Monday.
Shan said the province is instead trying to cover up "chronic underfunding."
"We as trustees believe that music, arts, all forms of sports, swimming programs, outdoor education, these are important parts of the development of a child in the school system. That's how education works," he said.
Shan added that many students are unable to access these activities outside of school, hence their importance within the public school system.
"In fact, many of us who are adults, many of those people who are in the provincial Parliament ... benefited from a system which had all [that] comprehensive programming and support for students," he said.
Teachers say they were not consulted
According to a news release from the Fund Our Schools coalition, 40 per cent of school boards have dealt with a deficit of $6.3 billion since 2018.
A report last year from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that Ontario's core education funding has dropped by $1,500 per student since 2018 — a figure the government has disputed.
Robert Bauer, who is the first vice-president at the Toronto Elementary Catholic Teachers union, said teachers were not consulted in Ontario's decision-making process, despite their role in coping with growing class sizes and staffing shortages.
"We are not the ones causing the crisis, but we are the ones working every day to fix it," he said.
Parents concerned about program cuts
Bibi Safraw Hanif, who has three children, including one with autism who requires special education, was also at the news conference. She worries how program cuts will impact them.
"If you cut off all these [after school] programs, what are you doing to our child's mental health? They are looking forward [to] these programs," she said.
During the initial announcement, Calandra said the school boards had failed parents and students alike.
"Where decision-making does not prioritize student success, where it does not prioritize resources for teachers in the classroom, I will not hesitate to step in and redirect that funding back into the classroom."
He added that this was only a "first step" in the broader rethinking of the structure of school boards.
In April, Calandra put the Thames Valley District School Board under supervision following a review of a $40,000 staff retreat to Toronto that included a stay at the hotel connected to the Rogers Centre, where the Blue Jays play.
Sachin Maharaj, an assistant professor of educational leadership, policy and program evaluation at the University of Ottawa, says the move to take over four more schools has raised "alarm bells."
"It's important to contextualize that it's not just that these school boards were taken over, but legislation was introduced to further centralize decision-making in the hands of the province," Maharaj said.
One example he says is the province preventing the TDSB from renaming some of its schools and introducing a police presence back into the hallways.
"I think it has less to do with the takeover, less to do with mismanagement or financial matters, and more to do with the province asserting its vision of education on Toronto schools," he said.
Maharaj pointed to the province's back-to-basics approach to education, which emphasizes reading, writing and arithmetic, saying it doesn't fit well with the city's idea of quality learning, which includes after school and arts programs.
"[School boards are] attempting to balance this tension where members of the local community value these programs and want them to continue, but the province does not give them enough money to be able to do that," he said.
"This is a critical point in deciding whether schools are going to be increasingly run by the provincial government in Queens Park, or whether local communities in Ontario are going to be able to continue to have a voice in the way their schools are run."
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With files from Britnei Bilhete