Gideon Spevak:
Queen’s Park is taking an increasing interest in the management of school boards throughout the province of Ontario.
In April, Ontario Education Minister Paul Calandra announced a provincial supervisor would be appointed to take over the Thames Valley District School Board serving the London, Ont., area in southwestern Ontario, for the reason of financial mismanagement within the board.
A provincial report released on April 11 stated that a key cause of the deficit was rising levels of absenteeism among staff, leading to higher costs for supply teachers. The board estimates the cost for this absenteeism to be over $27 million in the 2023-24 school year alone.
In particular, note was made of a trustee trip to Italy that costed around $190,000 and a staff retreat that costed about $40,000, decisions which seem a tough sell in convincing ratepayers that the best interest of students is considered above all.
On June 27, Minister Calandra announced that four major school boards — the Toronto, Toronto Catholic, Ottawa Catholic, and Dufferin-Peel Catholic boards — would also be placed under provincial supervision due to similar mismanagement. In a Dec. 1 announcement, it was confirmed that the same conditions would apply to the Near North District School Board, so now a total of six school boards across the province.
Additionally, the Legislative Assembly of Ontario passed Bill 33 in November, an Omnibus Bill which, among changes to child and youth services and post-secondary institutions, grants the education minister significantly more power and oversight over publicly funded school boards in the province.
The minister may now open investigations into school boards based on “matters of public interest” rather than the considerably narrower justifications allowed prior to the passing of this Bill. It also allows the minister to issue directions to school boards, that if not followed within an allotted time period would allow the minister to appoint a provincial supervisor to take over the operations of the board without any fixed time limit or sunset clause forcing the minister to return control to the trustees.
The government argues that these actions are necessary to address governance failures including laughable but unsurprising financial expenditures as well as student achievement gaps, highlighted especially by the delay of release of 2024-25 EQAO testing scores and stagnation of mathematics results since the 2021-22 school year, particularly in the Grade 9 testing.
The critique of this legislation from NDP Leader Marit Stiles suggests that the Bill represents a Progressive Conservative “power grab” and an undermining of local government to centralize provincial jurisdiction which, in turn, removes power from parents.
These claims seem to resonate with Ontarians. In a poll commissioned by the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO), 49 per cent of respondents prefer to keep trustees in charge of school boards while 24 per cent support the government’s agenda. Support for the former category, though, jumps to 59 per cent among parents who have school-aged children.
Separately, teachers’ unions and similar organizations for education workers argue that the Bill does not address fundamental issues with the province’s education system, such as under-funding, growing needs for special education services, and inflated class sizes.
The Ontario English Catholic Teachers Association (OECTA) released a November statement warning against the passage of the Bill, stating that “Ontario’s schools are facing real crises: overcrowded classrooms, rising violence, crumbling infrastructure, and deep cuts to special education. Bill 33 serves to distract from every one of these problems and will likely only make them worse.”
Campaign Life Coalition also took a stand against Bill 33 on the grounds of defending democracy at the local level as well as supporting parents’ rights to involvement in the education of their children. Though on these points they hold common ground with the NDP, they differ on the issue of protecting children from left-wing ideological conditioning, particularly within publicly funded Catholic schools which claim to provide an authentically Catholic education to students.
Assisted by the pro-life and pro-family group, the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board delivered a substantive victory to its ratepayers by voting to ban the gay pride flag from both the exterior and interior of their schools after outrage from parents.
Now, under strict management from the same government that continued Kathleen Wynne’s sex and gender identity policies and had senior members of cabinet take part in gay pride events across the province, the Dufferin-Peel board along with other boards across the province face the prospect of becoming more outwardly left-wing than ever.
Jack Fonseca, CLC’s director of political operations, told The Interim he sees as the implications of the passing of Bill 33, what it means for life and family issues and activism on the school board level. Fonseca said the move against school boards is “an attack on democracy,” saying “by eliminating democratically elected school board trustees so that parents have no say whatsoever in the education of their children, and no representatives who will feel accountable to them … children will be molded in the bureaucratic state’s ideology without any further interference from parents.” Fonseca said that “unelected, nameless, faceless bureaucrats will have total power in the classroom.”
Fonseca said that without oversight by an elected board beholden to parents and voters, “woke teachers will step on the peddle, knowing that parents don’t even have trustees to complain to any longer.” Fonseca said he does not believe that appointed administrators will be responsive to parents despite Calandra’s promise they would. “No socially conservative or Bible-believing Christian will ever be appointed in these roles, just like they don’t exist now, anywhere in the bureaucracy.”
Fonseca predicts that “the Ford regime will make an unconstitutional move on Catholic schools (to eliminate them), and he’ll count on the bishops doing nothing to resist.” The Catholic trustees were a bulwark against infringements of the constitutionally protected separate Catholic school system.
CLC wants all parents to speak out against the Ford government’s power-grab. “Parents and voters need to mount a campaign of overwhelming resistance to Calandra’s threats to abolish democratically elected school trustees,” flooding his “office with phone calls, letters, emails, and in-person protests, in the hope that he will back off from his threats.”
Fonseca also said that pro-life and pro-family Ontarians must work “hard to elect New Blue and Ontario Party candidates in the next election” to get rid of the “corrupt Progressive Conservative” government and repeal Bill 33.
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