This summer, Doug Ford’s government turfed the trustees from four school boards, including the Toronto District School Board (TDSB).
This continues a long saga of dysfunction at the TDSB that goes back to the board’s beginnings. In essence, the story is about three competing factions fighting for control: the staff, the trustees and the province. Meanwhile, students and communities are caught in the crossfire.
Creation of the TDSB
The TDSB was created in 1997, a Frankenstein-merger of seven school boards. Conservative premier Mike Harris enacted sweeping education reforms: consolidating school boards, demoting trustees to part time and making funding a provincial matter — stripping school boards of their ability to levy their own taxes.
Combining seven boards with separate bureaucracies and philosophies was a herculean, borderline impossible task.
It didn’t help that the TDSB and province couldn’t even agree on what “education” was. Under the provincial model, education only happened between the first and last bell of the school day.
“But it’s not, and it never has been, and it never will be [only during those times],” Donna Cansfield, who was a trustee during amalgamation, tells The Grind.
The TDSB had swimming pools, outdoor education centres, parenting centres and other unique programming which the new model did not fund. To keep those running, the board had to take funds from other programs.
Programs on a shoestring, trustee drama
Paul Christie was board supervisor in 2002. He tells The Grind that trustees “realized that there were programs that were going to be unsustainable, but they chose to continue funding them as much as possible, which put them on a collision course with the province.”
School boards were also, as Christie puts it, a “convenient whipping boy” for Queen’s Park while Harris cut more than $2 billion in annual funding from K-12 education spending during his time in office. The large TDSB was an easy target.
In 1999, the province took out an ad in the Toronto Star to chastise the school board for overspending on management, urging them to “do their homework!”
But there were larger problems beyond administrative bloat. By 2002, the TDSB, and the Hamilton and Ottawa boards all failed to pass balanced budgets. The three were placed under supervision, where trustees were replaced with a provincially appointed supervisor. The supervisions lasted until 2003 when the Conservatives were voted out, in part due to their education policy.
Many trustees worked hard for students’ education, but by the mid-2010s, some increasingly abused their power, interfering in the minutiae of schools, down to the colour of pencils. In 2013, police had to attend board meetings after the alleged harassment of the director of education Donna Quan by a trustee, resulting in criminal charges, which were later dropped. In 2015, one trustee called another a “fucking pig, pig, pig, pig, pig, pig” during a public meeting.
Toronto Life described the board at the time as a “nasty, bizarro, contemptible, gobsmackingly screwed-up soap opera.”
A 2015 provincial inquiry ripped into the trustees for treating their wards as “fiefdoms” and contributing to a “culture of fear.” The report mandated reforms, curtailing the day-to-day powers of trustees even further and giving board staff more control.
A new, unaccountable equilibrium
After the public chaos in 2015, the board seemed to settle down. Partially, the trustees were scared straight, but more than that, the staff were now largely calling the shots. And the staff acquiesced to Queen’s Park’s cuts more easily.
Bruce Davis was a trustee from 2000 to 2010. He recalls to The Grind that many directors and staff “consider the trustees just to be pesky, [a] kind of interference. … [The staff are] professional managers. They will do what they’re told by the government.”
Trustees were unable to push back against the “militaristic systems” of cuts.
Schools aged, the repair backlog grew into the billions and schools fell apart, often literally. In 2016 a bathroom stall door fell and pinned a six year old girl to the floor, concussing her. In 2017, $61 million in funds for low-income student programs were diverted for general finances.
One incident shows how opaque and unresponsive to communities the board staff became. In June 2025, Jennifer Chan, a superintendent, announced that the 33-year-running principal of Rosedale Heights School, Barrie Sketchley, would be reassigned to another school for his final year before retirement. Students organized one of the largest protests against a TDSB decision in the board’s history. (In full disclosure, I was an organizer of the protest).
Despite near-universal disapproval from the school community and multiple trustees, as well as board policy mandating input on principal changes, the staff refused to reconsider their decision. They ignored the appeals of students. It has never been the job of senior board staff to heed students or their parents; that was the role of trustees before their neutering. (In an interesting postscript, the provincial supervisor reinstated Sketchley in August).
The province takes even more control
Now, after nearly three decades of turmoil instigated by the Harris reforms, the hot potato of TDSB governance returns to the province. This came after the Ford government required the board to make cuts that even the staff couldn’t meet. The government also appears to have an ideological drive, unhappy that teachers are talking about Palestine, racism and other issues in the classroom from a progressive perspective.
So now the board has been placed under supervision, with trustees locked out of their emails and stripped of their remaining powers.
Despite its dysfunction, the TDSB has educated millions of students for almost three decades, and it has become a world leader in equity programs for school boards.
As for those pools, which face closure every time a deficit looms, they’re still used to teach kids how to swim, saving lives.
Provincial supervisor Rohit Gupta is now tasked with reining in the TDSB’s spending. But without changes to the funding model, the enormity of the TDSB and other structural problems, it’s unlikely the school board will break out of its cycle with this bout of supervision, or the next.
