Kids sit on broken chairs, ceiling tiles are held on with duct tape, and there was a leak in the gym roof for months. These are the conditions at Rob S.’ child’s Toronto school. Rob is a teacher in the Toronto District School Board. His child is in Grade 8 at a Toronto District School Board (TDSB) school.
Rob asked that we use only his first name and last initial, and not name his kid, to protect his job and his kid’s privacy.
Rob says that the quality of public school education has declined alarmingly since Doug Ford’s government took power in 2018.
Ford’s government has cut core funding for education by $1,500 per student, when accounting for inflation.
The TDSB was excluded from recent provincial funding for school infrastructure. The TDSB is Canada’s largest school board, with a repair and maintenance backlog of over $4.5 billion.
Teachers are also being asked to do more with less in the classroom. And the teacher shortage isn’t helping.
Part of the reason for the shortage is that fewer people are getting teaching degrees after the Ontario Liberals increased the time it takes to get a degree from one to two years in 2015.
But the more immediate problem is that around 48,000 certified teachers in Ontario are not teaching. The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario says this is due to poor working conditions and lack of funding for special education and classroom supplies.
“There’s no funding for the things that are actually written right in the curriculum by Ford’s government,” Rob says.
When he started teaching about 20 years ago, he got $700 from the TDSB to buy supplies for his classroom. Now he gets just $200 from the TDSB for his class of 31 kids.
In his own child’s class, “they’ve done one science project in the last two years because there’s no funding for [supplies] where they actually build something.”
“I can look back 20 years and say we were able to teach almost twice the curriculum,” Rob recalls. “You could go so much deeper into science when you’re actually physically doing it with hands-on activities. With Ford’s cuts, there are so little resources available that the kids are only being taught by slide decks, presentations and YouTube videos.”
The cancellation of the “Home School Program” has also set kids back. This program provided teacher support for kids in special education in Grades 2 to 8 struggling with math and language. The TDSB phased out the program once Ford was elected in 2018.
Since then “the teacher that was previously teaching a class at Grade 8 level is now teaching Grade 6 level, Grade 5 level [too],” Rob says of his child’s classroom. The teacher often sends those kids down to the library so he can get through the lesson.
Rob’s child is in a class of 32 students, but shared with their dad that there were just 10 people in class the other day. “The kids that would have been in the previous Home School Program, they’re basically left to fend on their own. As a result, the kids don’t come to school,” Rob explains, “because there are no supports for them. There’s no way they can achieve.”
“Teachers are doing everything they can to reach the students most at need,” Rob says, but without adequate funding, teachers will continue to burn out. “The funding formula has to be fixed.”
This article appeared in the 2025 Feb issue.
