The school year is underway and all trustees at four school boards, including the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), have been removed.
It’s part of the Ontario government’s Bill 33, which puts their appointed supervisors at the top of the boards instead of elected trustees. The bill also allows for police to be in schools (though the Toronto police chief said after Bill 33 passed that they wouldn’t be doing that), and it gives the government the power to sell “surplus” school land not used solely for educating.
The government’s rationale is that the boards have been mismanaging funds. But teachers and advocacy groups call it a distraction.
“Our schools aren’t getting the resources they need, and this whole supervision scheme is a sham to take attention away from the cuts to education,” says Jennifer Huang, executive assistant of the Toronto & York Region Labour Council.
“Multiple reports from third party audits, whether it be the Deloitte report or the Ontario Auditor General’s report, have cleared both the TDSB and [Toronto Catholic District School Board] TCDSB of financial mismanagement. Despite this, the province is still coming in with the supervision announcement because the school boards will not make the cuts that the government is seeking,” she explains.
In a press conference on Aug. 20, Education Minister Paul Calandra said the government might consider getting rid of all 72 school boards in Ontario.
According to Matias de Dovitiis, who was until very recently the elected trustee for the Humber River Black Creek community at the TDSB, “school boards are a democratic arena where we make decisions about public education at the community level. If we make changes about how education is operated, there are some 72 different ways to go about it. That’s good because you don’t want Northern Ontario to have to follow the same state guidelines from Queen’s Park meant for somewhere like Toronto or Windsor. They have different needs.”
“I represent one of 22 districts in Toronto, which alone has over 20 schools. Each school has their own parent council, student council, and their own series of school staff. I understand those schools much better than anyone at the school board right now, as at the TDSB, those 22 trustees have been replaced with a single supervisor. Now that one person needs to make decisions for over 22 different districts, each one with about 100,000 people,” Dovitiis explains.
The Fund Our Schools campaign has spoken out against the government’s approach to education and has hosted events across Toronto.
Dovitiis emphasizes the need for organized community involvement to push back against the Ford government.
“We need to do what people have done in other places like Manitoba or B.C., where their respective governments tried pushing through similar changes as the Ford government but were defeated, and eventually some of those governments even lost power.”
In Manitoba, a proposed bill in 2021 would have gotten rid of elected school boards. It was opposed by the Manitoba Teacher’s Society (which sent out popular lawn signs around the province), the Manitoba School Boards Association, rural groups, the provincial NDP and others.
The province held public consultations which drew large turnouts speaking in opposition. And about six months after it was proposed, the government scrapped the bill.
“This was largely due to parents, teachers and communities uniting and organizing to speak out against the radical changes. It’s about communities talking about the importance of public education, talking about the importance of public education as an equalizer in society, and how to build a better system based on more democracy, not less.”
This article appeared in the 2025 Oct/Nov issue.
