Education Minister doesn’t expect trustees to return to OCDSB ‘anytime soon’

Ontario’s Education Minister announced funding for new schools in Ottawa but also hinted that OCDSB trustees won’t return to duty. CTV’s Tyler Fleming reports.

Ontario Education Minister Paul Calandra says he does not foresee school board trustees returning to Ottawa’s largest school board “anytime soon.”

Calandra was in Ottawa Friday to announce $162 million in funding for two new high schools in the city and an expansion to an elementary school. The government will be giving the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB) $77.7 million toward a new high school in the Half Moon Bay area of Barrhaven, which will have space for more than 1,400 students from Grade 7 to 12. The Ottawa Catholic School Board is receiving $74.7 million toward a new high school in Orléans, which will also have space for more than 1,400 students. And the Conseil des écoles publiques de l’Est de l’Ontario, Ottawa’s French language public school board, is receiving $9.7 million toward an expansion to École élémentaire publique Mamawi that will add 104 more student spaces.

Speaking to reporters following the announcement, Calandra said he is still working on updates to the governance model for schools in Ontario, but he’s not anticipating a near-term return of trustees at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board.

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“There is nothing so far that leads me to believe, that has changed my mind anyway, that a $43 billion Ministry of Education budget should be delivered by trustees across the province of Ontario,” he said. “I don’t foresee a world, even if there were no changes coming forward, and there will be, where the trustees are returned to the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board anytime soon.”

The OCDSB was placed under provincial supervision in June after the board posted four straight deficit budgets. Trustees were stripped of their positions and a supervisor, Robert Plamondon, was appointed to oversee the board.

Municipal elections, including for school board trustee positions, are scheduled for October 2026.

Calandra said he anticipates more details about the governance model early in the new year.

Last month, Calandra announced a plan to create Family Support Offices in all supervised boards in the new year and all school boards by next September. He says the offices will streamline the way students and families get answers about concerns at school.

“These new offices will allow parents to call into the boards, know that their call has been answered, have a case file opened up, it’ll be tracked. As a parent, you’ll be able to see who’s working on your file. It’ll be the exact same people who the trustees turn to in order to facilitate a parent request who will be doing this work,” Calandra said Friday.

“Regardless of where we go in the new year, we will have a better way of meeting parents’ expectations, and the system will be able to move much more quickly to address needs but also to meet the realities of a changing education system.”

Calandra noted that a significant number of school board trustees in Ontario were acclaimed in the previous election, as they had no opponents on election day.

Three of the seven trustees in Ottawa’s French public board and five of the eight trustees in the French Catholic board were acclaimed in 2022, but none of the trustees in the OCDSB or the Ottawa Catholic School Board were.

Calandra stressed he would not close or amalgamate school boards, nor would he merge public and catholic school boards, but there can be changes in how school boards are governed.

Delays in bringing forward legislation are due to work on ensuring the Charter rights of French language and Catholic separate school boards are protected, he said.

“The English public trustees have no constitutional Charter guarantees,” he said. “So, I could strike a pen tomorrow and rid myself of all of them in one fell swoop, if I wanted to.”

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Stacey Kay, the newly appointed director of education at the OCDSB, said there is work to do to improve student success and wellbeing.

“I am optimistic and enthused to continue the fabulous work at the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board,” she said. “It is the folks that I have the pleasure of working with each and every day—the talent, the care, the dedication to the students in their care—that assure me that our future is bright in meeting the needs of our students, staff, and our parent community.”

Kay was appointed last month following the sudden departure of Pino Buffone as director of education. Neither the school board nor Calandra have said what led to Buffone’s departure.

Critics and parents oppose provincial intervention

While the provincial government pushes a centralized system for parent concerns, Kate Dudley-Logue, a parent of two children at OCDSB schools, calls the removal of trustees a “huge threat.”

“We used to be able to attend meetings and be heard. Trustees were there to listen to our issues and to have discussions at board meetings,” she says. “In fact, the board meetings that are still happening, they’ve actually started not live streaming. So you can’t even access them anymore unless you are to show up in person.”

The OCDSB is one of six school boards in Ontario under provincial supervision and without trustees, which Dudley-Logue says is a signal that Calandra is looking to change governance structures.

“It’s very alarming,” Dudley-Logue says. “This is our democracy, that we vote for these people and they are there to be accountable for to families, students, teachers. One hundred per cent families are losing their voice.”

Dudley-Long say she believes the Ontario government is using the trustees as a way to mask the real issue, chronic underfunding of schools in the capital region.

“Schools are not only falling apart physically, but students, are not receiving the supports they need. Many students with special education are simply not even in school. The schools just can’t support them,” she says.

“We’re not talking about those problems. We’re talking about how awful our trustees are and how they’re not doing the job. But they’ve been the ones who have been speaking up about the underfunding. So, really it seems like a real distraction from what the real problems here are.”

Like Dudley-Long, Ottawa-South Liberal MPP John Fraser says the province is wrongly directing blame at school boards.

“The real problem in our schools is not governance. It’s not the boards,” he says.

“It’s that they’re not safe places for our kids to learn and for people to work are the educators and that’s because class sizes have grown, special education has been starved, and we have a mental health crisis in our schools that just isn’t being addressed. It’s being ignored and so the government just wants to point the finger of blame to somebody else.”

Fraser says that while the Ford government muses about its intent is to eliminate trustees and take control over school boards across the province, the approach won’t work.

“There are 4800 schools in Ontario. Schools in Temiskaming are different from schools in Ottawa, they’re different schools in Windsor that are different from schools in downtown Toronto,” Fraser said.

“So, for almost two centuries, schools have belonged to the families and the communities that they serve and they know what’s best.”