The Toronto District School Board says its fat has already been trimmed.
Facing public outrage from the provincial government after multiple deficits, the TDSB says it’s faced years of real-dollar cuts and now has no choice but to consider closing pools and axing music programs to get back in the black.
Touting “historic” funding, the Ford government has accused the board of not doing enough to reduce spending while crying poor. Education Minister Paul Calandra plans to appoint an investigator to probe the TDSB’s finances, saying he’ll take over the board if he doesn’t like the result.
It’s but one battle in a war on school board budgets playing out across the province. After a pair of questionable trips by officials at two school boards, and deficits in others, the province has taken control of one and launched financial probes at three more, including the TDSB.
But with more than 40 per cent of school boards reporting deficits, education advocates say the problem is structural and can’t be fixed by tightening belts.
“If the province just funded the basics, we wouldn't be in a deficit,” Kristen Boyd, the school council chair at Roden Public School in Toronto, said on Thursday.
“This is a province-wide problem,” she said.
Using public data, The Trillium, along with several other analyses, found that provincial school board funding has declined over the Ford government’s time in office, when inflation is taken into account, exacerbating issues that were present even earlier.
By the numbers
The TDSB is projecting a $58-million deficit for 2025-26. That’s how much it needs to find in savings, board chair Neethan Shan said.
TDSB staff have proposed a number of ways to tackle this, some of which have garnered controversy, including cutting aquatic instructors and possibly closing more than half of the 66 swimming pools the board has in its schools.
The board is also considering cutting the itinerant music instructors program, through which it employs 74 specialized music educators to teach elementary students. The charity Coalition for Music Education Canada (CMEC) launched a petition to try to get the board to scrap the plan, TorontoToday recently reported.
At the Ontario legislature on May 1, Calandra accused the board of attacking students, parents and teachers with its proposals.
“What did they say? ‘Oh, we’re going to close all our pools. We’re going to fire our music teachers,’” the minister said during question period, adding that the board and trustees are “all about protecting themselves.”
He added this week that he would “never” allow the board to “fire teachers, and I will not allow them to close pools that mean so much to the community.”
“What they didn’t say is, ‘We’re going to look at the record number of superintendents who are littered all over the Sunshine List.’ They went from 3,000 to 8,000 people on the Sunshine List,” said Calandra, referring to the record of all public employees making $100,000 or more.
The minister also suggested the board should go “after the $35 million of paid leave that they have.”
“They have a responsibility to be at balance — like, full stop,” Calandra told The Trillium this week.
“Look, they had a responsibility to provide the ministry with a multi-year recovery plan that allowed them to get back (to balance),” he said, adding that “funding has gone up every single year that we've been here to literally historic levels.”
Teachers are over-represented on the latest Sunshine List because many received one-time back pay in 2024 after the government’s wage-limiting Bill 124 was found to be unconstitutional and subsequently repealed.
But the TDSB did go from 3,337 Sunshine List employees in 2018 to 8,826 in 2023, the year before the Bill 124 pay bumps.
Many TDSB employees over that time period moved from the $90,000 range into six figures, Shan said.
The TDSB cut its total administration and governance spending by nearly 11 per cent, from $112 million in 2023-24 to an estimated $99.9 million this year, according to a “2024-25 financial facts” TDSB document.
For the current school year, an estimated 2.4 per cent of the TDSB’s total expenses is going toward board administration and senior leadership costs, according to the document.
The board lists 34 superintendents on its website, and salaries can range into the $200,000s, according to the Sunshine List.
“Systemic, chronic underfunding cannot be addressed by just removing layers of supervision for a school board that is this large,” Shan told The Trillium, adding that the board cut two superintendent positions in the last budget.
Sick leave is an issue for many boards, but the TDSB has been working on this with some success, Shan said, though he didn’t cite specific numbers.
As the auditor general noted in her December report, the TDSB submitted a multi-year financial recovery plan — but the ministry rejected it, Shan said.
“We are still continuing to look for savings and efficiencies. Centrally, that process is still happening, but I don't think that that's enough to save us from a continuous deficit situation,” he said.
“I personally, and many trustees, feel swimming programs and music programs and outdoor education are a critical part of a child's education,” he said. “I've been a teacher myself, I have children in the system and I fully value these things, and I don't support cutting them.”
He said the ministry previously sent the board a letter asking it to look at programs that are “outside the core mandate,” including swimming programs. Shan said the board has requested a meeting with Calandra to “sit down and figure out solutions together.”
Per-student funding has dropped during PCs’ time in office
Ontario is spending more than ever before on education. But in another, more real sense, it’s spending less, according to several analyses that have been done by different organizations.
In 2018-19, before Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservatives took office, the province gave the TDSB just over $3 billion (or $12,386 per student) in “core education” funding, which makes up about 90 per cent of school boards’ operating revenue.
For 2024-25, the board is projected to receive over $3.3 billion, or $14,101 per student.
In this year’s dollars, however, calculated using Statistics Canada’s consumer price index for Ontario, boards were getting $14,852 per student back in 2018-19 — a $751 decrease in funding over the past seven years.
If the province had kept funding education at the rate of inflation, the TDSB would be $178.3 million richer this year — just over three times the $58 million deficit.
Ricardo Tranjan, a political economist and researcher with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, crunched the numbers, which The Trillium independently verified.
By excluding provincial contingency funding or unallocated amounts that were not freely available to boards in the same way normal cash flows, Tranjan previously estimated that province-wide per-student funding has dropped by $1,500 since 2018, an estimate commonly cited by education unions and school boards.
His new estimate takes the province’s funding at face value, resulting in a more conservative figure that’s in line with the Ontario Public School Boards' Association’s estimate of a decrease of $776 per student.
Ontario’s independent Financial Accountability Office (FAO), which has no vested interest in education spending, confirmed that per-student funding has dropped during the Ford government’s tenure.
In its April spending trends report, it found that per-child spending on education and child-care increased between 2018-2024. But during that time period, the federal government’s $10-a-day child-care program started up, resulting in an increase in public child-care funds.
Real spending per child aged 5–17 years has trended downwards between 2018-19 and 2023-24 when child-care spending is removed, an FAO spokesperson told The Trillium.
Karen Littlewood, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation (OSSTF), said while school boards could likely find “a lot of efficiencies,” there are unique needs to address across the province and boards have been facing extensive deficits.
“School boards and the ministry and the unions, we all have the best interest of the students at heart, but we're just running so thin now that there's not a whole lot left that can be cut,” she said. “Nobody is sitting on a pile of money, not knowing how to spend it. They're looking at the money they have and trying to figure out how to split it 10 different ways to meet the needs of the students.”
Littlewood pointed to the moratorium on school closures as one change the government could make to help boards find savings.
“I think we're also treating the province of Ontario like we're in a state of poverty. We're not. The province of Ontario is pretty prosperous. There's money for a tunnel under the 401,” she said. “Sure, we can all do with a little bit less, but we're continuously short-changing the students of the province of Ontario.”
Projected cuts much smaller than funding gaps
With 84.5 per cent of the TDSB’s funding going to labour costs — and the bulk of those salaries being centrally negotiated with the union and the province — the board says there isn’t much else to cut.
Shutting down pools and swim programs would save $12.8 million. Increasing class sizes would save $7.5 million. Cutting outdoor education would save $4.7 million. In total, all the cuts TDSB trustees are being asked to consider would equal $59.2 million — just over the projected deficit.
Aside from the drop in per-student funding, the board says it’s been underfunded in many other ways in recent years.
The previous Liberal government ended “top-up” grants for schools with fewer students than capacity. Ontario then saw hundreds of schools close, and the Liberals took significant heat from the public and opposition parties. In 2017, it implemented a moratorium on school closures, which the Ford government has continued.
As a result, the TDSB says it now has to keep the lights on for about 63,000 more spaces in schools than there are students.
In 2014-15, the TDSB got about $35 million in top-up funding. It estimates it would receive $41.3 million in top-up funding this year, if the grant still existed.
The TDSB’s mandatory Canada Pension Plan, Employment Insurance and Long-Term Disability program expenses have increased by $63.2 million since 2018, and the province hasn’t matched them, the board said.
Also not reimbursed is the $70.1 million the board says it spent on COVID-19-related costs, primarily for increased staffing.
And because the cost of living is higher in Toronto, the TDSB pays teachers more than what is provincially funded, said Shan. Salaries are centrally bargained and can’t be cut through the budgeting process. The province only funds a portion of the total teacher salary and benefits costs, to the tune of an $87.2-million gap, according to the TDSB.
Government says auditor report backs up its concerns — but does it?
This past December, Auditor General Shelley Spence looked into the TDSB’s finances. The government said her report “echoed many of the serious concerns the ministry has voiced to the school board on numerous occasions over the past few years.”
Overall, however, the report didn’t paint a picture of a school board that has spent frivolously.
Spence found issues with the number of sick days taken by staff and the board’s long-term building repair planning.
But while the board has a repair backlog estimated at $4.3 billion, provincial cash for repair and maintenance has been underfunded by about 46 per cent under the Ford government, Spence found.
To keep consistent with the Capitals Priority Program funding the TDSB received before 2017-18, accounting for increased construction costs, the government would’ve had to spend $375 million more than the $439 million it did in 2022-23, she wrote.
Spence noted that the board had $309 million in “unspent and uncommitted funding and reserves” as of Aug. 2023, but wrote that staff said the board couldn’t use the whole amount each year as the repair and maintenance work it can do is limited outside of the summer months when classes aren’t in session.
Repair costs would be less if the board could close schools, Spence noted.
After rejigging its procurement processes due to previous overruns, the board spent $28 million less than budgeted for repair and maintenance between 2020-21 and 2022-23, she added.
During his tenure, former education minister Stephen Lecce accused the TDSB of “literally banking cash.”
“If you have a repair backlog and you're sitting on $350 million, you're doing something wrong,” he said last May.
Lecce said he was “appalled” and promised to “(hold) the TDSB to account.”
“Certainly, they have unspent money in their capital budget,” Calandra told The Trillium this week.
The TDSB had to deplete its reserves “quite a bit” to deal with the pandemic — part of the $70.1 million the government hasn’t reimbursed, Shan said. The TDSB did not provide specific data on its current reserves.
If another COVID-level emergency happens, the board won’t be able to spend in the same way, he said.
“We need that buffer,” he said.
Calandra says he’ll be ‘relentless’ in holding school boards accountable
On the first day of the new legislative session, the education minister warned boards that he would be “relentless” in ensuring they "remain focused on what matters to parents and students and teachers.”
Calandra has made good on his promise, taking over the Thames Valley District School Board, which reportedly used board funds for a $38,000 stay at the Toronto Blue Jays stadium hotel last summer.
The Brant Haldimand Norfolk Catholic District School Board — which took an art-buying trip to Italy at a final cost (including legal fees) of almost $190,000 — will have to tell the government exactly how it plans to shape up.
And the TDSB, the Toronto Catholic District School Board and the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board will all get investigators, whose reports are due back to Calandra at the end of the month.
The TDSB has faced investigations before, noted John Weatherup, president of the Toronto Education Workers/Local 4400, which represents some workers at the board.
“All of them came to the same conclusion: the government of the day was underspending,” he said.
In 2002, Progressive Conservative premier Ernie Eves appointed a supervisor for the TDSB, who was able to take the board’s deficit from about $90 million to $54 million in just under a year.
Later that year, though, an Eves-appointed task force called for $1.8 billion (almost $3 billion in today’s dollars) in new education spending, saying provincial funding had failed to keep up with benchmarks set four years before.
In 2013, facing a $55 million deficit, the TDSB again proposed cutting itinerant music instructors. Instead, it passed a budget that cut the maintenance department, overtime hours and classroom supplies.
The education minister is engaging in “DOGE-like” behaviour, Ontario Autism Coalition director Sandra Huh said on Thursday, referring to the Department of Government Efficiency that U.S. President Donald Trump tasked with cutting government spending.
“I think Minister Calandra thinks that he's Elon Musk here in Canada,” she said.
Michelle Teixeira, president of OSSTF Toronto, said she’s seen no evidence of fiscal mismanagement at the TDSB.
“For the minister to turn around and blame the school boards … it's really rich, and I think it's a purposeful distraction from people asking those questions about the underfunding of public education,” said Teixeira.
“What's needed is adequate, sustainable, long-term, predictable funding,” she said.
She said while the board could probably make some administrative level cuts, “because the TDSB has had to deal with this, not just this year, but the last couple of years, like, since the pandemic, they've had to dip into reserves, I really believe they're at the point now where they are struggling to find places to cut that won't impact students.”
Teixeira, of OSSTF Toronto, said her concern with the financial investigation is that an investigator hasn’t been appointed yet, even though a report is due at the end of the month.
“I don't know that that's enough time to do the kind of thorough deep dive investigation that actually needs to be done,” she said, adding that she’s also worried the province will appoint a supervisor to the board “regardless of the results of this investigation.”
“Will a supervisor limit himself completely to matters of finance, or will he start to make decisions that do impact teacher workload, students' learning conditions?” she said. “It's a big unknown.”
Opposition New Democrats have accused the Ford government of a stealth privatization campaign.
“Because of Conservative ideology to defund public education, take over school boards and privatize our schools, 41 out of 72 district school boards in Ontario are now facing deficits and service cuts this year,” NDP MPP Kristyn Wong-Tam said in the legislature on Wednesday.
Calandra and Premier Doug Ford have both said they’re not considering publicly funding independent schools that don’t answer to public school boards — otherwise known as charter schools.
“No,” Ford said in April when asked by The Trillium if implementing charter schools could solve his issues with school boards.
“I love our public system.”
—With files from Gabe Oatley and Jessica Smith Cross
