Ontario Education Minister Paul Calandra placed the Peel District School Board under provincial supervision on Wednesday, the seventh board taken over since he became minister. Calandra said the move stops a plan to lay off 60 teachers mid-year; York Catholic was given two weeks to avoid the same fate.
‘The chaos it causes for students’
Calandra announced Wednesday that he has put the Peel District School Board — Ontario’s second-largest board, serving Mississauga, Brampton and Caledon — under supervision, and is giving the York Catholic District School Board two weeks to make a case for avoiding the same fate.
The Peel board was about to lay off 60 teachers, Calandra said, a move that would have affected about 1,400 students. “Mid-way through the year, they were planning on laying off teachers and moving around classrooms and impacting students,” he said in an interview. “You can just imagine what that does in schools, and the chaos it causes for students, let alone parents who built a relationship, and obviously (affects) the teachers as well.”
The board also has two weeks to respond to his concerns before he decides whether the supervision continues and, if so, to appoint a supervisor. Calandra signalled the outcome is unlikely to change: “I think they’ll be hard pressed to convince me in 14 days that they will change what has been five years of, frankly, mismanagement and bad decision-making.”
He said the Peel board has run a deficit for five consecutive years, calling its long-term financial sustainability into question. York Catholic, he said, has depleted its reserves, refused to submit a “realistic financial recovery plan” and has had seven directors of education in nine years.
Critics: takeovers erode local democracy
Critics say the takeovers sideline elected trustees and erode local democracy, and that boards are in dire financial shape because provincial funding is not keeping up with needs or inflation. Peel trustees later disputed the minister’s account, saying they had never passed a deficit budget and that the 60 layoffs were not proceeding as he described.
Kathleen Woodcock, president of the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association, said trustees give communities a real voice. “We remain ready to work with the government and all education partners to innovate, modernize, and strengthen Ontario’s publicly funded education system, but it is getting more and more difficult to do so with each passing week as classroom-level decisions continue to be made at Queen’s Park without local input,” she wrote.
Interim Liberal Leader John Fraser said Calandra’s approach is wrong. “This government is using takeovers to deflect from the fact that schools aren’t safe places to learn,” he wrote. “Class sizes are too big, special education has been starved, and we have a mental health crisis that’s not being addressed.”
What happened next
Calandra has been signalling for months that broader governance changes are coming, including possibly all but eliminating the role of trustees in the English public system; he said he expects to make a final decision “soon.” The province had already taken control of six other boards since he became minister, citing mismanagement.
In Peel, the supervision held. A provincial supervisor, Heather Watt, was appointed in March at a reported salary of $350,000 a year, trustees’ contact information was removed from board and school websites, and in March about 300 layoff notices went out to Peel teachers for the following school year — six weeks after the takeover that was justified by stopping 60 mid-year layoffs.
