Some days the week of October 8th hit close to 30 degrees and a week later, temperatures had plummeted to single digits. Old schools across the province have struggled to keep up with the erratic outside temperatures.
On October 18, 2018 Caryn Lieberman of Global News reported on a mother who brought in a space heater to her son’s Toronto Catholic District School Board classroom. After learning the temperature was only 16 degrees inside and that children were all bundled up in their outdoor clothing while trying to learn, the mother felt compelled to help.
Fix Our Schools commends parents wanting to ensure schools provide environments conducive to learning. Fix Our Schools also advocates for safe, healthy, well-maintained school buildings across the province. While a space heater provided a short-term solution for one classroom in this example, the electrical systems in many Ontario schools are not equipped to handle space heaters so our provincial government really must step up to provide long-term viable solutions for all Ontario schools.
Children deserve more than to be sweltering in their learning environment in September, early October, May and June … and freezing in their learning environments in October through to April!
The TCDSB gets approximately $50 million every year from our provincial government for repairs and improvements. The current repair backlog is around $1.4 billion. A Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB) spokesperson commented, “The simple math would tell you that it’s about 30 years of backlog in order to repair our buildings to an acceptable level … We just triage as best we can.”
Children deserve more than “triaging as best that school boards can”. However, until our provincial government implements funding solutions that enable school boards to address the repair backlogs that accumulated over the last 20 years, when provincial funding was often one-tenth of what industry standards suggest as the bare minimum required, school boards will continue to “triage” and our children will continue to learn in sub-optimum learning conditions.