In yesterday’s briefing, Premier Ford said, “We’re really relying on school boards. I just told them I have all the confidence in the world that they’re going to be able to get through this and make sure that the students and the staff are in a very safe environment”. As a co-founder of Fix Our Schools, a parent-led, non-partisan campaign started over 6 years ago to advocate for safe, healthy, well-maintained school buildings in Ontario, I literally felt tears spring to my eyes as I read this – tears of anger, frustration, and disbelief.
For over 20 years, successive provincial governments have relied on school boards to work miracles while being chronically and grossly underfunded by the Province. When Fix Our Schools began in 2014, provincial funding was a mere $150-M per year for school repair and renewal – ONE-TENTH of what industry standards suggested was the bare minimum! Yet the narrative of the provincial government was that somehow, the disrepair that accumulated in our provincial school buildings was the fault of SCHOOL BOARDS?? I guess the provincial government “relying on school boards and having confidence in them” to keep Ontario’s schools safe, healthy and well-maintained didn’t actually work out so well, given that the school boards only had ONE-TENTH of what was actually NEEDED to accomplish this goal. Sound familiar at all?
While we’ve been advocating for adequate, stable provincial funding for years now to ensure all Ontario public schools are safe, healthy, and well-maintained – we now find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic. COVID-19 has laid bare just how critical public education is to students, families, communities, and our society – and just how critical the school BUILDINGS are to student, teacher, and education worker’s safety and well-being. BUT – it isn’t realistic to starve a system for over two decades and then expect that it is in tip-top shape for you in a pandemic.
Premier Ford: Over the course of the 14 years that I’ve been a parent of students attending publicly funded schools in this province, I have seen teachers, education workers, principals, trustees and school board staff work miracles every single day DESPITE lack of adequate resources from the provincial government. So, I actually DO have confidence that these same individuals WILL somehow over the coming two weeks work MIRACLES to ensure our children are safe and that the adults in school buildings are safe as well. BUT – this isn’t how things ought to be. Public education and schools ought to be a top priority for every provincial government and providing adequate, stable funding is absolutely imperative. However, your government has treated public education and schools as an afterthought to things like bars and nail salons; been slow to provide guidance; continuously flip-flopped on said guidance; and, most disappointing is that your government has continued the long-standing provincial tradition of chronic and gross underfunding of public education and schools – while pushing accountability and responsibility for working miracles down to school boards, teachers, principals, and education workers.