When will Premier Wynne and Education Minister Hunter acknowledge that their one-size-fits-all education funding formula is not yielding the results Ontario citizens want to see in education?

The Ontario Alliance Against School Closures (OAASC) represents almost 900,000 voters across the province and wants education funding to accommodate the unique realities of communities in rural and Northern Ontario. They led a rally at Queen’s Park on November 21 to let Premier Wynne know that local public schools matter to their communities and that they expect a provincial government to provide a public education system that works for rural and northern communities in Ontario. 

Fix Our School represents thousands of voters across the province and wants education funding to address the $15-billion of disrepair that has been allowed to accumulate in all of Ontario’s 72 publicly funded schools over the past 20 years. Members of Fix Our Schools joined OAASC at the rally on November 21, recognizing that it is hard for rural communities to care about fixing their local school – if they don’t have a local school to fix! 

Our provincial government has the power over all education funding and the majority of policies that govern public education in this province. Yet, our provincial government routinely pushes all responsibility for the delivery of public education down to local school boards, which have very little power to effect change.

Premier Wynne and Minister Hunter: Please take the responsibility that must come with the power you have over public education and fix our schools – and the inherently broken formula which funds them!

Local schools are important to Ontario families. This is evident when any local school is at risk of being closed, a situation that is becoming more frequent as our provincial government puts pressure on local school boards to strive for the same type of “efficient use of assets” as for-profit corporations generally pursue.

Parents from across the province are heading to Queen’s Park today to let Premier Wynne and Education Minister Hunter know that local schools are important to communities and necessary to provide the best education possible for Ontario students. Children attending publicly funded schools in this province are more than mere chess pieces on a board that can be conveniently moved around (via 4-hour bus rides) to “nearby” schools in the name of operational efficiency.

In the November 20, 2016 Toronto Star article entitled, “Ontario parents protest a slew of rural school closures, claim funding model is faulty”, Annie Kidder, the executive director of People for Education, says that “while some schools (in the province) do need to be closed, there are always consequences. And those consequences go beyond individual kids.” Kidder goes on to say that, “the province and the school boards keep passing the buck back and forth about whose fault it is.”

This lack of accountability is concerning and is not yielding the outcomes we want to see in public education. The Province has held power over all educational funding and the vast majority of rules governing education for over two decades now. Ontario school boards have the responsibility to actually operate our publicly funded schools and administer the funding they receive from the province for their schools. Therefore, power and accountability/responsibility do not reside at the same level of government, making it easy to pass the buck.

In the instance of school repairs, we have gathered irrefutable evidence that from 2011-2016, the provincial government underfunded local school boards by $5.8-billion for school repairs. However, the Province tends to blame local school boards for problems. Clearly, this dynamic is not delivering what is best for students and communities and must change so that power and accountability/responsibility reside at the same level of government.

The provincial government released Facility Condition Index (FCI) data for all Ontario schools this August, which provides details of outstanding repairs on all school buildings in the province. Absent from this data is any type of assessment on school portables. Given the number of Ontario’s students and teachers who spend their days in portables, the condition of these buildings ought to be assessed and documented too! 

We received photos of a portable in a horrible state of disrepair, which highlights why assessing the condition of all learning spaces in Ontario is important. Ceiling tiles had caved in due to a leaking roof, the ceiling structure was filled with black mould and rodent feces. According to the person who sent us these photos, “the pictures don’t do the conditions in that portable justice. It was even worse than this. The mouldy smell was unreal.”