In a Toronto school last week, a piece of the ceiling in the library fell to the ground during school hours. Luckily, no student was sitting underneath the ceiling that collapsed.
The ceiling had been retaining water from a roof leak and eventually gave way. The TDSB struggles to keep up with the backlog of repairs needing to be done across its schools due to the decades of underfunding by the provincial government and incidents such as this one are the result.
The provincial government would push responsibility to the school boards to better manage their finances but when the provincial government has been allocating a mere fraction of what has been needed each year to properly maintain schools, this type of argument is akin to a parent getting upset with their child for failing to purchase weekly groceries for a family of four when given $10 by the parent to do so.
The provincial government has the power over the money that funds our children’s schools and it is time for them to take responsibility for the $15-billion of disrepair that plagues Ontario schools.