After hearing about the multitude of student injuries in schools recently, a parent, who is also a certified architect and construction consultant, contacted us with this: “It is appalling that the provincial government allowed the state of our schools to denigrate to the point where so much construction has to be done while students are in the buildings. And, while accidents can certainly happen, they happen more frequently in scenarios when construction work is reactive instead of proactive and in contexts where non-sufficient funding/resources are available.”
Ontario school boards are frequently conducting reactive repair work rather than proactive maintenance and we know that up until recently, our provincial government was only providing one-tenth of what industry standards say is needed to keep our schools in good repair. So we have the perfect storm brewing in Ontario where we can expect accidents and student injuries to be an ongoing issue in schools unless our provincial government begins providing the education funding actually needed to Fix Our Schools.