Why Are We Relying on Corporations to Fund Safe Classrooms?

October 15, 2020

Our provincial government is responsible for funding public education and schools. Full stop. 

To Fix Our Schools, this means that our provincial government is responsible for providing adequate, stable levels of funding that would ensure the safety, health, and well-being of the 2-million students who generally spend their days in Ontario’s schools, along with teachers and education workers. Yet, for over two decades, this has not been the case.

In fact, the gross and chronic provincial underfunding of school infrastructure by successive provincial governments lead to a situation where, even before the pandemic revealed further cracks, there was a school repair backlog of $16.3-billion in Ontario’s schools.

Now, in the midst of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Ontario, public schools and the safety of our classrooms seem dependent on the charity of corporations rather than proper provincial funding, as we consider the recent donation of 500 air purifiers by Danby corporation to the Toronto District School Board (TDSB).

Almost half of TDSB schools are reliant on windows for air circulation, without any form of mechanical ventilation. Experts believe that standalone filters can be an effective tool to improve safety in those classrooms. Therefore, the TDSB was understandably pleased to receive the 500 air purifiers from Danby, which will be placed in 37 TDSB schools in the highest-risk COVID areas. However, I hope we can all agree that when Doug Ford and Stephen Lecce promised they would do whatever was needed to ensure the safety of students, teachers and education workers, they lied. Full stop.

Our provincial government has clearly not done everything in its power to ensure the safety of students, teachers, and education workers if corporate donations of safety equipment are being welcomed by school boards! Even back in late August as we approached the re-opening of Ontario schools, Premier Ford all but admitted that his government had not done everything possible to ensure a safe re-opening when he stated that, he was “relying on school boards to make sure that students and staff are in a very safe environment“.

So where do we go from here? After six years of working to ensure all of Ontario’s publicly funded schools are safe, healthy, well-maintained buildings, Fix Our Schools is convinced that this will not happen until funding for public schools and education is adequate and stable. We are convinced that Ontario’s schools cannot be fixed by simply “finding efficiencies”. $16.3-billion of disrepair did not accumulate in Ontario’s schools because of “inefficiencies” by school boards.

But how, you may ask, can governments afford to provide the billions of dollars required each year to properly maintain and improve our public schools? If there is insufficient public money in the coffers to pay for this public good properly, then Fix Our Schools suggests that we must look to increase the amount of money in those public coffers. And, Fix Our Schools would suggest that most citizens already pay their fair share (or some would argue more than their fair share!) of taxes, so corporations must start to pay their fair share of taxes, as they did decades ago.