Fix Our Schools Calls for Transparency + Adequate, Stable Funding

November 17, 2020

Fix Our Schools is calling upon the Ford government to:

  • Resume the transparency into school disrepair in Ontario that was first introduced by the previous Liberal government in 2016, by releasing updated Facilities Condition Index/Disrepair data on Ontario’s schools in a comparable format to the data that was released in November 2017, so that the public can assess whether the annual funding level of $1.4-billion for school repairs is sufficient to fix Ontario’s schools.
  • Provide the adequate, stable funding for school infrastructure that we have been outlining is required since 2017, and have outlined in every subsequent budget submission we have made since that time.
  • Conduct an independent and comprehensive review of the education funding formula, as has also been requested by Ontario’s Auditor-General as per this quote from page 495 of the 2017 report: “(The Education) Funding formula uses out-of-date benchmarks and is due for a comprehensive external review. In 2002, an independent task force reviewed the Ministry’s complex formula for determining school boards’ funding. The task force recommended that the Ministry annually review and update the benchmarks used in the formula and conduct a more comprehensive overall review of the formula every five years. Fifteen years later, the Ministry has not commissioned another independent review of the (education) funding formula.” Given this quote is from a 2017 report, we can now say that it has been a full seventeen years since the Ministry of Education has conducted an independent review of a funding formula that has led to, among other things, a $16.3-billion repair backlog in Ontario’s schools.

Here is a brief history of events that has led Fix Our Schools to these calls for action:

In August 2016, after concerted pressure from the Fix Our Schools network, the Liberal provincial government finally released the disrepair data for Ontario’s publicly funded schools that it had been collecting for years using our taxpayer dollars. This new transparency was a huge win for Ontario students, parents, teachers, and education workers because it enabled a common understanding that all 72 of Ontario’s school boards faced a significant level of school disrepair. In fact, this data release confirmed that an unfathomable $15-billion of disrepair had been allowed to accumulate in Ontario’s 5,000 schools.

The 2015 Ontario Auditor-General report that had been released a few months prior to the school disrepair data revealed that the amount of annual provincial funding required to maintain Ontario’s schools in a state of good repair had always been approximately $1.4-billion/year. “However, actual annual funding on a school year basis over the last five years has been $150 million a year, increasing to $250 million in 2014/15 and $500 million in 2015/16,” thus clarifying that gross and chronic provincial underfunding – in some years as little as one-tenth of what was actually needed – was the root cause of the identified $15-billion of disrepair in Ontario’s schools as at 2016. In this same report, several other concerns were expressed by the Auditor-General regarding the inadequacy of provincial funding to ensure Ontario’s students learned in safe, healthy, well-maintained buildings that provided environments conducive to learning:

Portables: As per the Auditor-General, there were “over 100,000 students in temporary accommodations (portables), and about 10% of schools operating at over 120% capacity in the province. Although portables are needed to provide some flexibility to address changes in school capacity, existing funding is not sufficient to rehabilitate the existing portfolio and to replace these structures with more permanent accommodation, in some cases.“

New School Buildings: As per the Auditor-General, “About $2.6 billion worth of projects are submitted to the Ministry of Education by school boards for funding consideration every year. However, over the last five years, the Ministry has approved only about a third of the projects every year, since its annual funding envelope under the program has averaged only about $500 million on a school year basis.”

In June 2016, Kathleen Wynne’s Liberal government increased provincial funding for school repairs to the $1.4-billion/year that both industry standards and the Ontario Auditor-General suggested always ought to have been going to school repairs. While Fix Our Schools was thrilled that annual funding for school repairs had been increased by $1.1-billion per year, we cautioned that without additional funding to account for the almost two decades when provincial funding was a mere fraction of what was needed, and during which time $15-billion of disrepair had accrued, we would continue to see overall disrepair in Ontario schools increase – not decrease.

When the Wynne Liberals seemed slow on providing an annual update on the disrepair data for schools, Fix Our Schools continued to pressure the Province for ongoing transparency into the state of Ontario’s publicly funded schools. As we pointed out in this September 2017 blog entitled, Have we even stopped the bleeding on the $15-B repair backlog in Ontario’s schools?, citizens would have no idea whether the new $1.4-B/year level of funding was serving to decrease the repair backlog unless the Province released annual disrepair data. We also pointed out that this type of accountability seemed entirely reasonable.

Finally, after this pressure, the Liberals did release updated data on school disrepair in November 2017. Unsurprisingly, we saw an increase of almost a billion dollars of disrepair, with a total of $15.9-billion of disrepair logged by the third-party engineer firm hired by the Province to conduct assessments of Ontario’s schools.

Since that time, Fix Our Schools has consistently provided funding approaches that would fix Ontario’s schools. Our recommendations have been consistently ignored and, again unsurprisingly, disrepair in Ontario’s schools has continued to increase. The latest total disrepair data we have gleaned from the Ford government was actually through NDP Education Critic Marit Stiles after her November 2019 Estimates Committee revealed that total school disrepair had increased from $15.9-billion in November 2017 to $16.3-billion in November 2019.

We have no lens into the details of the most current school disrepair data because, shockingly, the Ford government has refused any level of transparency into this data which is collected using taxpayer money and ought to be made public annually.

Which leads us back to the beginning with the three calls to action above.