Ford Government Continues to Grossly Underfund Schools

March 4, 2021

With the ongoing COVID-pandemic and the new variants emerging regularly, ventilation and air quality in classrooms and schools continue to be a hot topic, as they have been since August.

Fix Our Schools sees this new interest in topics such as ventilation and air quality as a silver lining of the COVID pandemic. We have been urging the Ontario government to go beyond simply acknowledging ventilation and air quality as priorities and start providing the levels of funding that would enable local school boards to invest in making substantive improvements. These investments in improving ventilation and air quality would provide benefits immediately amidst the pandemic reality – but also for the long-term health of students and staff who spend their days in schools. 

In response to a recent study that showed carbon dioxide levels at several Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB) buildings regularly exceeded limits, TCDSB Trustee  Norm Di Pasquale said the province could do more to address the air quality in TCDSB schools. He mentioned the need for additional provincial funding to purchase air purifiers for the 1/3 of TCDSB classrooms currently without air purifiers. He also mentioned that addressing the ventilation concerns revealed in just one TCDSB school would cost up to $600,000.

Let’s contrast this identified funding need with what our provincial government has actually provided to school boards to improve ventilation, air quality, and HVAC systems amidst the pandemic:

  1. In mid-August 2020, the Ford government announced $50 million for “improved ventilation, air quality and HVAC system effectiveness in schools.” This equated to roughly $10,000 per school in the province, and was allocated between school boards as per this memo from the Ministry of Education. 
  2. In late-August 2020, the first tranche of the federal Safe Return to School funding was announced, including $100 million for “health and safety components of school reopening plans,” which included “the hiring of custodians, HVAC improvements, internet connectivity for students and other local needs.” It is unclear how much of this $100 million in funding actually went to HVAC improvements.
  3. On February 1, 2021, the provincial government announced $50 million specifically for “portable HEPA filters and other immediate options to optimize air quality and ventilation in schools.” 

So, even if half of the federal Safe Return to School funding went to HVAC improvements, the total funding provided to school boards to address air quality, ventilation, and HVAC systems in all of Ontario’s publicly funded schools is only $150 million.  So, the total funding provided for all Ontario schools to address ventilation, HVAC, and air quality issues is one-quarter of the $600,000 estimate to address the ventilation issues at one TCDSB school.

Hmmmm… this doesn’t sound like a provincial government that is taking the necessary steps to invest in school infrastructure – does it? However, successive provincial governments in this province have grossly and chronically underfunded school renewal and repairs for well over twenty years, such that going into the pandemic, Ontario schools had a total of $16.3 billion of disrepair. So, maybe the Ford government is simply continuing a long-standing tradition of underfunding the buildings where 2-million children spend their days? Fix Our Schools hopes that a lesson learned from the COVID pandemic is that you cannot chronically and grossly underfund infrastructure and systems, and then expect them to be there for society when an emergency (like a global pandemic!) hits.