Ontario Student Trustees – Proof that our Publicly Funded Education System is NOT BROKEN

May 8, 2019

On Monday, May 6, 2019, Fix Our Schools witnessed absolute proof that Ontario’s publicly funded education system is not broken. We were thrilled to be at Queen’s Park supporting the Ontario Student Trustees’ Association (OSTA-AECO) as they released an incredibly thoughtful, well-researched vision document entitled, “The Students’ Vision for Education”. The Student Trustees who researched, wrote and presented this vision document are intelligent, thoughtful, articulate, confident young people who are already making huge contributions to society. These same Student Trustees are a result of Ontario’s publicly funded education system.

OSTA-AECO is a non-partisan organization comprised of student trustees from public and Catholic school boards across the province. Representing approximately 2-million Ontario students, OSTA-AECO members work with provincial partners in government to improve our publicly funded education system for students.

The vision articulated by OSTA Executive on Monday at Queen’s Park was impressive and student-focused. The vision document represents much research and reflects data collected from over 20,000 surveys. Truly, the intelligence, poise, maturity, and confidence embodied in the Student Trustees at Queen’s Park was a huge testament to Ontario’s education system, one of the best in the entire world according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

As outlined in the Forward of the OSTA-AECO vision document, Ontario’s strong education system is no accident. It has relied on excellent, dedicated work by educators, administrators, and students.

“A publicly-funded education system is an integral part of any mature society. It lifts communities up, promotes widespread equity, and provides countless opportunities for citizens to succeed throughout their lives. The immense benefit of publicly-funded education is unquestionable; it is a promise of prosperity, success, and development. Nevertheless, to protect it, Ontario must constantly improve it.” – pg. 6 of OSTA-AECO vision document

OSTA’s vision document provides our provincial government with 35 long-term recommendations that “strive to transform every facet of our education system”.

For the Fix Our Schools campaign, perhaps the most pertinent recommendations from OSTA-AECO were under the pillar entitled, “Funding Formula Reform”, which calls on our provincial government to rectify the significant issues of funding inadequacy. Since 2014, Fix Our Schools has asked the Province to ensure adequate, stable funding for school building infrastructure and we were heartened to hear such strong support from OSTA-AECO for ensuring safe, healthy, well-maintained school buildings in this province.

In fact, OSTA-AECO identifies the growing state of disrepair in publicly funded schools as “one of the largest challenges facing Ontario’s education system”, noting that the capital repair backlog has grown from $5.6-billion in 2002 to a whopping $15.9-billion as of the most recent release of disrepair data by the province in Fall 2017.

The following student quote from the OSTA-AECO vision document provides a vivid illustration of how disrepair in Ontario’s schools negatively impacts student learning:

OSTA-AECO also calls on our provincial government to implement a Standard of Good Repair for Ontario schools as part of the solution to poor learning conditions in Ontario’s schools. Recognizing that “it is extremely difficult for students to succeed if they are shivering in class, the provincial government must create a standard for good repair which is localized for unique costs, individualized through school-based funding, and be completely detached from utilization rates. It should be provincial through consistent standards across the board for the temperature that is conducive for learning, cleanliness, and facilities’ upkeep requirements.”

Lack of Education Funding Details from Province puts School Boards Behind the Eight Ball

May 6, 2019

Annie Kidder, the Executive Director of People for Education, reminds us of the following truths in her blog released on May 2, 2019:

  • “First, there is no evidence anywhere that says cutting money from education is the best route to promote student success. On the contrary, economists agree that investment in education – from early childhood through to post-secondary – pays off at least tenfold. So if we invest $24 billion now, we will eventually reap a $240 billion payoff – in higher taxes paid, in higher employment in the rapidly-evolving knowledge economy (or, as one recent report called it, the Intangibles Economy), in savings to health care, and in lower costs for things like social services and criminal justice.”
  • “On April 26th, the province made announcements about funding, but there are no details available. This makes it difficult to know exactly how much money will be available, and for what. For school boards, who must submit final, balanced budgets by the end of June, this makes it very difficult to plan.”

School buildings impact health and achievement

May 2, 2019

Where did April go? We’re already into May but wanted to take a moment to reflect on April’s “Healthy Schools Day” in Canada. This designated day gives Canadians a specific time to focus on school buildings’ indoor environment quality and how this environment can either benefit or harm the health of our country’s school children and all the adults who work in school buildings across Canada. 

What are common issues in school buildings?

1. Exposure to hazards

  • Children are more vulnerable to environmental hazards than adults
  • Children spend an average of 30 to 50 hours per week in school
  • Adults who work in school buildings spend even more than 30-50 hours per week in their school workplaces
  • Children attending schools in good condition score 5 to 10 percent higher on standardized tests than students who attend schools in poor condition

 

2. Indoor Air Quality and Impacts

  • Many schools have problems linked to indoor air quality
  • Improved indoor air quality positively impacts health and, conversely, poor indoor environmental quality is associated with respiratory illnesses and poor concentration, leading to poor learning
  • We know poor indoor air quality is particularly challenging for people with asthma and we also know that 13-17% of school children in Canada have asthma, the leading cause of school absenteeism. Asthma accounts for thousands of missed school days each year and contributes high costs to the medical system

3. Water

  • Very few new schools have been built in Ontario in the last few decades therefore most school buildings do not have upgraded plumbing systems
  • Water standing overnight in school building pipes creates opportunity for lead leaching into the drinking water system at schools
  • The EPA & Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agree that there is NO KNOWN safe level of lead in a child’s blood
  • Many schools do not have backflow preventers, which are absolutely necessary to prevent bacteria from contaminating the drinking water systems 

4. The Lack of State of Good Repair Standards

  • Canada’s school boards make very difficult decisions between cutting back programs vs. cutting back on needed building maintenance because provincial funding simply isn’t sufficient for all education needs
  • Provinces, including Ontario, do not have a ‘State of Good Repair’ Standard for school buildings, which are important public infrastructure
  • Many provinces in Canada do not have mandatory carbon monoxide detector legislation for school buildings

The Future

When schools provide cleaner air, improved lighting, and reduced exposures to toxic substances, the children and adults who spend their days in these buildings benefit. They are healthier, miss fewer days of school/work and we see improved academic achievement for students. 

The Leaking Roofs of Ontario Schools

April 28, 2019

“If you’re in a classroom where the roof is leaking, that communicates very strongly to you that this is not very important what’s going on here.”  – Ontario High School Student

What is it like living through a major renovation at school? Many parents have contacted us with concerns about their kids who must stay in school buildings undergoing serious construction. Students have mixed feelings about work being done on their school. No more leaking ceilings, but how to learn in a construction zone? The sad reality is that most repairs on schools are now reactive or urgent, therefore more and more frequently, school repairs are conducted while students are in school.

Some of the parents on the Fix Our Schools working group have personal experience with schools receiving urgently needed repairs while children continued to attend school each day. The construction impacted students in many ways:

Health: Our kids lived in classrooms with hoarding that took up a lot of space in their classroom but did not keep out the brick dust. There were many reports of increased asthma incidents in the student population. Students also lived through unbearable roofing fumes that no fan could remove, causing dizziness and nausea. Some parents felt forced to keep their kids at home.

Education: Classes shared classrooms using a complicated rotary system, causing stress for the younger students. Access to the library space was lost for months and all the science lab equipment was packed up and unavailable. It was sad to see principals wasting much of their time supervising construction.

Safety: Tiny grade 1’s lost their yard and had to share play space with rough & tumble grade 8’s. In our opinion, the lack of space contributed to more injuries at our school, no matter how careful and considerate everyone was.

There have been incidents in #Ontario were children were very badly hurt during repair work. In 2018, two children were burned by roofing tar during gym class.

Ideally, children shouldn’t be on construction sites. However, the provincial funding model for schools for the last two decades has not prioritized the safety of students. Oddly, we’ve seen both federal and provincial governments prioritize the safety of adults in their place of work. They move out of the buildings being renovated, often for years.

 

Kudos to parents at Balaclava Elementary School

April 24, 2019

Parents expect their children’s schools to be safe, healthy, and well-maintained. Parents do not expect their children to be learning in environments where:

  • Water has entered light fixtures, causing a risk of shock and fire hazard
  • There are so many leaks that 35 buckets are lining the school halls
  • The fire alarm system was not functioning properly due to moisture
  • Ceiling tiles covered with mould are being cut away

And yet, those are some of the conditions described at Balaclava Elementary in March, 2019. Since founding the Fix Our Schools campaign five years ago, we’ve never seen parents as courageous and bold in calling out the unacceptable disrepair at their children’s school as those at Balaclava Elementary School.

https://twitter.com/geri_hall/status/1109148834033209345

Kudos to all of these parents for being so incredibly candid, for sharing photos of the disrepair and for contacting media in order to bring public attention to these issues and to effect change. Parents willingly spoke to media, with great results. In addition to the initial coverage in the Flamborough Review, CTV aired this clip on March 26, 2019, and Balaclava parents were also featured on CHCH.

Parents worked with their Principal, Superintendent, and local Trustee to understand how their children’s school had fallen into such poor condition that children’s safety was being questioned, recognizing that school boards are responsible for conducting school repairs. Equally important, parents also contacted their local MPP, the Minister of Education and the Premier, recognizing that it is a provincial responsibility to provide proper funding to school boards so that boards can actually be able to properly maintain their schools. For two decades, provincial funding was grossly inadequate, which has led to a situation where there are large school repair backlogs in all boards across the province.

We know that the nightmarish conditions that plagued Balaclava Elementary School earlier this year are not unique to this Carlisle school, which is part of the Hamilton Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB). HWDSB schools have a total of $337.4-million of disrepair, as per provincial data, and Ontario’s schools have a total of $15.9-billion of disrepair. 

Send a Postcard – Education Advocacy Made Easy

April 22, 2019

If you believe that publicly funded education matters and that safe, healthy, well-maintained schools matter too – then please send a postcard to make your views known!

The group called West End Parents for Public Education (WEPPE) has expanded its reach provincially with a recently launched Postcard Campaign. Here is the message you’d be sending if you contact them to receive postcards for you and your school community. You’ll notice there is space available to personalize your message.

We encourage all parents and parent councils to check out all the amazing tools that WEPPE has provided to make advocacy easy for parents and school councils across Ontario and to participate in this postcard campaign.

While the recent provincial budget maintained funding for school repairs at approximately $1.4-B/year, this amount has proven insufficient for school boards to be able to move beyond addressing disrepair reactively to actually reducing repair backlogs in their schools. As well, Fix Our Schools is very concerned about:

  • Inadequate provincial funding for the operational maintenance at Ontario’s schools. Operational maintenance is the critical day-to-day care, cleaning, and maintenance done by school custodians.
  • The lack of new school builds being approved by our new provincial government. As per provincial data on school disrepair, there are 346 Ontario schools that are in need of being replaced instead of being repaired.

 

 

 

Schoolyards are a Key Component of School Infrastructure

April 16, 2019

We believe that school infrastructure includes not only the school buildings but also the schoolyards. Important learning takes place in both classrooms and playgrounds! Sadly, school boards do not receive funding from the Province that is specific to maintaining or improving the outdoor component of our children’s schools.

If you agree that schoolyards are a key component of Ontario’s schools, we encourage you to check out the “Schoolyards Count! Initiative” being run by the Ontario Physical and Health Education Association (OPHEA). And to ensure that your local schoolyard gets audited!

They are asking schools across Ontario to help determine how Ontario’s schoolyards ‘measure up’ by taking an hour to use their “audit tool” to assess the quality of your local schoolyard. You could do this as an individual citizen, as part of a parent committee you’re involved with at your local school, or as a school council. Lots of options! The “Schoolyards Count! Initiative” is a partnership between Ophea and a researcher at Wilfrid Laurier University, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Doug Ford’s first provincial budget – and what it means for school repairs

April 11, 2019

When the Fix Our Schools campaign began in 2014, provincial funding for school repairs was only $150-million/year – one-tenth of what industry standards suggest had always been required by school boards to be able to reasonably maintain their school buildings.

After much work by the Fix Our Schools campaign, in June 2016, a huge increase in provincial funding for school repairs and maintenance was announced. Since June 2016, our provincial government has allocated roughly $1.4-billion/year to school boards for school repairs. This $1.4-B has been allocated via the School Conditions Improvement (SCI) fund and the School Renewal Allocation (SRA) fund. For the 2018-19 budget year, SCI funding was $1-billion ($900-million via the core program and $100-million via the Greenhouse Gas Reduction funding program) and SRA funding was projected to provide $361-million.

In Fall 2017, economist Hugh Mackenzie proposed that to truly fix Ontario’s schools an additional $1.6-billion per year – beyond this $1.4-billion in SCI and SRA funding – was needed for school maintenance, repairs and rebuilding schools.

 

Today, Doug Ford’s government released its first budget since taking office in June. We learned that his government will maintain annual funding for school repairs via SCI and SRA funding at the same $1.4-billion/year that has been in place since June 2016. We are pleased that no cuts have been made to this important budget allocation. While we agree with economist Hugh Mackenzie that a significant increase to this $1.4-billion/year funding plan is required to truly Fix Ontario’s schools, we are optimistic that Fix Our Schools can work with the Ford government to find new funding solutions. We now look forward to this government implementing a “State of Good Repair” standard for Ontario schools.

Why household overspending is worse than government overspending

April 7, 2019

With the recent Federal budget announcement and the upcoming April 11 Ontario provincial budget announcement, we thought that Globe and Mail columnist Rob Carrick’s opinion piece from March 18, 2019 entitled, “Why household overspending is worse than a federal deficit” was worth some conversation.

Clipping of article by Rob Carrick about spending...

For decades, the comparison has readily been drawn between our personal household budgets and those of governments. We all acknowledge that spending more than we make each year is a bad idea and that logic seemed to easily transfer to government spending – that if a government spends more than it takes in from taxes, that is a bad idea. Full stop.

However, in Carrick’s opinion piece, he considers a new line of thinking put forward by Olivier Blanchard, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Blanchard counters the big criticism of government budget deficits – namely, that they can lead to a bigger tax burden for future generations due to interest payments. He proposes that the risk of a higher tax burden for future generations can be minimized in the case of governments that are able to borrow money at an interest rate that is lower than the growth rate of the economy. If this is the scenario, then a government could pay what they owe without raising taxes in the future. 

part 2 of Rob Carrick article

Carrick goes on to say that there are no excuses for household deficits because the math will never work for individual household deficits to make sense.  Individuals pay much higher interest rates to borrow than governments and individual debt does not generally lead to higher wages (the equivalent of economic growth for governments).

So as we consider critiquing government budgets, let’s keep in mind that “deficit spending by governments can produce a net benefit if it results in improved hospitals, highway, or public transit.

Household overspending never makes sense.”

Education Rally on Saturday, April 6, 2019

April 4, 2019

My 12-year old son came home from school after participating in the April 4, 2019 student walk-out. He wondered why his teachers had not protested as well. I explained that teachers and many other adults who support public education and have concerns about recently announced changes would be attending a Rally for Education on Saturday, April 6, noon at Queen’s Park in Toronto.  Fix Our Schools was there and thrilled to see such engagement by so many citizens who care deeply about publicly funded schools and education.

One of the concerns for people who attended the April 6 Rally was the proposed increase to class sizes. TDSB Chair Robin Pilkey sent this letter to Minister Thompson on April 2, 2019 outlining how the provincial government’s proposed increases in class sizes will negatively impact students. Another concern for many people who attended this Education Rally was the poor conditions in so many of Ontario’s publicly funded schools. With $15.9-billion of disrepair plaguing Ontario schools, students, teachers and education workers are spending their days in buildings that look like this:

Unacceptable! Minister Thompson and Premier Ford – please take the appropriate steps needed to Fix Ontario’s Schools and ensure that Ontario’s students receive the education they deserve!