What to write when you email your local MPP candidates

April 3, 2018

We want this to be easy for you so we’ve taken the liberty of drafting an email you can use to send to all the local MPP candidates in your riding.

Dear INSERT NAMES OF ALL YOUR LOCAL MPP CANDIDATES,

I live in your riding and am concerned about the disrepair in our local schools. I know that the Province is responsible for funding education in Ontario and that school repairs have been grossly underfunded by successive provincial governments for many years, leading to the $15.9-billion of disrepair in Ontario schools today.  I’m part of the Fix Our Schools campaign and am contacting you today to ask:

Will you please sign the Fix Our Schools Pledge, to demonstrate your commitment to safe, healthy, well-maintained schools in Ontario and in our riding? Everything you need is right here: http://fixourschools.ca/mpp-candidates-sign-the-pledge/

I hope I can count on your commitment to safe, healthy, well-maintained schools.

Thanks, YOUR NAME AND ADDRESS

How do I find out the names and contact info for my local MPP candidates?

April 3, 2018

Now that the election has been officially called, you can visit the Elections Ontario website and enter your postal code to find out the name of your riding and the name of all candidates running in your riding. Sometimes, the party and/or candidate makes it easy for you to find their email and phone number. Other times – not so much! In those instances – consider using social media to contact them with your request for them to sign the Pledge. We’ve found almost all politicians are on TWITTER and/or FACEBOOK … so consider those avenues.

Click here to find your local Liberal MPP candidate; and

Click here to find your local NDP candidate; and

Click here to find your local PC candidate; and

Click here to find your local Green candidate

In addition, many candidates have already started knocking on doors in their ridings. So please keep an eye on your mail each day and look for flyers identifying the name and contact information for each candidate in your riding. Then you’re in great shape to get in touch with every MPP candidate in your riding and take the next step of asking them to sign the Fix Our Schools Pledge!  

Lunchrooms a barometer of poor overall school conditions

April 3, 2018

Andrea Gordon has continued to cover the issue of lunchrooms in Ontario schools – as a barometer of poor overall school conditions. In her March 26, 2018, Toronto Star article entitled, “Province urged to overhaul flawed approach to funding education“,  she also points to lunchroom conditions as a good indicator that the approach to funding education in Ontario is in need of a complete overhaul. She cited a recent report written by Hugh Mackenzie, entitled “Course Correction: A Blueprint to Fix Ontario’s Education Funding Formula”, as support for this argument. 

As Mackenzie points out in his report, we must demand an approach to funding education in this province that actually takes into consideration the needs of our children – all of their needs while they are at school, including the conditions of not only lunchrooms but classrooms, washrooms, outdoor areas, libraries, gymnasiums and hallways.  

However, when the provincial government took control of funding public education in Ontario over two decades ago, they focused on providing equal funding, regardless of student, school or community needs. In a nutshell, they confused equal for equitable; funding student, school and community needs were nowhere in the equation.

This example clearly illustrates the difference:

Consider a parent who has two children with different needs. One child needs glasses to see and the other child has perfect 20/20 vision. Would the parent deny the one child glasses to ensure an equal amount of money was spent on both children? Or, would the parent spend additional money to buy glasses for the child who needs them to ensure that both children can see? The answer seems pretty evident and the same principles ought to apply to funding education.

If we, as a society, want all children to have the opportunity to succeed and obtain the best education possible, we must fund education in a manner that considers student needs, school needs and community needs. Only this type of approach will provide equity, recognizing that sometimes unequal dollar amounts will be provided to achieve this equity. 

Ontario lunchrooms continue to strike a chord

March 27, 2018

After hearing from readers across the province about lunchroom chaos in their local schools, the Toronto Star continued to cover this issue in an article published on Wednesday, March 21, 2018 entitled, “Tales of school lunch chaos hard for parents to swallow”.  CBC picked up this issue also and covered it on Ontario Today with Rita Celli on Friday, March 23. Lunchrooms, it seems, struck a chord with Ontario parents, grandparents and citizens, in general. 

Like the Star, Fix Our Schools, also heard from parents across the province.

We extracted this disturbing quote from an email we received from one parent, who moved to Toronto from the U.S. 1.5 years ago:

“The lunch problem is the tip of the iceberg… I honestly don’t know how parents aren’t rioting in the streets. We have been in a lot of schools – mostly US, this is our first Canadian experience and we are stunned at how bad it is.  Never experienced anything like it. So thank you for all you are doing.  As a Canadian I am deeply saddened and shamed at the state of our public school system.  It is NOT ok for our children.”         

We were copied on this letter by a grandparent who lives in Burlington, who sent this letter to Premier Wynne and Minister Naidoo-Harris after reading about lunchroom chaos in the Toronto Star: 

“Ms Wynne, you have been a School Trustee, a Minister of Education and now you have been Premier and throughout your time in public office our school buildings have continued to deteriorate due to your lack of awareness, concern and leadership. Continue reading →

Lunchroom conditions – just the tip of the iceberg

March 22, 2018

After reading the March 20, 2018 Toronto Star article entitled, “School lunch served with side order of chaos” by Andrea Gordon, a concerned Toronto parent sent us this email, reflecting on her own family’s experience with school lunchrooms:

Dear Fix Our Schools, I just read the article about lunchrooms in the Star and wanted to throw in a few comments: Continue reading →

Make school conditions an election issue!

March 19, 2018

If you care about public education and want to ensure that all Ontario children attend schools that are safe, well-maintained and provide environments conducive to learning, then please use the following materials to engage with the Fix Our Schools campaign and help make a difference!

    1. A Flyer to provide you and your network with a quick overview of the Fix Our Schools campaign and some ideas for actions you can take.
    2. A Pledge to show your local MPP candidates in the coming weeks to have them sign to  demonstrate their commitment to fixing public schools in Ontario.
    3. An MPP_Information Kit to equip you to set up a meeting with your local MPP or any of your local MPP candidates for the upcoming June election.
    4. A Campaign_Guide that provides more details about the Fix Our Schools campaign – if you are really committed to the cause and wish to launch your own Fix Our Schools campaign locally, then this guide will help you do just that!

Should you like hard copies of any of these materials sent to you, please contact us at info@fixourschools.ca.

Canadians for a Safe Learning Environment (CASLE) has closed

March 18, 2018

Fix Our Schools connected with CASLE several years ago and this Nova Scotia-based organization has provided valuable mentorship and guidance to Fix Our Schools. For 25 years, CASLE fulfilled the following mission and made significant changes in Nova Scotia’s schools: “With solid information, respect, and persistence as our primary tools we can help provide environmentally healthy products and practices in schools, and healthy school buildings.” We were saddened to hear of CASLE’s closing and wanted to share the following excerpts from their final email to members:

In late 2017, CASLE closed. CASLE’s website will remain active so as to keep important healthy schools information available for the ongoing task of providing healthy school environments.

In 1992, the founding members of CASLE were astounded by what they found in schools in Nova Scotia. Some were parents whose children were made sick by their school buildings, and some were teachers whose health has never been the same. They found each other and set out to change that.

Since that time, CASLE has partnered with each successive provincial government. They have made schools better across Nova Scotia and across Canada, from Whitehorse to St. John’s, and as far away as Australia.

Children can’t learn well if they don’t feel well. Children are uniquely vulnerable to toxins and hazards in their environments. Our schools, their condition and the products and practices used in them, can influence children’s health, well-being and educational outcomes. Researchers have found a 5-to-10-point grade difference between children in good quality buildings versus those in poor buildings.

In Nova Scotia, schools now use healthier products for cleaning and teaching, less toxic maintenance materials and safer practices for maintaining the buildings. Most schools have been repaired or upgraded, and many that can’t be fixed are being replaced. CASLE helped develop a new approach to building healthy new schools, called Healthy School Design and Construction. All new public buildings in Nova Scotia are built following these healthy new building guidelines.

Since 1992, every Nova Scotian student and everyone who worked in our schools has benefitted from CASLE’s efforts. Because systems were changed, the benefits are expected to continue into the future.

Ask YOUR Trustee to publish data on your local school conditions

March 9, 2018

We instinctively know that our governments are accountable when voters are able to assess what and how they are doing. But how do we evaluate the use of our tax dollars? That’s dependent on our having the freedom to access the reports and actions of those who spend them.

At Fix Our Schools we supported the TDSB’s work to give parents access to the true nature of the school buildings in their purview. We were very proud of the board when they published repair lists for every school. Now a TDSB parent can monitor the condition of their children’s school. We haven’t found another school board who publishes the repair backlog for every school in their board. (If you know of another, please contact us!)

We spoke to Robin Pilkey, chair of the TDSB, about why THIS board viewed publishing as an important step for Ontario’s largest school board.

“The TDSB felt that publishing clear and transparent repair data for every one of our schools was an important step towards parents understanding the state of their children’s schools. Two decades of underfunding of school repairs by our provincial government has led to an accumulation of a repair backlog of over $4 Billion in the TDSB’s 583 school buildings. Annual provincial funding has increased drastically in recent years, which is excellent but we still need to find funding solutions for the repair backlog that accrued when annual provincial funding was only one-tenth or less of what industry standards suggest it ought to have been to keep our school buildings in a state of good repair.”

So Fix Our Schools asks: if the TDSB can collate data for 583 schools, publish it on 583 websites and update it annually, why can’t all the other school boards in Ontario do it too?

School trustees are elected by us and work for us. Take a moment to attend a ward meeting, shake your trustee’s hand and ask for your school’s repair list. Or, attend a school council meeting and ask your council Chair to request the data from the trustee; it is the public’s data.

As voters, we need to be able to have informed conversation about publicly-owned school buildings and this is a necessary step toward that goal.

Youth Advocacy

March 7, 2018

The youth of Ontario know that their schools are in terrible shape. They dodge buckets of brown water leaking from roofs and sit in classrooms that could never be called ‘room temperature’. They know there is something wrong with the air in some of their classrooms because they feel dizzy or have problems breathing.

As parents, we don’t hear all the details… our children don’t know that school could be any other way. Many parents love their school community and cannot separate it from the building’s condition. We need to realize that school conditions are impacting our children’s learning.


When students contact us, it is often to say that they feel youth are not being heard. At Fix Our Schools we encourage them, giving them tools to advocate for themselves. Teachers can help them learn these skills by discussing issues that students face daily and encouraging them to take action. What is more ‘real world’ than your chipped locker that you face every day?

Ontario curriculum teaches Civics in Grade 10 – why don’t we encourage students to follow the steps through our levels of government to get the boiler replaced at their school, or a new school built in their neighbourhood? Wonder what concerns they have about the condition of their school? Ask. You’ll be surprised.

We ask.. this is what we hear:

Broken Staircases
Broken Railings
Holes in Walls
Freezing Classroom
Paint Peeling
Brown Ceilings
No Wi-Fi
No Stall Doors Left in Washrooms
Water Dripping
Cleanliness of Washrooms
No Computer Access
Lack of Equipment
Classrooms at 40°C
Radiators Falling off Walls
Rusted Bike Racks
Asbestos Wrapped Pipes
“Funny” Air

Is provincial EDC regulation “constitutionally inoperative” and unfair?

February 28, 2018

Since our inception as a campaign in Spring 2014, Fix Our Schools has urged the provincial government to change its outdated regulation regarding eligibility and use of Education Development Charges (EDCs). Over the past four years, the issue of EDCs has surfaced countless times as a possible (albeit partial!) funding solution for the $15.9-billion repair backlog plaguing Ontario’s publicly funded schools.

On February 27, 2018, Gmess of caution street signslobe & Mail reporter Caroline Alphonso reported that the TDSB, Canada’s largest school board, has challenged the Ontario government over the equity of its EDC regulation in an article entitled, “TDSB challenges “unfair” development-charge regulation”.

In its filing to the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, the TDSB pointed out that, while it is obligated under the Education Act to provide “adequate accommodation” to all students who have a right to attend its schools, “the TDSB is not able to adequately plan for and address the accommodation pressures occasioned by that growth.”

Continue reading →