Over the past year, the Ontario government has repeatedly accused school boards of financial mismanagement. The Minister of Education then took over eight boards, appointing generously paid supervisors to replace trustees and run boards with an iron fist. These eight boards have a combined enrolment of 733,000, or 36 per cent of all students in the province.
The allegations justifying the takeover have not been backed by hard numbers. Yes, schools across the province are facing financial challenges—any educator or parent will tell you that. But is mismanagement really the problem?
The CCPA closely monitors education funding in Ontario, using hard numbers, and we have a different explanation. Our analyses show that, year after year, schools have been asked to do more with less; we have now reached a breaking point, where the holes in the foundation are literally visible.
The Core Education Funding figures released yesterday further support our stance, regretfully.
This year’s per-pupil funding, once adjusted for inflation, falls slightly below last year’s level and $180 below what it was in the 2018-19 school year. In a school system with more than two million students, every cut adds to substantial budget shortfalls. In 2016-27, the Ontario government will spend almost $362 million less on Ontario’s schools than it did in 2018-19, in real dollars. We continue to move backward.
The other problem with funding cuts is that they add up. Some funding cuts simply mean that students miss opportunities they will never get back. Other cuts create financial pressures on future years: waitlists for special education supports continue to grow, in-class resources are never restocked, leaks in the roof are never fixed, the anti-racism programs continue to be kicked down the road for the next year, as do additional supports for students from lower-income families, whose allocated funds are diverted to other priorities. The list is long.
You can take from Peter to pay Paul only so many times.
The accumulated shortfall for Ontario schools since 2018-19 is now at a whopping $6.4 billion. This is the total amount that Ontario’s school boards have lost compared to what they would have received if their funding had kept pace with enrolment and inflation over the past eight years, assuming no additional funding injection in the next school year.
The supervisors of the eight school boards under provincial supervision will have to face these impacts of budget shortfalls.
As the charts below show, all eight boards have been deprived of considerable amounts of funding in the past years: $950 million in the Toronto District School Board, $290 million in the Toronto Catholic District School Board, $266 million in the Peel District School Board, $347 million in the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, $123 million in the York Catholic District School Board, $235 million in the Thames Valley District School Board, $221 million in the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board, and $22 million in the Near North District School Board. The amount varies by board size, but most shortfalls represent between 20 and 30 per cent of a year’s funding.
These sizable cumulative budget shortfalls are a much more credible explanation of the financial challenges schools and boards are facing than allegations of mismanagement, which have not been backed with evidence. Regretfully, this year’s school board allocations are not reversing the trend that got us into this mess.
Notes on method
- The Ministry of Education has not released the actuals for 2022-23 and 2023-24; this analysis uses the revised estimates for those years.
- All years exclude debt service and one-time pandemic-related funding, no longer part of the Core Education Funding.
- In previous analyses, I excluded unjustifiably large planning provisions, but since the amounts are now back at reasonable levels, they are included.
