Parents of students with disabilities are warning that the removal of school board trustees is making it even more difficult to advocate for students with special learning needs within the public school system. Back in June, Education Minister Paul Calandra seized control of four school boards, including the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), and appointed supervisors to address alleged financial mismanagement. Speaking at Queen’s Park Monday, a group of parents of students with special learning needs said the change has made it more difficult to get help for kids when there are problems. “For years now, parents of students with disabilities have been stuck in the middle of conflicting messages,” said Julia Evangelisto, co-founder of Ontario Parents for Education Support. “School boards say the province isn’t giving enough money to meet the needs of students with disabilities. The province says boards are getting more than ever, and families like ours, we’re standing in the crossfire, forced to fight for our kids’ basic rights – an education that meets their needs – while schools are left trying to fill the gaps they were never built to handle.” Bruce McIntosh, a board member and founding president of the Ontario Autism Coalition, said trustees have frequently been called on to help address problems where students with special needs have fallen through the cracks. “The minister is now in a position of micromanaging school boards, and he has far more authority to direct action in schools than elected trustees ever had,” McIntosh said. Saying Calandra has now become “Ontario’s uber trustee” for all the boards under supervision, McIntosh said the advocates have started a new campaign telling anyone with a suspended trustee “you better call Paul,” a play on the Breaking Bad spinoff about a wheeling and dealing lawyer. “Now we call on parents of students with disabilities who need help for their child at school to call or email Ontario’s super trustee Education Minister Paul Calandra,” McIntosh said. “You better call Paul. Tell him how your school is not meeting your child’s disability related learning needs. Tell him what to order your school board to do to fix this. Better call Paul.” In a statement, Calandra’s office insisted the changes are in fact about improving the system and said the province has increased special education funding by 36 per cent over the past seven years and has hired more than 4,000 additional education assistants since 2018. “The decision to place school boards under supervision was not only about financial mismanagement, but about restoring accountability and trust in the system. Trustees repeatedly failed to listen to parents and communities, focusing on their own interests instead of student success, as seen in the flawed TDSB lottery and the Elementary Review Program at the OCDSB,” the statement read. “We will continue to put parents and students at the center of the education system to ensure resources go directly into classrooms to help students succeed and make it easier for parents to get clear answers and support.” But the group said the issue of resources is separate from representation. Evangelisto said there is no one within the school system tasked with advocating for students with special learning needs. Without trustees, she said, there is nobody parents can turn to, to intervene when there are problems that can’t be resolved with frontline school staff. “Within the structure of the school boards, parents take that on themselves and build community around each other,” she said. “That’s how the Ontario Autism Coalition came about. That’s how my group, Ontario Parents For Education Support, came about. We are on islands all by ourselves, trying to navigate this system in a storm around us, and we don’t know where we’re going.” David Lepofsky, who chairs the TDSB’s Special Education Advisory Committee, said the TDSB serves 40,000 students with disabilities and special education needs. “That’s more kids than some school boards have in total,” he said. “That is an incredible, incredible opportunity for the rest of Ontario to learn what they might be in for if there are no longer any elected trustees to provide public, independent oversight of what the education bureaucracy is doing with their kids and with our tax money.” He said the TDSB’s Special Education Advisory Committee has provided important feedback to school board officials via “lively, fulsome, frankly intelligent and thoughtful discussions with staff.” “We don’t always agree, but we put our advice forward, and then we could take it to the trustees.” He cited a recent decision by the ministry to ban school boards from live-streaming meetings as evidence that they simply want to stifle dissent. “You (historically) can go to a meeting of the entire board of trustees and make a delegation in public, often monitored by the media and live streamed, and you could then take that video and use it to try to advocate publicly to make things better. All gone.”
