Stacey Cline is careful not to cross between the icy sidewalk and school courtyard as she waits for kindergarten dismissal outside Northlea Elementary and Middle School. Beyond that line, tiny and restless members of TDSB Ward 11 (Don Valley West) swish around in snowpants. As an educational consultant and the only former TDSB teacher running for trustee, Cline knows the rules—candidates aren’t allowed to canvas on school property.

“Hi, did you know there’s a by-election happening for TDSB trustee?” she asks a mom shouldering her daughter’s backpack on their way home. The parent startles, halfway through her mission to retrieve her daughter’s mittens. “I’m running because I think that every kid deserves an equal shot,” Cline continues brightly, introducing herself as an educator and mom with a daughter at a nearby high school. “This is separate from the provincial election.”

The parent sighs warily. “It’s never-ending,” she says.

Cline expects a certain level of exasperation from residents in the centrally-located ward, which spans from Highway 401 to the Don River, enclosed by Yonge and Leslie streets.

In a bitter and partisan by-election last November, constituents voted for Rachel Chernos Lin over right-wing commentator Anthony Furey to replace the late Jaye Robinson as city councillor. Chernos Lin’s subsequent departure from her role as TDSB chair triggered the current by-election for trustee, scheduled for March 3. Doug Ford’s early election call, plus the looming federal election, means the dutiful voter in Don Valley West will have gone to the polls four times in less than a year.

The problem is, dutiful voters are few and far between in regular city elections, let alone in unexpected races for school trustee. “This little by-election will be won by just a few votes,” says Cline, who has endorsements from city councillors Brad Bradford, Mike Colle, and James Pasternak. She’s one of 10 candidates vying to represent the educational interests of a ward cleaved by income and class. Coming off the tail-end of a polarizing city council election, candidates are promising inclusivity while also reevaluating equity programs. They’re hoping to narrow the focus to “core academics” as well as advocate for expanded extracurricular opportunities. How well a candidate sells these conflicting ideas as cohesive policy may decide who scrapes by.

While her platform ranges from cutting back on unnecessary administration to addressing a shortage of special education resources, central to Cline’s messaging is the idea that the TDSB has lost its way. “There’s this perception that it isn’t as good as it used to be,” Cline says, describing her conversations with parents in the ward. “The concept of public education is held in quite high regard, but to be honest, the TDSB itself is not.”

One of the most pressing concerns parents raise is that while the board has grown and changed since their time, its infrastructure hasn’t caught up. Almost half of TDSB schools were built more than 60 years ago. Northern Secondary School, where Cline’s own daughter attends grade 11, was founded nearly a century ago in 1930. “She won’t use the bathrooms at Northern because they’re in terrible shape,” Cline says. And they’re not the only problem—the school is struggling with leaky pipes, spongy floors, broken windows, sometimes unbearable heat, and boilers that need replacing.

Northern isn’t the only school in the ward dealing with crumbling infrastructure, either. The TDSB rates its school buildings using the Facility Condition Index (FCI), where the potential cost of repairs is divided by the replacement value of the building to generate a percentage. Generally, the higher the score, the greater the state of disrepair: buildings which surpass 65 percent are considered to be in “critical” condition. As per data from 2022-2023, three of the four secondary schools in Ward 11 can be labelled as such, with Northern topping the list at a steep 96.6 percent.

“This is purely an issue of funding to get our schools back to a level that they’re clean and functional,” Cline says, pointing to the board’s total renewal needs backlog, estimated at $4.1 billion as of August 2023. With recent provincial cuts to education funding, she thinks the board should be pragmatic with the money they do have. “Teachers are burnt out,” she says, highlighting employee absenteeism as an example. “It’s costing us.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean taking away sick days…it means addressing the reasons as to why they’re absent.”

Diana Goldie, a resident of Don Valley West for more than 30 years, has her own ideas about how the TDSB can address efficiency and accountability. Goldie is a mother of three kids, all of whom completed public schooling in Ward 11, where she spent 12 years leading various school councils. If elected trustee, she aims to return to a “student-focused agenda” which prioritizes safety, extracurricular programming, special education supports, and parental involvement.

It’s part of a “back to basics” approach which emphasizes core subjects and calls into question certain equity-related policy changes made by the TDSB in recent years. For one, Goldie is concerned about lottery-based admissions to specialized schools and programs, such as Etobicoke School of the Arts, which replaced ability-based assessments in 2022. The board voted in favour of the controversial change to remove barriers for underserved communities and ensure a “fair chance of acceptance” for all. “I’m worried about the integrity of these programs,” Goldie says. While she believes diversity, equity, and inclusion are important, Goldie hopes to reevaluate projects like school renaming, which she says would waste valuable resources. In January, a TDSB reference group submitted a report to the board, recommending three schools be renamed due to their namesakes’ ties to colonial history and anti-Indigenous racism.

Cline’s platform also promises a narrower focus on math, literacy and science. “There’s so much programming that’s being focused on in the board about equity,” she says, adding that such initiatives are “extremely important and nothing I would personally oppose.” Yet, she’s heard dissonance from parents, who want to see less “chatter” and a stronger emphasis on core subjects. “This isn’t an anti-equity pitch, but parents need to feel confident that academics are the priority.”

Two by-election contenders emphasize the need for “parental rights”—a buzzword in the recent storm of dissent against gender and inclusion policies in schools. The movement has sparked protests across Canada and ushered in restrictive legislation in other provinces around gender identity and gender-affirming care. Aaron Anderson, who seems to have previously run for Ward 9 trustee in 2022, promises to “abolish all diversity, equity and inclusion programs and policies” on his campaign website. Another candidate, Gus Stefanis, opposes “gender identity theory” and the “false premise” of equity. Stefanis ran for MP in 2019 and 2021 in the riding of Scarborough-Guildwood. He’s listed as the leader of the now-defunct Canadian Nationalist Party, an “overtly neo-Nazi” group, according to the Canadian Anti-Hate Network.