When the province took over some of Ontario’s largest school boards last June, it vowed to restore financial stability and rein in what it characterized as out-of-control spending. Yet more than eight months in, there’s little evidence its supervisors have put these boards on firmer footing.
The Ministry of Education has now taken over an unprecedented seven school boards across the province. In the GTA, these include the Toronto Catholic District School Board, the Toronto District School Board, the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board, and most recently, the Peel District School Board. The ministry has also threatened to take over the York Catholic District School Board, but as of March 3, it has not done so.
The stated reasons for most of these takeovers were allegations of financial mismanagement. (An exception is the Near North District School Board, which the ministry declared it was taking over because of “deep-rooted dysfunction and mismanagement that have eroded public confidence.”)
Critics have viewed these allegations as a pretext to allow the government to assert its power over the boards. And so far, the decisions of the supervisors—at least, the ones that have been made public—do not appear to have significantly changed the financial picture of their boards.
At the Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB), for example, only three documents have been posted on the board’s website under the heading, “Supervisor’s Decisions and Directions,” as of March 3. These documents contain mostly decisions to receive or approve staff reports and recommendations, like an advisory committee report or revisions to the board’s occupational health and safety policy.
“We haven’t seen any major cuts or reductions. And if they are being considered, or if they are being made, they’re not being reported to the public,” said Kevin Morrison, one of the TCDSB’s 12 trustees whose roles have been drastically diminished under supervision. (While trustees at the public boards have been entirely stripped of their duties, Catholic board trustees have been retained, but their jobs have been limited to providing input on matters of denominational rights, at the supervisor’s discretion.)
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The only thing Morrison noted that could be considered a cut is Supervisor Frank Benedetto’s decision to cancel the installation of air conditioning at the new Buttonwood Elementary School, claiming a savings of $2 million—a tiny sum compared with the board’s total annual budget of $1.35 billion. The decision has since been reversed without any explanation.
At the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), Supervisor Rohit Gupta also does not appear to have made a significant dent to that board’s bottom line. Among the changes at the board under his supervision: a principal was reinstated at Rosedale Heights School of the Arts, the board ended its controversial lottery system for specialty high school admissions, and Gupta cancelled the renaming of schools named after colonialist historical figures. The board also replaced its director of education, Clayton La Touche, and reportedly lifted a cap on class sizes for grades four to eight. If the latter results in any savings, it’s unlikely they would significantly narrow the TDSB’s funding gap, which in 2024/25 was more than $173 million.
At a January meeting of the TDSB’s special education advisory committee, the board’s executive officer of finance Craig Snider confirmed that Gupta hasn’t made any cuts or secured any additional funding for the board since he assumed supervision.
“Both [the] budget and the revenue have stayed the same,” Snider said. Supervisors at the TDSB and TCDSB declined The Local’s earlier requests for interviews and referred all questions to the ministry. The ministry has not responded to any of our requests.
The fact that supervisors have not found easy savings is a sign, critics say, that the problem is not about how boards have been spending, but about their revenue. Even though the supervisors are tasked with restoring financial stability to their assigned boards, they’d be hard pressed to actually make any headway without a long-overdue overhaul of the province’s education funding formula.
For decades, there have been numerous calls—from a government-appointed independent task force, policy researchers, the Auditor General of Ontario, and teachers’ unions—for the province to thoroughly review and update its funding formula, which determines how much money Ontario’s 72 school boards get each year.
That’s now become more urgent than ever, as a broken and outdated formula has magnified the Ford government’s underfunding of education over the past seven-plus years, said David Mastin, president of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario. He noted that since 2018, Ontario’s school boards have faced an estimated accumulated funding gap of $6.35 billion—in other words, they’re getting that much less than they would have if provincial funding had kept up with inflation and changes in enrolment.
“School boards are trying to manage quality delivery of public education in each of their jurisdictions with not enough money to do it,” Mastin said. “And so they’re being forced to make decisions that are untenable.”
The biggest indicator of whether a board is struggling doesn’t appear to be related to specific instances of poor management, but something far simpler: size. Of the eight largest boards in Ontario, six are now under provincial supervision.
An analysis by The Local shows these big boards also receive among the lowest levels of provincial funding per pupil. The largest board, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), for example, which has close to a quarter of a million students, received $14,650 per student in what’s called “Core Education Funding” (formerly “Grants for Student Needs”) in 2025/26. That funding makes up more than 90 percent of the board’s revenues.
By comparison, one of the smallest boards in the province, Conseil scolaire de district catholique des Aurores boréales, which had 841 students, received the highest amount per pupil in Core Education Funding at $37,501.
This variance in funding was highlighted in a 2023 report by the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario, which found smaller boards receive more per-student funding than the larger ones and, on average, the French-system school boards tended to receive more per student than the English-system boards.
That’s because provincial grants are designed to level the playing field, providing extra funding to school boards with lower enrolment, those with schools that are far apart from one another, are far from an urban centre, and provide French-language instruction, the report explained.
Yet according to The Local’s analysis, the smaller boards receiving the highest per-student funding are also the ones with the biggest reserves, or accumulated surpluses. In other words, they’re spending less than the government doles out to them. Meanwhile, those with the lowest per-student funding tend to have the smallest reserves, and some are in the red—meaning their expenditures have been exceeding their funding.
Over time, the number of boards slipping into annual deficits and accumulated deficits has grown.
According to the Financial Accountability Office’s report, 15 of the 72 school boards recorded an annual deficit in 2021/22. (With certain exceptions, school boards are required to balance their budgets under the Education Act.) That same year, only one board, the TDSB, had an accumulated deficit.
By March 2025, however, documents from the Ministry of Education obtained through a freedom of information request stated that 32 school boards, or 44 percent of all school boards in the province, faced an annual deficit in 2024/25.
“What is happening is school boards are increasingly going into deficits,” TCDSB Trustee Markus de Domenico said. “It’s coming to a moment where you just run out of runway and you run out of your reserve.”
The provincial government has repeatedly emphasized that it is making record-breaking investments in public education, and Minister Calandra has blamed school boards for misspending. But when adjusted for inflation and changes in enrolment, school boards, on average, received $260 less per student in 2024/25 than they did in 2018/19, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
The current financial crisis—characterized by multiple boards in deficit, which the think tank said was likely caused by chronic underfunding and cumulative funding gaps—has been years in the making, the Centre said in its analysis last May. It noted that this problem is related to what it called “structural flaws” in the funding formula.
Many of these flaws have been widely recognized since the early days of the funding formula, first introduced by the Mike Harris government in 1997. Economist Hugh Mackenzie examined them in detail in a 2017 report for the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, noting that from the outset, the formula was designed to cut operational education spending by hundreds of millions of dollars. In his report, Mackenzie pointed out that the formula provided funding that was well below school boards’ actual costs, including inadequate funding to employ enough teachers to meet basic class size standards, and for special education.
In spite of the recommendations of a 2002 task force to comprehensively review the funding formula every five years, and subsequent calls to do so, including from the Office of the Auditor General of Ontario, the formula has not been fully reviewed in more than 20 years.
Boards like the TCDSB and TDSB continue to face large funding gaps, particularly for special education and staff salaries and benefits.
To Mastin, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario president, the fundamental problem with the formula lies in the fact that it is not based on actual student needs.
“It’s based on this top-down approach that, you know, someone in a leather chair in Queen’s Park has determined: ‘This is how much we’re going to give to education as a whole. Now make it work,’” Mastin said.
Bringing in supervisors won’t fix that fundamental problem, he said. Their expertise is in finance, not education, and their salaries are taken out of school board budgets. According to Global News, they can bill the local boards up to $350,000 a year.
Most importantly, Mastin said, “They’re not people that are dealing with human beings and four-year-olds and six-year-olds and 12-year-olds who have genuine needs.”
Students themselves—the ones affected most—say they’re being shut out of the decision-making process under supervision.
At a press conference in February, TDSB student trustee Ahnaaf Hassan told reporters that he was elected to represent that board’s quarter of a million students, from kindergarten to grade 12. But after months of emailing his board’s supervisor and director of education, Hassan, a grade 12 student at R.H. King Academy, said he was only able to secure a meeting with the latter.
“I was refused any contact or any meeting with the supervisor at all,” he said.
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SupportAs spring approaches, a time when boards normally hold public debates about next year’s budget, the silence from the ministry-appointed supervisors is jarring.
“There are no board meetings. There is no public discussion. The supervisor has the ability, with the authority from the Minister of Education, with the stroke of the pen, to do whatever they want,” said de Domenico, the TCDSB trustee.
And if that supervisor wants to make cuts to the board or seek more funding for 2026/27, de Domenico said, “Nobody knows.”
The only way members of the public will have a chance to see the budget, if at all, he predicted, will be if they manage to find it posted somewhere on the TCDSB website.
For his part, Calandra has insisted he is acting on behalf of students.
“Our responsibility is to do everything possible to boost student success. Students deserve better, and we must do better,” he said at a press conference in December, during which he announced he was appointing a new advisory body, some of whose members will be paid $1,500 a day, to “review how Ontario supports student learning,” including examining Ontario’s curriculum.
When asked about the need for more funding for the boards, Calandra acknowledged that the clash between the ministry and unions—in which the minister announces increases in funding and the unions say more money is needed—has been playing out for decades. But he suggested parents and teachers are uninterested in that dispute. “In the final analysis, I don’t think parents care. I know teachers, when I’ve talked to them, just say, ‘Give us better resources to teach,’” he said.
Calandra said he was “not going to shy away from making changes to the educational system,” and was looking at both the governance model and the funding formula. Although he has said he is considering the possibility of getting rid of trustees, he indicated he would provide more clarity about the direction he intends to take after legislature resumes. Members of provincial parliament are scheduled to return to Queen’s Park on March 23, after a 14-week winter break.
In the meantime, the absence of any major financial changes under supervision strengthens critics’ belief that the school board takeovers were never about tackling misspending.
“It’s about centralizing power with the provincial government, and wanting to remove opportunities for people to elect a local representative who understands local context,” said Marianne Larsen, an elected trustee at the Thames Valley District School Board and professor emerita in the faculty of education at Western University.
The Thames Valley District School Board, the first board Calandra placed under supervision in April, after reports that senior board officials used board funds for a retreat in Toronto where they stayed at a hotel inside the Rogers Centre baseball stadium.
The government is using that controversy and others—like a costly trip to Italy by trustees at the Brant Haldimand Norfolk Catholic District School Board—as examples to make its case for reform, Larsen said.
But eliminating elected trustees won’t fix the crisis in public education, she said; it won’t solve the underfunding of special education or eliminate school board deficits. Instead, she said, “What you will eliminate is people advocating for increased funding.”
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