Provincial Funding Versus TDSB Spending

The provincial government has repeatedly touted its record-breaking investments in education. And the 2025 Ontario budget, released last week, indeed showed the province’s base spending on education increasing to $41 billion in 2025-26, up from more than $38 billion this year and $37 billion in 2023-24. In the budget, the province also said it would invest $55.8 million to train 2,600 new teachers by 2027.

If you break down how much school boards get to fund their operations, however, the view is less rosy. More than 90 percent of the TDSB’s revenue comes from the Ministry of Education through what’s called Core Education funding, which is based on enrollment numbers. (Core Education funding for the 2025-26 school year is not yet available, but expected to be released soon). When adjusted for inflation, that funding per student in Ontario has actually declined by an estimated $1,500 between the 2018-19 and 2024-25 school years, according to analysis of early data by Ricardo Tranjan, senior researcher at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. At the TDSB, that decline was less dramatic, but still amounted to an estimated $794 less per student.

When funding does not keep up with inflation, Tranjan said, school boards are asked to do the same with less. As a result, he said, “they have been stretching the money, stretching the money, stretching the money. But at some point, it’s just not possible to make ends meet.”

As the largest board, the TDSB may be among the first in the province to reach this point, Tranjan said, but a look at the other 71 boards in Ontario suggests they are struggling financially, too.

“It might be just a matter of time for them to be in a very similar position where they cannot make ends meet,” he said.

Teaching Staff

Staff salaries and benefits are the TDSB’s biggest expense, making up more than 80 percent of the board’s total budget. Statutory benefits, in particular—that is, benefits for which employers are required by law to pay on behalf of their employees—make up a substantial portion of spending that is not within the board’s control.

Over the years, the cost of these statutory benefits, which include the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and Employment Insurance (EI), have continued to rise, while the amount the board receives from the province to pay for them has not increased, explained Stacey Zucker, one of the board’s associate directors, at a TDSB budget town hall in April.

According to the TDSB’s 2024-25 financial facts report, the unfunded costs of CPP and EI were $39 million and $4.7 million higher, respectively, than they were six years ago. The unfunded cost of long-term disability benefits were $19.5 million higher.

Special Education

Of the 72 school boards in the province, 71 of them, including the TDSB, spend more on special education than is funded by the province, according to TDSB Trustee Michelle Aarts of Ward 16, Beaches-East York, who sits on the board’s special education advisory committee.

The reason? “The funding is not in touch with the realities of meeting student needs,” she said.

Instead of funding special education based on what individual students or schools require, the bulk of special education funding is based on a percentage of student enrollment and a formula based on statistical estimates.

One way that the TDSB ends up spending more than it’s funded is by subsidizing smaller classes when there aren’t enough students to reach the Ministry’s caps on class sizes, Aarts explained. For example, the funding may cover the costs for one teacher for every nine students, in line with the Ministry’s cap on special education classes for those with developmental delays. But the number of students with developmental delays in a given area can’t always be divided neatly into classes of nine. Therefore, the board may need to create more, and smaller, classes to accommodate students, or bus them across great distances to attend another school, Aarts said.

The TDSB also has programs for students with complex medical needs and complex special needs, including in hospital settings and self-contained special education schools that don’t exist at other school boards, Aarts said. Students with complex needs may need multiple staff members with multiple specializations, including nursing training, to teach and take care of them over the course of a school day. While the TDSB can apply for additional funding for these students through a grant called the Special Incidence Portion, or SIP, the amount it receives is about $30,000 per student, while the actual cost to serve them is about $100,000 per student, Aarts said.

Administration and Governance

In addressing the Legislative Assembly during the May 1 question period, Calandra railed against what he described as the TDSB’s “record number of superintendents who are littered all over the Sunshine List.” (He did not mention that the Sunshine List has grown longer in general, as the earnings threshold to make it on the list, at $100,000, has remained unchanged since 1996. The list also included an increase in public sector employees, who received retroactive payments after the province agreed to reverse Bill 124, which capped wage increases.) Calandra accused the TDSB and its trustees of protecting themselves at the expense of students and teachers.

In fact, central administration costs are a small fraction of the TDSB’s overall budget. In her presentation to the board’s budget meeting in April, associate director Zucker said spending on administration makes up just 2.4 percent of the TDSB’s total expenditures. (For comparison, administration and general expenses made up 6 percent of the total operating expenses of Ontario’s publicly-funded universities in 2022-23, according to the Council of Ontario Universities.)

Many of the costs that come with administration cuts aren’t necessarily visible, but they do end up affecting students, Trustee Aarts explained. When the board reduces central staff members, the work they do gets passed down to teachers, principals, and vice-principals, whose focus should be on student learning and achievement.

Over the past five years, the TDSB has cut 90 central staffing positions, amounting to $10.9 million, Aarts said. Over the same period, it also made $8 million in reductions to other central budgets.

Aarts said the TDSB’s school superintendents are each responsible for 26 schools on average, compared with superintendents at other boards who each have 20 schools. She added that the board has about 10 percent fewer senior staff, and 30 percent fewer superintendents than other boards.

Pools

One area where the TDSB is considering cuts is school pools. Pools are among the expenditures over which the TDSB has control, unlike statutory benefits for employees, for example. Pools, like general interest courses, also fall outside of what the Ministry considers to be kindergarten to grade 12 education, and the Ministry does not provide funding for them. The Ministry expects the board to be able to fully cover the cost of operating them.

The TDSB has 66 pools, and receives revenue for the use of many of them after school hours from various lease agreements and permit fees.

According to a report from board staff on options to balance the 2025-26 budget, the lease revenue for these pools is projected to be $6.1 million for 2024-25, and permit fees are projected to be $3.5 million. Meanwhile, the financial cost of operating the 66 pools for the year, including water treatment, utilities, additional caretaking, and general maintenance, is projected to be almost double that, at $17.2 million. In delegations to the TDSB’s finance, budget, and enrolment committee this spring, some private swim company owners suggested the board could increase its revenues through various ways, like offering leases to private companies, similar to the board’s lease agreements with the City of Toronto, and increasing permit fees for pool use.

The TDSB also employs 86 full-time equivalent swim instructors, which costs $5.7 million a year—and those numbers would need to increase substantially next year to comply with changing requirements. Among its recommendations, the report suggested closing 35 pools that are not leased on a cost-recovery basis.

Closing pools is a highly unpopular proposal, one that Minister Calandra criticized in question period. And the board is still looking at options to recover its costs without doing so. But the report said its recommendations, which include shutting down the 35 pools, are projected to save the TDSB $12.8 million, which would allow the board to edge a little closer to reducing its projected deficit of $58 million for 2025-26.

Putting Funding into Context