Sandra Chong sees her colleagues and friends struggling at work in the public education system. They’re overwhelmed, burnt out, and languishing professionally.

“Lots of really strong, powerful, wonderful, dedicated teachers that I’ve known for a long, long time, they’re not okay,” she said. “They’re beyond spent.”

As a vice-principal in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), Chong believes that helping re-energize her colleagues is one of the most important parts of her job. It’s her role to provide “instructional leadership,” she explained—that is, to support, invigorate, and inspire teachers, especially those who have lost their spark.

But in practice, Chong, who is using a pseudonym because she was not authorized by the TDSB to speak to the media, has found she has very little time for that. Chong became a vice-principal in early 2023, and has only worked part-time as an administrator during her first year-and-a-half on the job. (A lot of vice-principal positions in the board are only half-time roles, she explained.) During the last school year, she was also a part-time teacher, providing prep coverage and working as a resource teacher, supporting students in small groups. In her teaching role, she’d teach one kindergarten class every day.

When working as an administrator last year, she dealt with one crisis after another, triaging them as they arose. Often, that would include figuring out staffing allocations for the day, divvying up responsibilities, and rearranging schedules whenever the school was down a staff member or lunch-time supervisor, and trying to make sure teachers got adequate “prep time,” or time during the school day when they could plan lessons, mark assignments, and do other preparatory work. It also meant walking children to class if they were struggling with self-regulation; investigating and responding to incidents that were sometimes started by students, sometimes by teachers; helping teachers access resources for students; reviewing special education documents, like Individual Education Plans, or IEPs, for students needing tailored instruction; and calling, emailing, and meeting with parents.

To try to stay on top of all her tasks, she frequently worked long beyond normal working  hours.

Don’t get her wrong, Chong said; she loves the job and had no illusions about how challenging it would be. “I knew what I was getting into. Do I have any regrets? On the occasional day, yes,” she admitted. If only her school, and the public education system in general, were better funded, and better staffed, she said. “I have a whole list of things that would make things better for everyone.”

Principals and vice-principals have a bird’s-eye view of the problems in the current school system. They’re also the people at the end of a chain of school staff, the people who feel the knock-on effects of a thousand tiny inadequacies. If there aren’t enough early childhood educators in kindergarten; if the school is short on lunchtime supervisors; if there are no special needs assistants or child and youth workers for teachers to call on to manage students with behavioural challenges; if staff members are constantly calling in sick because they’re burnt out, there’s only one fallback solution—call the office. The people in the office, however, say they’re overextended, too. Instead of steering the ship, they spend most of their days plugging the thousand leaks that spring up each day.

It’s an unsustainable situation, they say.

“You have to hope that you have enough leaders to keep the system going,” Chong said, noting she’s personally not disillusioned herself. “But, you know, ask me in eight years.”

The number of principals and vice-principals at the TDSB has fluctuated between around 890 and 940 full-time equivalent positions within the past five years. According to the TDSB’s most recent report summarizing its financials, there were 891 full-time equivalent administrators in the 2023-24 school year, a decline of 2.2 percent from 2019-20. That’s in line with a similar decline in student enrolment and teaching staff numbers within that period—2.9 percent and 2.7 percent respectively. But according to interviews with educators, parents, and advocates of public education, these headcounts don’t adequately capture the fact that the needs of students are growing beyond what schools are able to handle. There aren’t enough people—from early childhood educators and learning coaches to office support staff and lunchtime supervisors—to support teachers and administrators. And when they tap out, there aren’t enough people to fill in for them. The annual funding gap for principals and vice-principals—that is, the difference between how much the TDSB receives from the province and what it actually spends—was nearly $27.5 million. That represents just a fraction of the board’s overall funding gap in 2023-24 of $201 million.

Instead of steering the ship, they spend most of their days plugging the thousand leaks that spring up each day.

TDSB trustee Matias de Dovitiis said the board has made significant investments in order to boost the number of vice-principals in schools, but it’s not enough. Some schools in his board have as many as 500 to 600 students, and only one principal—no vice-principal, he said. (According to the TDSB, elementary vice-principals are allocated based on a points-based method that accounts for not just the number of students at a school, but other factors, such as the head count and projected enrolment in grade 7 and 8, French immersion, and gifted and non-gifted intensive support programs. All allocations are finalized through local decision-making—that is, by executive superintendents and other staff and officials.)

School administrators “meet with people, they plan, and they make more efficient use of resources,” de Dovitiis said. When an administrator is overstretched, it makes it much more difficult for parents to get assistance for their children, for teachers to get support, and there’s less time for them to devote to hiring new staff and improving their school, he said. In short: “That school is not going to do as well.”

The Ministry of Education did not respond to emails seeking comment from The Local.

If the results of a recent Ontario-wide survey are any indication, many of these principals and vice-principals are, indeed, stretched precariously thin. The survey, conducted by the polling firm Abacus Data on behalf of three associations representing Ontario’s public school administrators, revealed 99 percent of the more than 3,700 principals and vice-principals who responded said their workload had increased since 2019, and 97 percent said their workload was unmanageable. More than three quarters of the respondents said the level of violence in schools was on the rise, and 70 percent felt their school board didn’t value them.

Ominously, 72 percent said they would be able to retire within five years.

Stéphanie Sampson is president of the Association des directions et directions adjointes des écoles franco-ontariennes (ADFO), one of the province’s three public school administrators’ associations that commissioned the survey.

The reasons why nearly all principals and vice-principals in the province’s public education system are struggling with overwork are complex, Sampson said, in part, because their roles are actually very hard to define. Sure, the Education Act outlines their duties, including maintaining proper order and discipline in the school, ensuring cooperation among the staff, keeping student records, and preparing timetables. But in reality, the job involves much more, encompassing everything that’s necessary for a school to run smoothly, Sampson said.

The most prominent spike in their workloads occurred during the early stage of the COVID pandemic, when principals and vice-principals suddenly had to coordinate remote and hybrid learning, as well as take on public health responsibilities, such as contact-tracing and overseeing sanitation and safety measures. Today, they’re dealing with the after-effects, including students’ learning loss, staff shortages that have been exacerbated by the pandemic, as well as mental health issues—not only among students, but parents, teachers, and administrators themselves. The Abacus Data survey revealed 65 percent of principals and vice-principals said they had accessed mental health services.

No child goes to school with the intention of causing trouble and getting sent home, especially not the very little ones. Chong, the school administrator, firmly believes this.

She also believes that sending students home for acting up is not the solution. “Because they’re entitled to their education, right?” she said.

Sure, there may be times when a school needs to call parents to come in and help calm their child, or even to take them outside for half an hour to reset before bringing them back again, she said. But sending them home doesn’t get to the root of the problem.

Chong recognizes that what she believes isn’t what actually happens across the education system, though. Exhausted teachers and administrators may lack the time, patience, or know-how to deal with students who act up. She’s been on the receiving end of school calls herself to pick up one of her children from kindergarten—a situation that would require either having to call her in-laws, have her husband take unpaid time off work, or take time off work herself.

99 percent of the more than 3,700 principals and vice-principals who responded said their workload had increased since 2019, and 97 percent said their workload was unmanageable.

Relationships are instrumental in helping students through behavioural issues, Sampson said; students need to have an adult they can trust, in whom they can confide, and who will have their backs. Ideally, when students have behavioural issues or act violently, they will have someone at their school with whom they have that kind of supportive relationship, who can step in, defuse the situation, and calm them down enough to be able to discuss what went wrong and how to move forward. Even more ideally, school staff members would be able to intervene before any violence erupts.

Amid shortages of staff, however, students are constantly having to adapt to new, perhaps unqualified, adults at their school, which Sampson said exacerbates the rising levels of violence that principals and vice-principals reported in the survey. Frequently these days, those unqualified adults aren’t just teachers who haven’t completed their training, but somebody’s grandmother or uncle or neighbour who has agreed to come in to keep classes open, she said.

“If we have less adults within the school, we’re responding not only less effectively, but maybe not as quickly as necessary,” she said.

TDSB trustee Sara Ehrhardt said a significant reduction in lunch-time supervisors, which she said is driven by a lack of funding, means principals and vice-principals are often doing the job of lunch-time supervisors, as well. (Today, the ratio of lunch-time supervisors to students is one per 100, according to John Weatherup, president of the Toronto Education Workers CUPE Local 4400. When he worked as a lunchroom supervisor in the late 1980s, he said, it was one per 25.)

“Principals and vice-principals are needing to patch all the holes due to provincial underfunding,” Ehrhardt said.

On top of it all, principals and vice-principals are constantly having new initiatives thrust upon them that they need to carry out. It’s not that they dispute the necessity of curriculum revisions to adapt to the current social environment, or of the province’s ban on cellphone use in classrooms and its crackdown on vaping, for example, Sampson said. But implementing these initiatives requires additional protocols in schools, ensuring everyone’s on the same page, holding meetings to make sure new rules are followed, and dealing with any backlash from students. “It just seems like constant additional workload,” she said.

Politically, a critical problem when it comes to education funding is that it’s difficult for governments to get any credit for fixing messes left by their predecessors, said Hugh Mackenzie, a long-time researcher of education funding in Ontario.

“It’s much more attractive to do something new,” he said. That could explain why the province appeared to have no hesitation announcing it’s investing $30 million in its 2024 budget to install vape detectors and other security upgrades in schools. But there seems to be considerably less political interest from various governments over the years to make fundamental changes to Ontario’s education funding model.