Every morning by 6:15, Rashad Ottley gets to work preparing his school for the arrival of students and staff members, the roughly 120 people who will use the building and its grounds that day.

Ottley, the head caretaker of a small, specialized high school in the Toronto District School Board, will often find two or three people sleeping rough in the parking lot or garden. His first task is to gently rouse them and ask them to clear out before school starts.

Then, he inspects the grounds. People sometimes use the parking lot as a toilet, he says, so he cleans up any messes they leave. On occasion, he finds stray syringes or empty alcohol bottles, and disposes of them. He clears away any broken glass. “That’s where kids play and stuff,” he explained.

Next, he goes inside to open up the building. He surveys all the rooms, and checks in on any tradespeople who have come to work on things like the plumbing or electrical. Then, he sets to work downstairs, using an auto-scrub machine to clean the floors of the gym, the kitchen, and the cafeteria.

By 8 a.m., as most of the teachers arrive, Ottley performs all his mechanical checks, checking the boiler, and flushing the water systems to make sure the water is clean and free of any lead that remains in the fixtures and plumbing of older schools. He also checks the fan room and clears out traps of any clogs and grease. Once the students arrive at 9 a.m., he may have time for a short break, but everyday is unpredictable and some shifts he’s on his feet the entire day: cleaning up graffiti in the washroom, receiving deliveries, fixing door knobs, taking care of a broken window. Ottley puts his heart into his job.

“I have to. Have to,” he said, repeating for emphasis. “I think you have to put a lot of heart into everything you do, because otherwise, what’s the point?”

He takes pride in his work and recognizes how important it is, taking care of a building with all the students and staff members in it.

“Their safety, their health is my responsibility. And the energy in the building is my responsibility,” said Ottley, who greets students by name with a toothy smile as he walks through the corridors.

Ottley is one of more than 2,100 full-time equivalent caretakers at the TDSB, a category of workers whose numbers have gradually declined over time. In 2023-24, the most recent academic year, the board was down more than 150 full-time equivalent caretaking positions from the previous year, according to a TDSB report of its finances.

When it comes to the board’s facility services and planning, of which caretaking is a part, the TDSB’s reported total funding gap—in other words, the difference between the province’s funding and what the board actually spends—was nearly $29 million in 2023-24, up 39.4 percent over five years.

Gradual cuts over many years have left fewer caretakers scrambling to keep schools clean and safe, union representatives say. If schools seem grubbier—if classrooms are dirtier, lunchroom tables stickier, snow isn’t cleared as quickly, and washrooms are messier—it’s because there aren’t enough people to do the job. And while these are arguably the most visible signs, the cuts to caretaking reflect only one aspect of the broader financial shortfalls that Toronto’s public schools are facing.

TDSB Chair Rachel Chernos Lin wrote a letter to then-Education Minister Stephen Lecce in April to call his attention to the budgetary challenges of her board. In it, she emphasized the need for safe and modern learning environments and stated that it is critical for the TDSB to receive adequate funding support.

The Ministry of Education did not respond to The Local’s emails requesting comment on education funding.

If schools seem grubbier—if classrooms are dirtier, lunchroom tables stickier, snow isn’t cleared as quickly, and washrooms are messier—it’s because there aren’t enough people to do the job.

John Weatherup, president of the Toronto Education Workers CUPE Local 4400, estimates that the caretaking staffing levels at Toronto schools have declined by as much as 40 percent since he worked as a school caretaker in the late 1980s.

Back when he held that job, “there was far more staff—way more staff,” said Weatherup, whose union represents caretakers in the TDSB, the Toronto Catholic District School Board, and the French-language Viamonde board. “It was like a different world.”

Now, he said, many Toronto schools have only one or two caretakers working the day shift, yet the use of school buildings and their grounds has only increased.

Since 2010, for example, Ontario schools have been offering full-day kindergarten. Schools also host a variety of community programs, from EarlyON Child and Family Centres to Scouts Canada troops. In addition, there are now more than 200 childcare centres for infants to 4-year-olds operating in TDSB schools, which require a higher standard of cleanliness than, say, a classroom for grade 7 and 8 students.

Weatherup said at each school, his members are responsible for cleaning roughly 40,000 square feet, the equivalent of more than 20 spacious single-detached houses, per night—more square footage than at school boards in any other city in the province.

“The caretakers are getting hammered, right? Because they can’t keep up,” he said. The schools where we send our kids, he noted, simply don’t meet the same standards of cleanliness used for commercial and office buildings. “We meet no standards.”

Glen Amiro, vice-president of CUPE 4400 Unit D, was one of 16 caretakers at a Toronto high school in the mid-90s. That was before the 1998 amalgamation of the City of Toronto, and the merging of its school boards. Today, he said, that same school has 6.5 caretakers.

In addition to the duties Ottley performs on a typical morning, head caretakers working the day shift may also need to inspect playground equipment, remove ice and snow from the grounds, and take care of swimming pools in the schools that have them, Amiro explained. The second shift of the day, the afternoon shift, is when most of the cleaning gets done.

Ageing school buildings that have fallen into disrepair can add to the challenge of keeping them clean and safe. This May, NDP MPP Bhutila Karpoche of Parkdale-High Park sounded the alarm over the state of Toronto public schools when she posted videos and photos on social media of flooded floors and leaks in the roof at Humberside Collegiate Institute after heavy rain. Meanwhile, several parents told The Local their children’s schools were dealing with rodent infestations, from mice scurrying through classrooms to rodents falling through urine-soaked ceiling tiles. The TDSB’s backlog for the roughly 23,500 repairs needed at its schools was last valued at $4.2 billion in March 2023. That backlog is projected to reach close to $5 billion in 2027.

Kate Dupuis, whose children were in senior kindergarten and grade three last year, noticed leaves in their school yard went uncollected last fall, and turned into a squishy mush. One of her children slipped on a mound of uncleared ice, and had to be taken to the hospital—“thank goodness, nothing broken,” she said. Faced with persistent rodents, school staff purchased supposedly rodent-proof bins, where students could safely store their lunches during the day. That didn’t deter the pests, Dupuis said; their droppings were discovered inside the bins. And just before the winter holiday, her youngest’s kindergarten class, with its high-touch surfaces, was plagued by recurring bouts of conjunctivitis, or pinkeye. “It just kept going round and round,” Dupuis said.

The schools where we send our kids simply don’t meet the same standards of cleanliness used for commercial and office buildings.

Andrea Thompson, chair of the school council at Wedgewood Junior School, where her two children go, said that in addition to a “rampant rodent issue,” the school is also overcrowded, with hundreds of students, from junior kindergarten to grade 5, tracking in slush over the winters. (In 2022, the official count was 507 students at the school.) Toilets constantly overflow or fail to flush, she said. “As a developed nation, the bottom line should be that schools are safe, hygienic learning and working environments,” Thompson said.

As caretakers work harder to keep up, Amiro worries they face greater risk of burnout and workplace injury.

“The human body only takes so much over time, and you can get away with that for a while, but eventually it starts to break down,” he said. “It becomes a negative feedback loop. It’s only going to lead to more accidents, more illnesses, people are going to be forced to take more sick leave, which will then create work, and then we’re into that vicious cycle.”