Nora Green was still fuming on a Tuesday afternoon in November. The previous night, she had attended a quietly explosive meeting of the Toronto District School Board’s Special Education Advisory Committee. She’d left shaking her head in restrained outrage.

Green is a long-serving member of the committee, a group made up of elected school trustees (that is, until the province took over the board in June), and volunteer representatives with an interest in special education. She represents the non-profit Inclusion Action in Ontario. Her silver bob, round glasses, and gentle exterior disguise a resilient core.

For nearly 20 years, she has sat across from board staff at the committee’s monthly meetings, advising them on how to make improvements to serve the more than 41,000 students with disabilities and other special education needs at the board. Progress, she’s found, has been frustratingly slow. Now, laid bare during their Nov. 10 meeting, tension between the two sides—the volunteer members of the committee on the one hand, and the school board staff on the other—had reached what felt to her like a breaking point.

“There’s been a lot of labour over two decades to accomplish what?” Green said. Students today still find themselves in the same situation and facing the same barriers that her own son experienced when he was in elementary school, she explained. He’s now 25.

“I don’t even know what the point is of coming together anymore,” she said. “It’s quite clear they don’t listen to us.”

The Nov. 10 meeting had started off like many others—a land acknowledgement, a report from the chair, a parent delegation, a presentation by staff.

But the tone in the room seemed to shift after Lepofsky turned to the question of special education staffing allocations. He brought up a scenario frequently raised by parents. What happens, he asked, when families believe their children need more support than they’re getting, but their principal tells them it can’t be done?

Over several minutes, Nandy Palmer, the TDSB’s executive superintendent of special education programs, who is a fixture at these committee meetings, responded. She listed off the various professionals at the board, discussed its “needs model,” and explained that support can take many forms, including bringing in central teams to work with classrooms. “I want to be very clear that at no point should school principals be saying to a parent, ‘I’m sorry I can’t support your child here,’” she said.

Her explanation did not appear to provide a satisfying answer.

Committee member Latoya Aldridge conceded that some people within the TDSB were making genuine efforts. But even so, she insisted, there are families who’re being told that their school doesn’t have the funding for special education staff for their children. “So how are we addressing those situations? And how are we recognizing…that is occurring?”

“Every school has special education supports,” Palmer replied, repeating that if families are being told there isn’t help available for their children, “no principal should be saying that.”

“What you end up with is the dictatorship of the senior bureaucracy.”

For many in the room, the response seemed to typify a frustratingly bureaucratic response to the issue, one that refused to address the reality families say they’re facing.

When Aldridge pressed further, Palmer, ever-professional, responded with what sounded like the slightest hint of exasperation: “So as always, please let us know if someone’s coming to you [with that complaint] so that we can take a look at it.”

“I want to be really clear, too,” the executive superintendent continued, that families may feel their child needs certain support, but “then we do the assessments, we go in and we do the observations, and so forth, and the school communicates what the student actually does need.”

After a prickly back-and-forth between committee members and Palmer, Lepofsky brought the meeting to another subject: the request to host a second town hall.

For months, he had been making this request, he said, but was told that staff were too busy working on a special education review. Since staff informed the committee that this review is now on hold, Lepofsky said he wished to make his request again.

La Touche, the TDSB’s education director, however, demurred. He spoke at length in a calm, halting voice. He appreciated the effort that went into the last town hall, and the feedback from participants, he said, but his answer was no—or at least not now. Efforts instead should focus on implementing a special education action plan.

“Certainly open to considering a town hall at some point,” he said, “but I think not at this time.”

Several committee members balked.

“I really can’t tolerate fake—and I’m not saying you’re being fake directly,” committee member Bronwen Alsop said. But, she said, to deny a town hall, a vital forum to hear from families and to help them not feel alone, contradicts the TDSB’s message that it sees parents as partners.

“I’m sorry,” Alsop continued, “but you are basically duct-taping us and censoring us, and this is wrong…We are lost and I really feel like there’s no hope now.”

When it was her turn to speak, Nora Green echoed Alsop’s sentiments. The various ways in which the committee’s work is being hampered—from pausing the special education review to halting live-streaming of their meetings, to editing their minutes—is “spineless,” she said. “I want to be supportive of staff. I want to be a partner. But I am feeling very insulted, to be honest.”

What the meeting underscored is a wide chasm between the TDSB’s depiction of special education and families’ accounts of how their children are actually experiencing it.

As committee member Leo Lagnado explained in an email, “This gap reflects a fundamental disconnect between policy and practice.”

Official narratives from the board tend to focus on things like intentions, said Lagnado, who represents the charity Autism Ontario. Meanwhile, “families are living the day-to-day outcomes: long waitlists, denied referrals, unsupported classrooms.”

In delegations and at last year’s town hall, numerous parents have shared stories of having to pick up students early because their school doesn’t have the resources to handle them, of feeling as though the education system has abandoned their children, and of teachers not having the time or know-how to implement their children’s individualized education plans.

Two decades earlier, Green faced the same problems. “I was almost unemployable,” she said, because she was so frequently called by the school to pick up her son, who was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, now considered under the umbrella of autism spectrum disorder.

From her perspective, the senior staff who attend the special advisory committee meetings are hardworking and mean well. But with nearly 600 schools, the TDSB is so large that the director of education, the board’s most senior executive, can’t possibly personally connect with and relay his messages to individual principals and teachers.

And how closely those principals and teachers implement the TDSB’s policies throughout the board is hard to know. The TDSB doesn’t collect data on how many families feel insufficiently supported, a problem that Green said the now-paused special education review was meant to help remedy. (Green and her fellow committee member Aldridge had been working with staff to put together the review, which was to include surveying parents and teachers to measure how the board’s special education programs and students are faring.) In the absence of data, it’s difficult to make an irrefutable case that any change is needed.

Moreover, like many other Ontario school boards, the TDSB routinely faces funding shortfalls from the Education Ministry, including specifically for special education. (According to documents The Local obtained through access to information legislation, 32 out of the 72 school boards projected deficits in 2024-25, up from 11 in 2020-2021.) But if there’s a reluctance from the board to say they’re hard-pressed to accommodate students because they don’t have enough funding, it’s possible there’s a legal reason for that.

A 2012 Supreme Court of Canada decision made it clear that funding limitations can’t justify a board’s failure to provide appropriate supports to students with disabilities, Lagnado explained: “So when boards are underfunded, they are placed in an impossible position: they cannot legally cite lack of funding as a reason for denial of service.” Hypothetically, then, if a student requires a special needs assistant, a financially-strapped board may be reluctant to admit why it won’t provide that assistant.

Yet transparency is essential, Lagnado said. “If boards are expected to do more with less, then families, and the public, deserve to understand the constraints and advocate for systemic change at the provincial level.”

Lepofsky, the special education advisory committee chair, said he sees another reason for the gap between TDSB policy and practice. Like in every large bureaucracy, he said, senior bureaucrats have a tendency to protect and defend their operations.

“The overall bureaucratic imperative is: Guard your turf,” he said. That translates into families not being told the full array of special education programs and services that are available, for example, or trustees being told, prior to the provincial takeover, that they can’t weigh in on certain issues because they’re considered operational matters.

“That’s their way of short-circuiting our capacity to have a voice and trustee oversight,” Lepofsky said. “What you end up with is the dictatorship of the senior bureaucracy. And I don’t like using harsh words, but that’s exactly what you end up with—the appearance of oversight, but not the reality and substance of oversight.”

If the top brass at the TDSB are guarding their turf, they seem to be guarding it even more closely under supervision. Since the provincial takeover, it’s become even harder to seek accountability. Transparency has declined, as high-level decisions, which were previously debated at open board meetings and shared in public documents, are now made behind closed doors.

“The other thing that’s happening now, don’t forget, is: who’s their boss?” Lepofsky said. “Who do they report to now? Do they report to the trustees? No, they report to the province.”