AODA Alliance
Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance Update
United for a Barrier-Free Ontario for All People with Disabilities
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Read What Advocates for Parents of Students with Disabilities Asked the Legislature’s Standing Committee to Do to Fix Bill 101 – All of Which the Ford Government Ignored
May 24, 2026
SUMMARY
Earlier this month, the Ford Government used its majority in the Ontario legislature to dramatically shorten debates in the Legislature over its Bill 101. That is the bill that gives the Minister of Education dramatic new powers to micromanage schools and school boards across Ontario. It leaves in place school board trustees, rather than abolishing them. However, it dramatically weakens their capacity to oversee and govern local school boards. Bill 101 in effect puts Education Minister Paul Calandra in charge of micromanaging our schools and school boards, all from Queen’s Park.
The Ford Government then used its majority to pass Bill 101 over strong objections from the opposition parties. This bill is called the “Putting Student Achievement First Act.” The title alone is like something from George Orwell’s “1984.” Witness after witness at the Legislature’s April 27, 2026 public hearings on Bill 101 agreed that this bill does nothing to improve student achievement.
In this AODA Alliance Update and the following one, we catch you up on what was said during the one day that the Ford Government allowed for public hearings. We seriously regret that these hearings got scant media attention. They deserved substantial media attention, since Bill 101 and the issues it addresses have been in the headlines for weeks.
In this Update, we set out for you word-for-word the criticisms of this bill and the calls for amendments that were presented by the two community organizations that advocate for parents of students with disabilities, the AODA Alliance and the Ontario Autism Coalition. You can also watch the AODA Alliance’s testimony online.
During a full day of public hearings, only three of the organizations or individuals given time slots to present to the Standing Committee were there to give the parents’ perspective. The AODA Alliance and Ontario Autism Coalition both sought improvements to Bill 101 for students with disabilities. A third organization, the “Hold Schools Accountable Parent Network” criticized school board staff and trustees for not being more accountable to the public, especially when a student has been the victim of bullying and violence. Oddly, it supported Bill 101, even though they will find school boards and staff less accountable under Bill 101. This has been proven to be the case at school boards like the Toronto District School Board when it is run by Education Minister Calandra through his provincial Supervisor that reports to him.
There are two things that are especially striking as you read the following. First, even though these presentations raised serious concerns with Bill 101 from the perspective of students with disabilities, absolutely no Conservative MPPs asked the AODA Alliance or the Ontario Autism Coalition a single question. They showed no interest in learning more about their evidence. If they doubted the information presented, they offered these witnesses no opportunity to address their doubts.
Second, when the bill came forward three days later for the Standing Committee to consider proposing amendments to the bill, the Tories proposed no amendments that would address any of the concerns that the AODA Alliance and Ontario Autism Coalition identified. They did not vote for any opposition amendments that would have addressed any of these problems.
This comes in the context of the fact, confirmed at these hearings, that when developing Bill 101, the Education Minister did not consult the AODA Alliance, the Ontario Autism Coalition or many of the other witnesses who spoke against Bill 101 at these hearings. AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky put on the public record at these hearings that Education Minister Calandra twice agreed that he’d have a meeting with Lepofsky. On May 15, 2026, we wrote the Education Minister, asking to schedule that meeting. A copy of that letter was emailed to every member of the Ontario Legislature. So far, the Minister’s office has not responded.
How You Can Help
- Get others to read the evidence set out below presented to the Legislature by the AODA Alliance and the Ontario Autism Coalition. Publicize this on social media.
- Write Education Minister Paul Calandra at edu@ontario.ca to urge him to schedule his meeting with AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky.
- Learn more about our advocacy on Bill 101 by visiting the AODA Alliance website’s education page.
- Check out the AODA Alliance’s series of informative videos on the campaign to tear down the many disability barriers in Ontario’s education system facing students with disabilities.
MORE DETAILS
Excerpts From Ontario Hansard of the Standing Committee on Social Policy on April 27, 2026
Originally posted at https://www.ola.org/en/legislative-business/committees/social-policy/parliament-44/transcripts/committee-transcript-2026-apr-27?utm_source=openai
Evidence of AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky
- We will now go to the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance. David, you have the floor.
Mr. David Lepofsky: My name is David Lepofsky. I’m speaking as chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance. I also draw upon my experience for several years as the chair of the Toronto District School Board’s special education advisory committee.
Bill 101 is a disaster for students with disabilities and their parents. It does nothing—nothing—to make things better. It does lots risking that it will make things worse.
Listen to the whole day you’ve heard today, of your only day of hearings. Parents’ voices—we’re a sideshow. We’re a small minority of who was allowed to speak here. Listen to the arguments that were made in support of this bill—“Oh, it’s all about CEOs,” and all that kind of stuff. What they were talking about had no relationship with the world we live in. I daresay a parent, a student or a teacher listening to this would say, “Are they talking about schools at all?” This is, respectfully, ridiculous. But it gets worse.
Premier Ford is known to all of us as the guy who campaigned as the champion to cut red tape and get rid of bureaucracy. Well, this bill injects the greatest load of provincial red tape and bloated bureaucracy in our school system in our lifetimes. Look at the myriad of regulations by the minister, regulations by the cabinet, directives by the minister, guidelines that are binding by the minister, policies by the minister, decisions where you’ve got to get the approval of the minister, or where, if the director of education isn’t happy with the trustees, they can go to the minister. This is called bureaucracy soup.
If you pile it all up—the minister was asked today, “Well, what’s it going to cost?” He said, “It won’t cost school boards anything.” The reality is for school boards to figure out what all these rules are, and, of course, once they’re made, they could be changing and they don’t have to be consulted—figure out what they’ve got to do and where they’ve got to get permission, and then getting permission or trying to get permission from the minister. Have you ever tried to get a decision out of a minister’s office? I worked in the Ontario public service for 33 years. Respectfully, there are times you could die of old age—and it has nothing to do with which of your parties is in power. Everything here is decisions of the minister. Our kids will be graduating before their rights in kindergarten may get decided.
Then you’ve got to have a phalanx of bureaucrats in the minister’s office to come up with all the forms and then read all the applications from 72 school boards when they need to get directions on all of these things. That’s what will happen when you’re trying to have one minister at Queen’s Park essentially running the entire system. It’s going to be a ton of bureaucracy. It’s going to cost a whole lot more. It’s going to cause uncertainty and chaos. And it’s going to be really slow.
As a community advocate, if I go to any of your parties and say, “We want to propose a new piece of legislation”—any of you, left, right, centre, whatever—you ask two questions. “What is it going to cost? This hasn’t been costed.” We were told this morning that it doesn’t cost these school boards. Well, folks—oh, man—it’s going to cost. Since we’ve heard there’s no new money for it, we know where that money is going to come from: the classroom. Is that putting student achievement first—draining underfunded classrooms to fund more red tape and bureaucracy? I don’t think so. The second question that any of you would ask—left, right, or centre—is, “You need a new law? Well, isn’t there a law that can do this?” Here’s the thing: Before Bill 101 came forward as a means to solve a problem that we were told exists, we got a 300-plus-page Education Act that gives tons of power to the minister. Then, three years ago, we got Bill 98, which gave them more power. And then, last fall, we got Bill 33 that gave them even more power. There is no indication here that the minister has tried to use, much less exhaust, those powers to solve problems. Therefore, he’s got to come through with this kind of bulldozer legislation.
Just take the issue of absenteeism. Where’s the proof that the minister tried fixing this for eight years with all the powers he’s got? I don’t see any. Well, I don’t see anything, but that’s apart from the—okay. But the reality is—like, come on. The way they go about it is bizarre: “So we’re going to come up with a rule that requires them to show up.” That is a form of public policy—if we translated it to medicine, it would go like this: “How are we going to treat somebody with stomach flu? We’re going to put duct tape over their mouth and nose.” It makes the apparent symptom go away—not comfortably—but it doesn’t solve the problem at all.
Then the question comes: “Well, what about students with special education needs?” Afterwards, the minister said, “Oh, we’ll exempt them. So all we’ve got to do is make them ask for their exemptions.” Parents of kids with disabilities have tons on our plates, much less trying to go find out, go through a bureaucracy now to get an exemption from that.
The Chair (Mr. Brian Riddell): One minute remaining.
Mr. David Lepofsky: I’m going to give you one more problem that you’ve got to understand: If you tell kids with disabilities that they don’t have to meet the mandatory attendance requirement but the other kids do, you have now gifted a brand new source of bullying. And I thought that was a problem we want to solve.
We’ve got tons of recommendations, and I’d love to talk to you in my question-and-answer about how you fix this.
The Chair (Mr. Brian Riddell): Thank you, sir.
- John Fraser: Thanks to everyone who is here today for the last deputation of the day.
I’m going to start with Mr. Lepofsky. Thank you very much for your presentation. It was good that it came at the end of the day because I think it snapped us out of the end-of-the-day lull.
You expressed very clearly, I think, some of the challenges that are—I’m going to make a couple of comments, and then I’m going to let you tell me what you think we need to do.
(1) I think, if you want to point at anything about everything being run from a corner office somewhere in Queen’s Park, all you have to look at is the minister hanging on to the EQAO results for two and a half months while educators needed it, because he wanted to look at it and study it—evidently, can’t walk and chew gum.
(2) Absenteeism: I asked the minister this morning, “Can you tell me the three main causes of the increase in absenteeism in our schools?” I got an anecdotal answer: “It might be this here. It might be that there. We hear this.” I don’t understand how you think you’re going to solve a problem if you don’t understand the root causes of it.
I’ll leave the floor to you.
Mr. David Lepofsky: Thank you.
(1) Because this is, by the minister’s own statement, such a massive change, it should not be proclaimed enforced until at least 2030, to give school boards a chance to see all those regulations, all the policies, gear up, figure out what the heck is going on so we don’t cause chaos. Even though the bill isn’t enacted, the government can enact drafts.
(2) There should be an independent audit and a value-for-money audit by the Auditor General of this bill before it is proclaimed enforced, because telling us it’s not going to cost anything, at least as far as school boards are concerned, just is not plausible.
(3) We propose that it’s now completely unintelligible what the job of the trustee will be. I challenge our colleagues from the government to list for us what’s the job of the trustee—what are their powers? The bill should be amended to clearly define it.
(4) Next, the bill should require the government to consult before it adopts regulations, guidelines and so on—they didn’t on the bill. They didn’t consult us. Now, cornering him in the hall here, the minister has agreed to talk to me. In fact, he agreed twice when I talked to him, and he said we’ll meet soon. I’ll see if I can take him up on that. But we need that built into the law here.
(5) We need a requirement that all of these new policies and regulations do not create any more barriers for students with disabilities—because bureaucrats create barriers.
(6) The bill should set a clear path for the eight boards under supervision to get back to local democracy by November 15 of this year so people can know what they can do. The minister can have power to override that, but can we have some clear benchmarks? Just saying they’re on the right path—i.e., his own supervisors are not on the right path—isn’t good enough.
(7) Finally, the minister said we need to standardize; we have uneven practices in special education.
The Chair (Mr. Brian Riddell): One minute, 55 seconds.
Mr. David Lepofsky: Here’s a solution: The minister’s predecessor received a report in January of 2022, four years ago, which was the final report under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act of the kindergarten-to-grade-12-standards development committee. The government promised to enact an accessibility standard for education—strong support for it. They’re still, four years later, not doing it. They don’t need new legislation; they just need to take the responsibility they now have and actually do it.
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Mr. John Fraser: Thank you very much.
How much time do I have left?
The Chair (Mr. Brian Riddell): You have one minute and 15 seconds.
Mr. John Fraser: It’s John Fraser, MPP for Ottawa South.
You mentioned earlier that you were the chair of SEAC, special education advisory committee at the Toronto District School Board.
The Chair (Mr. Brian Riddell): You have one minute remaining.
Mr. John Fraser: I’m trying to figure out how one child whose needs aren’t being met—are going to be met by enacting this bill. Do you have any comments on that?
Mr. David Lepofsky: Things have already gotten considerably worse at TDSB since the supervisor took over. He won’t even come to our special education advisory committee meeting.
Two weeks ago, we had a public town hall that invited parents of kids with disabilities and special-ed needs to tell us what their problems were. He wouldn’t even show up. It’s on YouTube, not because he allowed it—in fact, the minister banned that—but because the Ontario Autism Coalition livestreamed it. You could watch it online, and 1,000 people already have.
We’ve heard about the need for more accountability. With the absence of trustees, with all their foibles—and I could list them—
The Chair (Mr. Brian Riddell): Thank you, sir.
- Chandra Pasma: Thank you.
Pat, with apologies, I’m going to go to David, because I don’t have much time.
David, you’ve mentioned you’re already seeing the behaviours of the supervisors—their decisions which are harming kids with disabilities and their families. Now this bill, Bill 101, is going to give them liability protection.
The Minister of Education was here this morning. He said he has no intention of adding any funding to school boards to cover all of these new responsibilities. He refused to say he would eliminate the shortfall in special education funding.
As you mentioned, there is absolutely nothing in here that provides any greater support to students with disabilities.
In light of all of that, do you have concerns that this bill is giving the minister and his appointees sweeping immunity protections?
Mr. David Lepofsky: I think there are several problems, one of which is that—the next problem is, for those who want more accountability, what this is actually going to create is more of a tyranny of the senior education bureaucrats at school boards because, having taken what are relatively weak trustees already, in terms of their current powers, and gutted them further and put the minister in this driver’s seat, there’s going to be virtually no oversight. So there’s going to be less accountability.
What we’re already finding at TDSB right now is that the budget process, which, by law, our special education advisory committee is supposed to be consulted on, is more secret than ever.
The Chair (Mr. Brian Riddell): One minute remaining.
Mr. David Lepofsky: It seems the bill is driven by the idea that we just don’t have enough secrecy around school board budgets.
Last point: Here, let’s just agree on one thing. Let’s just rename the bill “the putting red tape and bloated bureaucracy first act.” At least the title will be accurate.
Ms. Chandra Pasma: When we know there are thousands of kids who aren’t able to be at school every day, hundreds of thousands who aren’t allowed to be at school for the full day, did you find it very encouraging when the minister said they would be exempted from any attendance requirements?
Mr. David Lepofsky: We’ve been asking the minister—and his predecessors, since 2019—to use the ample powers he now has to rein in the arbitrary power of school principals to refuse to admit kids to school either at all or for the full school day. And so far, in seven years, they’ve done a grand total of nothing.
Evidence of Ontario Autism Coalition Board Member Kate Dudley-Logue
- The Chair (Mr. Brian Riddell): Thank you very much for your presentation, sir.
We will now go to the Ontario Autism Coalition. Please state your name for the Hansard and you may begin.
Ms. Kate Dudley-Logue: Thank you for the opportunity to be here today. My name is Kate Dudley-Logue, and I am vice-president of community outreach with the Ontario Autism Coalition. If you are unfamiliar with the OAC, we are a grassroots organization that represents a membership of almost 35,000 families, caregivers and autistic individuals.
I would like to discuss the potential impacts of Bill 101 in relation to students with special education needs and their families.
Oddly, Bill 101 doesn’t mention special education—not even once. There’s nothing in this bill that will make accessing supports easier for students with disabilities. There’s nothing in this legislation that will make schools safer for these students. And there is nothing in there that is addressing the crisis of exclusions and modified schedules that are being enforced on students with special education needs. This has become normalized throughout this province.
The OAC is in its second year of collecting data from families whose children are navigating the special education system in Ontario. Our now annual report will be released this Wednesday, but I would like to spend a few minutes discussing some of our key findings.
Families from 64 school boards across the province completed our survey, sharing their child’s experiences navigating special education during the 2024-25 school year. The findings show a system that is failing disabled students and placing unsustainable pressure on families, educators, school boards and communities.
Our data showed that 26% of disabled students were placed on modified schedules at some point in the school year. This means that these students were not attending school for full days—in fact, many of them were spending maybe an hour to two hours at school a day. With over 362,000 students with special education needs in Ontario schools, 26% represents over 94,000 students. The number one reason for students being put on modified schedules was that the schools lacked the resources to support the student safely.
Some 33% of disabled students are experiencing some form of exclusion. This 33% represents over 119,000 students who are frequently being sent home or are left out of parts of their school day due to lack of resources.
And 6% of disabled students are not in school at all. They’re either being fully excluded or their family has given up and pulled them out due to safety concerns or an inability to advocate for meaningful access. This 6% represents over 21,000 students who should be in school but do not attend at all.
Bill 101 puts a great deal of emphasis on attendance. In fact, Minister Calandra is painting a picture that declining attendance is affecting classroom learning. Meanwhile, disabled students who want to be in school are being told they can’t be, mainly due to lack of resources. Why are we not sounding the alarm on this? And why are we not looking at the reasons students aren’t in school and addressing them head-on?
Exclusions don’t just harm disabled students; they destabilize entire families. How are families supposed to work when their kids cannot attend school? Just today, a story in the Ottawa Citizen highlights a family pushed into homelessness, now living in a shelter, after their child was limited to just two hours of school per day due to a lack of resources. I ask again, why is Bill 101 not addressing this?
As you can see, families of students living with disabilities have to do a tremendous amount of advocacy. This comes at an extreme cost to families with already challenging demands being placed on them.
The OAC’s data showed that 29% of students with special education needs required their family to engage with their trustee at least once during the school year in order to advocate for the needs of their child in schools. This represents more than 102,000 points of contact with trustees.
While we are pleased that the changes in governance structure indicated in Bill 101 do not eliminate democratically elected trustees, it is deeply troubling that much of our trustees’ powers will now be shifted to the ministry.
As of today, eight Ontario school boards are under direct ministry supervision, with elected trustees sidelined. We can tell you unequivocally from what we hear in our community that access to safe and meaningful education for students with disabilities has not improved at these eight school boards; in fact, it has gotten much worse. Not only have many of these school boards overturned decisions previously made by trustees that protect what little special education supports and programming were already in place, but barriers and an extreme lack of transparency are leaving parents at these boards with nowhere to turn. The minister’s decision to stop live-streaming SEAC meetings is a great example. We’re creating barriers that are making it more and more difficult for parents to have voices in their children’s education. And this should be a warning sign to all school boards as to what they may face under Bill 101.
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We are recommending that the government engage in real consultation before moving forward with Bill 101. Families, students and educators should be at the forefront of decisions that affect our education system, and that is not what is happening here.
The Chair (Mr. Brian Riddell): One minute remaining.
Ms. Kate Dudley-Logue: Removing trustees’ decision-making powers must be scrapped from this bill. Democracy must be kept in place at our school boards so that families can have a voice.
This government needs to address our deteriorating special education system. Commitment to even collecting data on exclusions and analyzing the issue would be a good first step towards acknowledging the lack of supports and how we are increasingly underserving our most vulnerable students. Bill 101 certainly does none of the above. Thank you.
The Chair (Mr. Brian Riddell): Thank you for your presentations.
- Chandra Pasma: Thank you so much to all of the witnesses for being here this afternoon. I wish I had a lot more time to ask questions.
Kate, I’m going to start with you. Was the Ontario Autism Coalition consulted on this legislation?
Ms. Kate Dudley-Logue: No, not at all.
Ms. Chandra Pasma: And do you think that parents of children with disabilities have a pretty good grasp of what’s happening in our schools and should be included in any conversation about how we’re going to support and protect student achievement in Ontario?
Ms. Kate Dudley-Logue: One hundred per cent. Families of children with disabilities have to engage with their school boards, with their educators, with supervisors, superintendents. It’s probably well beyond more than your typical parent would have to engage. Most parents are very, very involved; they have to be, because they’re constantly fighting for supports.
Ms. Chandra Pasma: When the minister was here this morning, I asked him about the statistics that the OAC has provided about the number of kids who are excluded—that there are more than 20,000 children every day who aren’t allowed to attend school at all, and then tens of thousands of kids who are only attending for part of the school day, sometimes as little as one hour—and the minister’s response was, “We’ll exempt those kids from the attendance being included in the grade.” As a parent of kids with disabilities, is that reassuring to you?
Ms. Kate Dudley-Logue: No, not at all. And how kind of him for exempting them from an attendance-incentivized issue when these kids are not being allowed to be in school. So it would be disgraceful if that was held against them, when they’re being told they can’t be there. These are kids who want to be there.
Last week, I spoke with a family whose child was allowed to be at school for 40 minutes a day. She had to pick her kid up every day, with her kid crying because her child did not want to leave. The school didn’t have an EA to support this child for more than 40 minutes.
Ms. Chandra Pasma: The minister would not commit this morning to filling that $850-million funding shortfall, which—we know even that level of funding isn’t enough to allow our kids to be at school every day. But school boards are having to pull funds from elsewhere or cut specialized class placements and EAs in order to try to maintain that $850-million shortfall. He wouldn’t commit to eliminating that or any new funding.
As you mentioned, there’s nothing in this bill about student safety, about student supports, about full attendance.
So do you find it concerning that the bill does give the Minister of Education sweeping immunity and liability protections from the consequences of his own actions?
Ms. Kate Dudley-Logue: One hundred per cent. As I was discussing in my remarks, the situation at the school boards that are currently under supervision has only deteriorated since last summer, when that all started. We’re not seeing an increase in supports. We’re not seeing an increase in specialized classrooms. We’re actually seeing cuts happening. And they’re happening more at the school boards under supervision than we’re seeing in other school boards. So this can only leave us with the realization that moving forward with Bill 101 would mean a tremendous amount of cuts towards special education.
Ms. Chandra Pasma: You raise a really good point, because these new CEOs are going to be a lot like the supervisors. They’re not accountable to the people in the community. Only the Minister of Education can fire them—which is just like the supervisors. They’re going to be people with business or financial backgrounds, not people with educational experience or qualifications.
The trustees will still be there, and they can pick up the phone, call a superintendent, call a principal, mediate a conversation between parents and educators, but they won’t be able to come to the table with systemic solutions anymore.
The CEO can rule a motion out of order. They can prevent trustees from debating it. They can refuse to include something in the budget. And if the trustees don’t pass the budget, they can just turn to the minister for approval.
So when you mentioned just how much parents of kids with disabilities depend on their trustees—what does that loss of advocacy at the board table mean for kids with disabilities and their families?
Ms. Kate Dudley-Logue: It’s really alarming. I’ll use the example of Ottawa—and I know you know this quite well.
The Chair (Mr. Brian Riddell): One minute remaining.
Ms. Kate Dudley-Logue: Last year, prior to being put under supervision, Ottawa-Carleton District School Board was trying to implement a new elementary program review that was going to eliminate 39 special education classrooms. The trustees did a tremendous amount of listening; they did town halls, meetings with individual parents, meetings with groups of parents. They finally came to the conclusion, after listening to these parents, that this would be very detrimental to these students, and they voted against it.
Moving forward, under Bill 101, trustees aren’t going to have the power to say no to things that are harmful to the students and the families they represent. That’s a real problem. We’re losing our democracy in schools.
Ms. Chandra Pasma: What we’ve seen in the OCDSB is that the supervisor is now cutting those specialized class placements that the trustees protected after listening to parents, but parents have no mechanism to hold the supervisor accountable for that decision.
Ms. Kate Dudley-Logue: That’s right.
Ms. Chandra Pasma: In fact, the supervisor did not provide any clarity on what is happening until I reached out to him—
The Chair (Mr. Brian Riddell): Thank you for your comments.
We’ll now move on to the third party. I recognize MPP Fraser.
Mr. John Fraser: I’d like to thank everyone for being here today.
I want to start with Kate. We know each other, so we’ll use first names.
We had the minister in front of us here this morning, and what I asked him was about absenteeism—not in relation to exclusions, but absenteeism, and what the top three reasons were. He couldn’t answer my question. So—he gave an anecdotal answer, I should say. So they fundamentally don’t understand why it’s happening. It’s hard to solve a problem if you don’t fundamentally understand the root causes of it.
But one of the things—and I mentioned it this morning—is that special education is starved. Trustees and boards have had to find $850 million that’s not allocated for that. That translates into schools not being safe places, but it also translates into people’s everyday lives with their children. What they’re experiencing is creating a lot of hardship, as you described.
I do not see how Bill 101 is going to get one child who’s not getting the help they need the help that they need.
I don’t know if you want to add anything to that.
Ms. Kate Dudley-Logue: Yes, I will.
You touch on a good point about absenteeism. The irony, that this ministry is making such a big deal about attendance while telling—17% of the student body that is experiencing being told that they can’t attend school. There’s some real irony here.
Beyond that, for students with special education needs who are attending school full-time—they’re still dealing with a real lacking of support, and it can often, as they age, turn into mental health issues. When they’re not being supported properly, they’re feeling frustration, they’re falling behind, and that can lead to absenteeism.
Beyond the irony of students being excluded, we’ve now got families of children with special education needs who are feeling tremendous anxiety that their kids are going to be punished for not being at school, when the system isn’t creating an environment that is supporting them well enough to be there successfully.
So it’s a real problem that we’re making such a big deal about this.
Mr. John Fraser: It is a real challenge.
I do know that the OAC has been advocating for more direct services, more support. And now we have a policy of inclusion in the classroom, which is good, and it’s important. But what is happening—the supports aren’t there for kids.
I gave an example of Marigold, a student in my riding. She’s six years old—been there for two years, had an assessment, needs services and not getting them. Two years, when you’re six years old, is a really long time.
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I know that many of the families you work with and represent have a lot of concerns about their children falling further behind.
Ms. Kate Dudley-Logue: I didn’t write about this in my notes, but the Ontario Autism Program, as we all know, has a wait-list of close to 70,000 kids now who are waiting for more than five years to access therapies and services that could help them be so much more successful at school. The challenges that they face in school are amplified by the fact that they’re not accessing therapy. So we’re not helping them outside of school, while we’re cutting the services that are in school, and it’s creating—I often use the terminology “the perfect storm.”
How are these kids going to have the opportunity to develop skills to be successful in school, having not received the therapy that they need? And why are we downloading that onto educators? Educators are not therapists.
- The Chair (Mr. Brian Riddell): Thank you for your comments.
We’ll now move on to the independent party for three minutes.
Ms. Aislinn Clancy: I’d like to direct my questions to Kate from the Ontario Autism Coalition.
Last year, the government underspent, so it had $500 million more to spend in our schools. You talked about almost 70,000 kids on the autism wait-list. What do you think the families would do with that money if they had access to the money that was meant to help kids?
Ms. Kate Dudley-Logue: Well, we certainly need to get that wait-list moving. There’s no such thing as early intervention in this province anymore for children with autism. They wait, often, two to three years to get a diagnosis, and then they’re put on a wait-list that’s a minimum of five years long. The $500 million could go a long way for getting that moving and expanding capacity so that there are more service providers. It could also go a long way in our schools, to provide more EAs to give supports.
So, yes, it’s alarming that there’s money there that’s not being spent.
Ms. Aislinn Clancy: I akin this to kind of like the emergency room—it’s like all the societal needs that go left unmet by other ministries, whether it’s housing and food and, in this case, therapies and supports for kids to have tools in their tool box so they can arrive at school ready to learn.
Can you speak a little bit about kindergarten? I hear that even our principals are doing a lot of diaper changes, because we don’t have that support to help kids with toileting. We end up with kindergarten classrooms where kids are showing up and we don’t know about the needs that they have. Tell us what we could do differently that this bill doesn’t cover to help kids start kindergarten with tools in their tool box so that they have what they need to function in that environment.
Ms. Kate Dudley-Logue: Certainly, any child who’s autistic and who has been diagnosed before kindergarten will not have been accessing therapy yet. They may have accessed some of the other pillars in the Ontario Autism Program, but not the core clinical funding that provides them one-on-one therapy.
The Chair (Mr. Brian Riddell): One minute.
Ms. Kate Dudley-Logue: So, yes, they’re arriving in kindergarten, and they haven’t had an opportunity to develop a lot of skills—one of them might be toileting; others, routine-following, communication levels, being able to manoeuvre socially with peers.
What we’re seeing a lot in kindergarten is—again, we’re back at exclusions. There are schools that, before even meeting the child, and just hearing from the parent upon registration that the child is autistic and has a level of needs that will require more support—they’re immediately being put on modified schedules before the child has even had an opportunity to present whether they can make it through a school day. Schools are really at a point where this is becoming normalized. These kids are not going to be in school full-time.
Ms. Aislinn Clancy: What I hear from families is that it creates an enormous amount of strain: stress on a marriage, on the mental health and well-being of parents who are left questioning and dealing with everything on their own—let alone financial, when somebody has to abandon work—
The Chair (Mr. Brian Riddell): Thank you very much.