Education Minister Calandra Wrong to Only Consider Two Options, Abolishing Elected School Board Trustees or Simply Maintaining the Status Quo Unchanged

Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance Update

United for a Barrier-Free Ontario for All People with Disabilities

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Education Minister Calandra Wrong to Only Consider Two Options, Abolishing Elected School Board Trustees or Simply Maintaining the Status Quo Unchanged

 

March 22, 2026

 

SUMMARY

 

AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky’s monthly column in the Toronto Star’s Metroland publications for March 2026 explains why it is so important for Premier Doug Ford and his Education Minister Paul Calandra to broadly consult on the future of elected trustees to govern school boards. Read that article below.

 

How You Can Help

 

  • Send this article to your member of the Ontario Legislature. Tell them how the message in this article matters to you.
  • If you are the parent/guardian of any students with disabilities/special education needs at the Toronto District School Board, and if your child has encountered any difficulty getting their disability-related education needs met, sign up to attend and speak at the TDSB Special Education Advisory Committee’s 7 pm April 13, 2026 public forum for parents/guardians of students with disabilities/special education needs. Information on how to sign up, and attend in person or on Zoom, is available in the February 10, 2026 AODA Alliance Update.
  • Watch the March 11, 2026 Queen’s park news conference of leaders from school boards, teachers’ unions, students, and parents of students with disabilities. See why it is so important for the Education Minister to halt his creeping takeover of the Ontario school system, now at over one third of that system. Learn why the Government needs to hold a robust public consultation on how school boards should be governed. Urge others to watch the news conference.

 

MORE DETAILS

 

Inside Halton March 20, 2026

 

Originally posted at https://www.insidehalton.com/opinion/columnists/ontario-trustee-system-needs-change/article_faed095f-1348-5ea4-a857-ddfefb2fd6e1.html

 

Ontario’s school boards need an overhaul to better aid our children, not complete cancellation

Role of school board trustee should be improved through reform, not abolished, David Lepofsky writes.

 

By David Lepofsky

David Lepofsky is chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance.

 

As a volunteer advocating for people with disabilities, and as a parent of a child with disabilities, I found the Education Leaders Summit on March 11 to be a day like no other.

 

This is for reasons important to communities big and small throughout Ontario.

I’ve been passionate about ensuring kids with disabilities are better served in our schools ever since my mother successfully fought our school board in 1971 to enable me to remain in my local school, as my dwindling eyesight plummeted. We didn’t want me being sent to the school for the blind in Brantford, as our school board insisted.

Decades later, I find myself, with many others, battling for equal educational opportunities for one-third of a million students with disabilities.

My column last month highlighted how things are getting worse for these underserved students at the boards seized by the Ford government. The province, or a single education minister’s office, is not competent enough or equipped to directly run any school board, much less eight of them.

On that March day, a news conference at Queen’s Park united a veritable summit of Ontario’s K-12 school system’s major players.

Leaders from the school boards and teachers’ union as well as students and I spoke on behalf of parents of students with disabilities.

These sectors can at times be in conflict and not smiling in unison. It was wonderful for students with disabilities and their parents to have a key role.

We had three simple asks:

  1. The government should put on hold any new legislative reforms to school board governance until a comprehensive public consultation has been held.
  2. This consultation should fully include parents’ voices, including parents of students with disabilities, school boards, education staff and education experts. It should consider the recurring unmet needs of students with disabilities.
  3. The government should make public a detailed plan for the return to local democracy at those school boards now under provincial supervision, with a path to its restoration with clear goals and benchmarks.

At this event, I shared an open letter to Education Minister Paul Calandra from 12 major disability organizations, who also endorsed these requests. We extended our hand to Premier Doug Ford to work with us.

How did Ford react? With what I believe was an effort to distract reporters from our news conference, he cobbled together his own media event timed an hour before ours on the other side of Toronto.

 

He announced cash for elementary teachers to cover some classroom expenses that the government had failed for years to properly finance.

Avoiding us is a frustrating response to our offer to work with the premier.

Meanwhile, Calandra keeps seizing more school boards and things keep getting worse for students with disabilities.

An article published by TorontoToday the day before the news conference shared how increasing the size of some special education classes at the Toronto District School Board, including diagnostic kindergartens, has been harmful for vulnerable students with disabilities in those classes.

We fought against that change last spring when elected trustees voted with us to prevent it.

After the province assumed responsibility for the board, the supervisor overturned that decision and ordered an increase in the maximum size of classes without speaking to the Special Education Advisory Committee — which I chair.

The premier now says he’s not made up his mind whether to abolish or retain local democratic oversight of Ontario’s 72 school boards.

Our message at the news conference, available on YouTube, was this: There is ample room to reform the school board trustees system, to make it strong and effective, and to target past shortcomings.

At this March 11, 2026 news conference at the Ontario Legislature, Queen’s Park, leaders from the major players in Ontario’s K-12 education system united to call for the Ontario Government not to abolish locally elected trustees to govern Ontario’s 72 school boards. This included leadership representing school boards, teachers’ unions, students and parents of students with disabilities On the panel was the president of the Ontario Public School Boards Association Kathleen Woodcock, a student trustee Carter Peios, the president of the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario David Mastin, and AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky (who is also chair of the Toronto District School Boards Special Education Advisory Committee.

Calandra has wrongly made it sound like Ontario only has a simple and false choice of either retaining the status quo or totally abolishing local democracy for school boards.

There is good middle ground here, a quintessentially Ontario solution: Mend it. Don’t end it.

Strengthen and reform the role of elected school board trustees to avoid past problems and make them more effective.

David Lepofsky is a retired lawyer who chairs the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance and the Toronto District School Board’s Special Education Advisory Committee. He is a visiting professor of disability rights at the law schools at Western, Queen’s and the University of Ottawa, and hosts a podcast: Disability Rights and Wrongs – The David Lepodcast.