AODA Alliance
Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance
NEWS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Ford Government’s New Education Legislation Does Nothing to Help Vulnerable Under-served Special Education Students, But Makes Things Worse For Them
April 13, 2026 Toronto: There’s absolutely nothing in Education Minister Paul Calandra’s April 13, 2026 announcement about new legislation governing Ontario’s school boards that will help over 330,000 Ontario K-12 students with disabilities/special education needs, and lots that will make things worse, according to a major disability advocacy coalition. The AODA Alliance is one of the many community groups that Ontario’s Education Minister refused to consult in crafting today’s announcement.
“Arbitrarily cutting in half the number of TDSB trustees means half the access to battle the many barriers that students with disabilities/special education needs face at TDSB,” said David Lepofsky, AODA Alliance Chair and one of these parents himself. “We need trustees to have stronger authority to fix the disability barriers that Ontario’s Education Minister and Ministry have left festering for years, but instead Minister Calandra wants to substantially weaken the mandates of school board trustees.”
Parents of students with disabilities need far stronger oversight of the unelected senior school board bureaucrats who are the true centre of power running school boards. Yet Calandra’s reforms give those senior school board bureaucrats even more free reign, unconstrained by effective democratic oversight.
As but one example, TDSB’s senior staff have repeatedly and arbitrarily opposed its Special Education Advisory Committee from holding an open Town Hall to hear directly from parents of students with disabilities/special education needs about their children’s challenges at school. Tonight at 7 pm, TDSB’s Special Education Advisory Committee holds such a public forum at 505 Yonge Street despite that opposition from TDSB.
At today’s news conference, Minister Calandra did not provide a specific roadmap or benchmarks for school boards to achieve in order to get out from under provincial supervision. He said they need to get on “the right track” (whatever that means) and get their finances in order. Yet the Minister’s hand-picked supervisors have been running these boards for months. If they aren’t yet on the “right track,” that would be solely the responsibility of the Minister. Paradoxically, TDSB, while running under the Minister-appointed supervisor since last summer, is still operating under the very same budget that the trustees passed last spring—the supposedly unacceptable budget that led the Minister to oust TDSB’s trustees.
A major governance reform that would help all TDSB students, including its 40,000 students with disabilities/special education needs, would be to divide the board up into a group of smaller boards. Each could readily be governed by a properly mandated group of 12 trustees. TDSB is far too large and bureaucratic, with a quarter of a million students.
Since Premier Mike Harris restricted school boards over two decades ago, the Ontario Government has been stripping powers from trustees and yet blaming them for all that’s wrong in the school system. This must not distract from chronic underfunding of public education, including education for students with disabilities, a chronically disadvantaged underclass in Ontario-funded schools.
“One month ago, on March 11, 2026, an unprecedent summit of school boards, teachers’ unions, student trustees and parents of students with disabilities united at a Queen’s Park news conference,” said Lepofsky, who was one of the speakers at that event. “We reached out our collective hand to Minister Calandra to work with us all on how to reform the school board system. He has ignored our offer, and instead disregarded our concerns in developing today’s announcement.”
The AODA Alliance calls on the Ford Government to commit to hold open, accessible public hearings on its education reform bill. It did not do so when it passed its Bill 33, that began this process last fall. The AODA Alliance also calls on the Ford Government to ensure that everyone who wants to speak at those legislative public hearings will be afforded an opportunity to do so.
Contact: David Lepofsky aodafeedback@gmail.com
Learn more by visiting the AODA Alliance website’s education page.