On Eve of Election Call: Ford Government Announces Another 1.3 Billion Dollars on School Construction Without Ensuring these Schools will be Accessible to Thousands of Students, Parents and Staff with Disabilities

ACCESSIBILITY FOR ONTARIANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT ALLIANCE

NEWS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

 

On Eve of Election Call: Ford Government Announces Another 1.3 Billion Dollars on School Construction Without Ensuring these Schools will be Accessible to Thousands of Students, Parents and Staff with Disabilities

 

January 28, 2025 Toronto: On the eve of the Ford Government’s impending snap election call, disability advocates are blasting the Ford Government for failing to announce any measures to ensure that newly built or renovated schools will be designed to be accessible to thousands of students, parents, teachers, and other school staff with disabilities when it announced yesterday that it is investing another 1.3 billion tax dollars into building new schools and expanding existing ones.

 

“Our Government must ensure that public money is never again used to create new disability barriers, like when the Government built Toronto’s new billion dollar courthouse replete with accessibility barriers that an AODA Alliance video revealed,” said David Lepofsky, Chair of the non-partisan AODA Alliance, which has been campaigning to get the Ontario Government to pass an Education Accessibility Standard under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (“AODA”) to make Ontario’s public education system accessible to students with disabilities. “If new schools are wastefully built with disability barriers, it costs the public much more to later remove them.”

 

For years, Ontario’s Ministry of Education has largely left it to each school board to decide what, if anything, to include in the design of a new school building to ensure it is disability accessible. Each school board must wastefully reinvent the accessibility wheel.

 

Three years ago today, the Ford Government received the landmark final report of a Government-appointed panel of experts that detailed the barriers in Ontario’s K-12 schools and how to remove and prevent them. It included 20 detailed pages on how to design an accessible new school. Yet, for the ensuing three years, the Ford Government has not enacted a single word of the measures in that expert report. The Government had appointed that expert committee under the AODA to recommend what the Government should enact in the promised Education Accessibility Standard to make publicly funded education in Ontario fully accessible for Ontario students with disabilities.

 

“This is not the first time that the Ford Government has embarked on such a misuse of public money,” said Lepofsky. “In July 2020 and again in March 2024, the Ford Government announced major plans to build new schools and to renovate others across Ontario. Then, as now, the Ford Government announced no requirement to ensure that this new construction will be disability accessible.”

 

School boards lack expertise in accessible building design. Making this worse, architects are too often not properly trained in accessible design.

 

Ontario desperately needs mandatory provincewide standards. A student, parent or school staff member with a disability has the same accessibility needs to get into and around a school building, whether in Kenora or Cornwall, Toronto or Ottawa. It is well established for years that compliance with the insufficient accessibility requirements in the Ontario Building Code, the weak and limited AODA accessibility standards, and local municipal bylaws do not ensure that a new building is accessible and barrier-free for people with disabilities.

 

This treats people with disabilities as if they simply don’t exist or don’t matter. It is a cruel irony that the Ford Government’s announcement yesterday claimed that it would “deliver good value for Ontario taxpayers” and that “school boards were encouraged to standardize the design of new school construction…”

 

“This disregard of the most fundamental needs of students with disabilities is part of a larger and troubling pattern,” said Lepofsky, who served for four years as a member of the Government-appointed K-12 Education Standards Development Committee. “The Ford Government continues to make self-congratulatory announcements about the education system, all the while failing to enact the promised Education Accessibility Standard. This leaves students with disabilities in a school system that is replete with unfair disabilities, far beyond the design of school buildings, as the expert K-12 Education Standards Development Committee thoroughly documented.”

 

Blistering findings about Government failures to deal with disability accessibility needs across society permeate the 2019 final report of the 3rd Independent Review of the AODA conducted by former Lieutenant Governor, David Onley, and the 2023 4th Independent Review of the AODA conducted by Rich Donovan. Both Reviews, which the Ontario Government appointed, found that progress on accessibility in Ontario has been painfully slow, and that there is no effective Government leadership.

The Rich Donovan AODA Independent Review found in June 2023 that Ontario has an accessibility crisis requiring an urgent Government crisis response. None has been forthcoming from the Ford Government in the following 19 months. The Ford Government’s failure to ensure that this new school construction is disability accessible is more proof that Ontario has an accessibility crisis.

 

This week, the AODA Alliance awarded the Ford Government an “F” grade for its handling of accessibility issues during its 6.5 years in power. In the upcoming election, the AODA Alliance is asking all party leaders to make the “Accessible Ontario Pledge” to lead Ontario to become accessible as soon as possible because the Government failed to fulfil its duty to do so by 2025 as required under the AODA.

 

Contact: AODA Alliance Chair, David Lepofsky

Email: aodafeedback@gmail.com

Twitter: @aodaalliance

 

For background, check out:

  • The June 16, 2016 AODA Alliance Update which sets out the recommendations for the design of an accessible school building which the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee circulated in 2021 for public feedback, which were well-received, and which in almost identical terms are included in the final report of the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee.
  • The final report of the Government-appointed K-12 Education Standards Development Committee, which the Ford Government received on January 28, 2022.
  • The AODA Alliance website’s education page, which documents the grass roots campaign since 2009 to get the Ontario Government to enact the much-needed Education Accessibility Standard to make Ontario’s education system accessible to and barrier-free for hundreds of thousands of students with disabilities.
  • The Accessible Ontario Pledge and the January 6, 2025 AODA Alliance Queen’s park news conference where it was unveiled.