Ontario Government Must Increase Special Education Funding and Pass the Long-Overdue Education Accessibility Standard to Give Students with Disabilities an Equal Education in Ontario Schools, Queen’s Park News Conference Told

Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance Update

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

Website: www.aodaalliance.org

Email: aodafeedback@gmail.com

Twitter: @aodaalliance

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/aodaalliance

 

Ontario Government Must Increase Special Education Funding and Pass the Long-Overdue Education Accessibility Standard to Give Students with Disabilities an Equal Education in Ontario Schools, Queen’s Park News Conference Told

 

January 25, 2025

 

SUMMARY

 

Yesterday, the Ford Government announced that it would call an Ontario general election next Wednesday. This election comes almost a year and a half earlier than Ontario’s legislated fixed deadline in June 2026 for Ontario’s next general election.

 

The AODA Alliance is rapidly gearing up to, again, wage a non-partisan campaign to get the strongest commitments we can from all political parties and candidates on tearing down barriers that impede Ontarians with disabilities. Please expect to receive AODA Alliance Updates that offer you action tips and keep you posted on breaking events.

 

In that spirit, here is the latest news! On Thursday, January 23, 2025, one day before the Ford Government announced its election pledge and ended the rising tide of rumours, the Ontario Autism Coalition held an important news conference in the Media Studio at the Ontario Legislature at Queen’s Park. AODA Alliance Chair, David Lepofsky, was invited to be a speaker at this news conference. You can watch the archived video of this news conference.

 

This news conference focused on the serious problems of students with disabilities/special education needs being underserved in Ontario K-12 schools. Both the Ontario Autism Coalition and the AODA Alliance have collaborated on this issue many times.

 

At this news conference, the Ontario Autism Coalition unveiled the results of a survey it had conducted of parents of students with disabilities/special education needs about the challenges and barriers their children face at school. This study was not limited to children with autism. You can read the Ontario Autism Coalition’s report on the survey on the Ontario Autism Coalition website.

 

This news conference got an impressive amount of media coverage. Below we set out the January 23, 2025 report on it in the influential Queen’s Park publication “The Trillium.”

 

This January 23, 2025 news conference combines well with the AODA Alliance’s January 6, 2025 news conference where we made public the Accessible Ontario Pledge that we are calling on all political parties to make during this election campaign. We invite you to watch that earlier news conference and read the Accessible Ontario Pledge. Supplementing these two news conferences is the video of the November 25, 2024, AODA Alliance community public hearings at Queen’s Park. There, people with disabilities from around Ontario told MPPs about disability barriers they continue to face.

 

How You Can Help

 

 

Learn about the AODA Alliance’s advocacy to make the education system accessible to students with disabilities by dropping in on the AODA Alliance website’s education page.

 

There have been 24 days since Ontario failed to meet the January 1, 2025 deadline for becoming accessible to people with disabilities set by the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. Help us get all parties to commit to the Accessible Ontario Pledge to turn this accessibility ship around!

 

MORE DETAILS

 

The Trillium January 23, 2025

 

Advocacy group survey shows ‘systemic neglect in special education’ in Ontario

 

School bags hang on pegs at an elementary school in Toronto on Tuesday Jan. 9, 2024. I THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young Sneh Duggal a day ago

 

A group advocating for children with autism are raising the alarm about what they say is an “under-resourced and underfunded” school system that is leaving students with disabilities “paying the price” through exclusions, safety concerns and a lack of access to a “meaningful education.”

 

The Ontario Autism Coalition (OAC) joined labour and disability advocates at Queen’s Park on Thursday to share the results of a survey it conducted last summer on families’ experiences with special education in the province’s public schools.

 

“The report paints a bleak picture of a system that is unable to properly support a large portion of the students it is meant to serve due to large shortages of staff and other resources,” the group said, noting that half the families felt their children were “not receiving a meaningful education.”

 

“For a government that concentrates on academic outcomes in education, there seems to be little concern for the outcomes of students with disabilities,” said Kate Dudley-Logue, vice president of the OAC.

 

She said the survey results showed “systemic neglect in special education in Ontario, and we are well past the time of being able to pretend that we can ignore it.”

 

“The time for commitment to equity and access to meaningful and safe education for students with disabilities is now,” said Dudley-Logue.

 

Half of the parents who participated in the survey said they “usually or always worry” about their children’s safety and more than one-third said their child didn’t feel safe or supported, with bullying, elopement and violence being the top safety concerns.

 

The group has previously raised safety concerns, including after a couple of incidents at Ontario schools, one of which ended tragically.

 

Last year, Landyn Ferris, 16, a student at Trenton High School with a rare form of epilepsy called Dravet syndrome, was found without vital signs at the end of the school day on May 14. He was found “unattended in a sensory room,” Josh Nisker, founding partner of Beyond Law and a lawyer representing Ferris’s family, told The Trillium at the time.

Early in the year, a seven-year-old boy with autism wandered from his school at the Durham District School Board and was found at a “busy intersection” during a storm in January.

 

“Still, we have seen no action to address safety concerns in schools for vulnerable students,” said Dudley-Logue. “Educators and school staff are left to do the best they can just to keep students with disabilities safe due to chronic staffing shortages and a lack of resources; often the only tool they have left in their tool box is exclusions.”

 

The OAC’s survey, which included 429 responses covering children in 60 school boards for the 202324 school year, also found that six per cent of families said their children were “fully excluded” from school — so they didn’t attend. More than a third said their children were “partially excluded,” which could include the school asking the family to pick up their child early or the child not being able to participate in activities such as field trips.

 

Nearly 20 per cent of families said their children had been on a modified schedule, with 35 per cent of these children going to school for three to five hours a day. Of those experiencing a modified schedule, 38 per cent said the reason for this was the “school lacked the resources to accommodate the student’s needs or to keep them safe.”

 

“It’s not about a blank cheque,” said Laura Walton, the president of the Ontario Federation of

 

Labour who also used to work as an educational assistant. “It’s about providing the services and the supports and the resources where they are needed. Fair doesn’t mean that everyone gets everything the same. It means that we give what we need to the people who need it in order for them to be successful.”

 

The survey also touched on Individual Education Plans (IEPs), which outline special education instruction, supports and services for students. It found that more than 50 per cent of families felt that “some or none of their student’s Individual Education Plan accommodations were followed consistently.”

 

Dudley-Logue attributed the reported “failures” of IEPs to a “lack of resources.”

 

She said while educators might have the “best intentions” to follow IEPs, the reality on the ground is much different.

 

“When there’s one teacher in the classroom and no (educational assistants), and the teacher has sometimes a dozen kids in their class on IEPs, plus maybe another 20 kids in the class, they’re going to have a real struggle to make sure that every item on an IEP is being followed, and that’s likely what’s happening,” Dudley-Logue said. “The answer is more educators in the classroom providing more commitment to make sure that IEPs are being followed.”

 

NDP education critic Chandra Pasma agreed, saying underfunding has led to a lack of qualified educators in classrooms, with those coming in to fill absences having “no time to read the IEP, let alone know how to put it in place.”

 

David Lepofsky, chair of the AODA Alliance, said one issue is that when parents go through the typical channels with a complaint, “nobody going up that hierarchy may have specialized experience and expertise in educating students with disabilities.”

 

He called for the province to pass an accessibility standard, under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, that would require the establishment of an “effective, fast, fair method for parents of students with disabilities to try to get these issues resolved,” instead of advocates having to lobby each school board to do this.

 

For its part, the government said its education funding has reached “historic amounts,” including funding for an additional 9,000 education workers since 2018.

 

“Our government is ensuring students have access to high-quality education, including those with special needs. For the 2024/25 school year, we invested over $3.7 billion for special education — the largest investment ever in Ontario history — which has increased the number of educational assistants by nearly 3,500,” said Education Minister Jill Dunlop in a statement.

 

“Our government will continue to make historic investments to support the next generation including those with special needs,” she said.

 

But Walton shot back at the government’s argument of making “historic” investments, saying, “that’s not true.”

 

“Those investments are not keeping up with the current costs of providing an education in Ontario,” said Walton.

 

Each of the groups said they’d be gearing up if Premier Doug Ford calls an early election, which is expected to happen next week.

 

“We are going to arm our membership of families and supporters with the information and the questions that they need to be asking when the election campaign is happening,” said Dudley-Logue.

 

Walton said that if an election is called, the OFL will work closely with the autism community to “ensure that these voices are lifted up and that we are putting in place (a) government that understands the needs of supporting these students, supporting the families and clearing those barriers that have been long in existence and far overdue to be removed.”

 

The AODA Alliance has issued a call to all provincial party leaders asking them to commit to what the group calls the “Accessible Ontario Pledge” regardless of whether or not an election is held soon, with Lepofsky saying that so far only the Greens have signed on.

 

-With files from Alan Hale