There’s More Media Attention on the Plight of Students with Disabilities in School Boards that the Ford Government Took Over and is Directly Managing, But We Need More!

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

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There’s More Media Attention on the Plight of Students with Disabilities in School Boards that the Ford Government Took Over and is Directly Managing, But We Need More!

September 20, 2025

SUMMARY

There has been so much media attention on the controversies surrounding the Ford Government’s decision to oust elected school board trustees at four Ontario school boards and to have the Government itself run those boards. There is a pressing need for more media attention to the impact this is having on over 330,000 students with disabilities/special education needs and their families.

Below are two recent articles that focus on this:

The September 18, 2025, article in School Magazine, a publication focusing on education issues, and
The September 18, 2025, column in the Ottawa Citizen.

The excellent School Magazine article points out that at a recent meeting of the Toronto District School Board’s Special Education Advisory Committee, SEAC members again pointed out to TDSB staff that frustrated parents who want to escalate their child’s unsolved problems at school are eventually expected to raise it with their school’s superintendent. Yet TDSB did not publicly post information on how to contact that superintendent. We understand that this is being rectified. While this is a commendable improvement, it is deeply troubling that for years, TDSB did not make that contact information public. All that time, TDSB senior staff rejected SEAC’s calls to improve the complaints process for parents of students with disabilities/special education needs.

For four major Ontario school boards, this is now all the direct responsibility of the Ford Government, not school trustees. Moreover, the Ford the senior staff at those school boards cannot tell the Ford Government to keep its hands off anything that is operational” in the way they admonished school board trustees. This is because the Ontario Government now has responsibility for the management and operations of those four school boards.

The Ford Government’s track record on serving students with disabilities/special education needs is has been deeply troubling over the past eight years, as is amply documented on the AODA Alliance website’s education page. It is just one illustration of its dismal track record more generally at leading Ontario to become accessible to people with disabilities, as the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act requires the Government to do.

The new provincially appointed Supervisors at four Ontario school boards have a chance to dispel this concern, and to implement much-needed cost-effective reforms to better serve students with disabilities. A strong report replete with workable recommendations was submitted to the Ontario Government over three and a half years ago by a panel of Government-selected experts from the disability community and the school system itself. The Ford Government has not enacted a single word to implement the K-12 Education Standards Development Committee’s final report. Nothing stops a school board’s provincially appointed Supervisor from implementing some or all of that report’s recommendations.

How You Can Help

Alert parents about this important concern.

Write letters to the editor about this issue. Insist that they give more coverage to the impact of provincial takeovers of school boards on vulnerable, chronically underserved students with disabilities. It is very immediate, important, and of course, interesting!

To get helpful tips about how to do this kind of advocacy, subscribe to AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky’s new podcast “Disability Rights, and Wrongs! The David Lepodcast.” If you have an Amazon Echo, just say: “Alexa, play podcast Disability Rights and Wrongs.” It’s on all the usual podcast platforms, such as Apple music and Spotify.

Send us your feedback. Write us at aodafeedback@gmail.com

MORE DETAILS

School Magazine September 18, 2025

Originally posted at https://educationactiontoronto.com/articles/tdsb-under-supervision-special-needs-kids-face-a-bureaucratic-maze/

TDSB under supervision: Special needs kids face a bureaucratic maze

William Paul

With over 40 000 special needs students attending Toronto District School Board (TDSB) schools, it’s easy to understand why parents are concerned about navigating a system which often appears opaque. Until the Ford government replaced TDSB trustees with an appointed supervisor, they at least had someone to whom they could turn for help dealing with the maze of requirements for their kids to get help, the uncertain assurances for help to come and the fear for their kids when those plans fell short due to lack of funding or staff.

In early June at the last Special Education Advisory Committee (SEAC) meeting of the school year, parents once again came forward with worries for their kids. Mehreen spoke of a growing reliance on unqualified people to replace unavailable staff. Yolanda said she couldn’t find a safe kindergarten placement for her nonverbal autistic daughter who escapes from class, puts foreign objects in her mouth and throws things at people. She wanted something more appropriate for her child but after pushing her case through the prescribed complaint process was told that the assessment to determine whether her daughter could get special treatment had been denied.

There was nothing new about this. At a SEAC Town Hall in November 2024, more parents related similar experiences: a child on an assessment waiting list for years, another with severe autism lacking a safety plan, parents told that support for their child would have to come at the expense of help for another, a child with attention and learning problems sitting in the school office for weeks at a time. Over and over, SEAC has heard from parents about their special needs kids being excluded from school if the principal doesn’t think they have the resources to keep them or the students around them safe. They can refuse admission to school under Ontario’s Education Act (section 265m.1 ).

TDSB without trustees

At last week’s TDSB SEAC meeting parents had serious questions about the changes that have come with the ascendance of the board’s supervisor Rohit Gupta. SEAC member Nora Green said that trustees were “public facing”, elected and answerable to parents who would reach out to them. Trustees would mediate situations like those above. Now that they’re gone, what do families do when they hit a brick wall with local principals? Next on the list of people to contact on the mandated Parent Concern Protocol are superintendents. But none of them have public emails – by the way, you could solve that problem today just by posting them. Without the trustees, Supervisor Gupta is next on the contact line. His email should replace those of the trustees, but realistically, what are the chances of getting a response from him?

SEAC chair David Lepofsky was looking for anything positive that might come from the takeover. He asked Associate Director, Louise Sirisko, if the supervisor would approach the Ministry of Education (MOE) to support “more robust funding” for special education. Currently the TDSB is about $38 million in the hole for this budget line. Sirisko said that Minister Paul Calandra would listen to suggestions about changing the budget. But she had a curious take on the current funding process: all students get a per-pupil amount just for being at school. More money is provided to cover those who are either identified under a category of special need or just clearly need extra help. Fine, but this doesn’t explain why the TDSB and other boards are often short funded. It’s clear that there needs to be a better way to fund special education.

Lepofsky also raised the question of repeating last November’s SEAC Town Hall, noting that TDSB staff decided not to go ahead with the original proposal. Without trustees or meetings to hear parent delegations, would staff reconsider this decision? But without trustee advocates, a decision like that really is up to staff.

What about the Special Education Plan?

And what about Supervisor Gupta’s reversal of the trustees‘ vote against TDSB staff’s proposed Special Education Plan in June? This raises critical questions about both trustees’ roles – should they ever be reinstated – and staff prerogative.

Every year, school boards must submit a special education plan to MOE. This year, the one proposed by TDSB staff included increased caps on sizes of two different kinds of special education classes. Lepofsky spoke against this change at the June 18 Board meeting noting that it entailed a “…blank cheque – across the board permission”1 to act on class size limits. It was a way of saying “just trust us” that left parents of these kids holding the bag if it was their child’s class size that was raised. Once again, they’d be left to struggle with TDSB staff to resolve the situation.

Trustees were being asked to vote on a plan that contained a class size increase they didn’t want to approve. This led to an awkward but fundamental question from Trustee Alexis Dawson: “what is governance and what is operations and what are we approving versus what will go ahead irrespective of our approval.”

Here’s the issue. Board staff apparently have the final say over operational matters like staffing, who to hire and promote, maintaining schools and so on. This is accepted practice though David Lepofsky, a lawyer, challenges the board to point to the section of the Education Act or regulation that says so. What this all came down to then was a proclamation from Director Clayton Latouche that a special education plan containing an unwanted class size increase needed to be passed by trustees based on his assurance that it was “quite robust.”3

To make that clearer Associate Director Louise Sirisko, explained that it was outside the purview of elected trustees to do other than decide whether or not the special education plan was “in alignment with legislation”4 which it was, she argued, because staff said so.

Just trust us.

Here’s Trustee Dawson: “So we are simply adding a stamp of approval not to the actual content of the plan but to the checklist of criteria that plan meets.”

Sirisko: “That is correct.”5

Whatever anyone might think about the distinction between governance and operations, it’s pretty clear that increasing special education class sizes could well be the thin edge of the wedge to make more of them larger; it’s a solution to the governance problem of not having enough money to run programmes. So, this looks like a governance matter slipped into a requirement to approve the plan.

Trustees saw through the ruse and voted against accepting the plan. They were summarily turfed out at the end of the school year by Paul Calandra who perversely complains that these elected officials just have too much power. Rohan Gupta, the supervisor with no experience working in education, reversed their decision and staff got what they wanted: their Special Education Plan approved for MOE. The Special Education Advisory Committee wasn’t asked what they thought about the reversal, even though it is supposed to be consulted.

Dark tower

What now? Parents looking for help to mediate tough situations for their special needs kids aren’t going to find it soon. The supervisor doesn’t answer emails, posts his decisions periodically and is otherwise unavailable to anyone who wants to know what is happening within the dark tower that has become the TDSB. Questions put to Louise Sirisko about Board versus staff purview, reasons for reversing the decision on the special education plan and whether a special education town hall might go ahead were met with a request from TDSB Communications to direct such queries to MOE.

David Lepofsky hopes that there might still be opportunities to address issues like exclusions of special needs kids, accessibility and underfunding. Now that trustees are gone, he adds that SEAC has new responsibilities to use its platform. Like so many issues facing parents and students, people connected to special education must bring more and broader organization within the community to fight the creeping authoritarianism that is replacing elected trustees with a maze of bureaucracy.

Notes:

David Lepofsky, TDSB – Regular Board Meeting, June 18, 2025 Time stamp: 1:01:15

Alexis Dawson, TDSB – Regular Board Meeting, June 18, 2025 Time stamp: 4:07:34 https://www.youtube.com/live/9-8NovC7qdg

Clayton Latouche, TDSB – Regular Board Meeting, June 18, 2025 https://www.youtube.com/live/9-8NovC7qdg Time stamp: 4:08:25

Louise Sirisko, Regular Board Meeting, June 18, 2025 Time stamp: https://www.youtube.com/live/9-8NovC7qdg 4:11:56

Alexis Dawson, TDSB – Regular Board Meeting, June 18, 2025 Time stamp: 4:14:01 https://www.youtube.com/live/9-8NovC7qdg

Ottawa Citizen September 18, 2025

Originally posted at: https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/fix-school-special-education

Kot: To fix the public school board, start with special education

If we don’t give our students adequate resources now, we will pay a much higher price in the future.

By Mary Ellen Kot

Children board a school bus in Ottawa. Education must be for all, says Mary Ellen Kot. Photo by Tony Caldwell /Postmedia

The following is written in reply to “Ford government was right to take over Ottawa public school board,” published Sept. 10:

University student Trevor Ng wrote in defence of the Ontario government appointing Bob Plamondon to supervise the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board. He stated that “Plamondon has years of experience consulting with the likes of the City of Ottawa, Finance Canada and Via Rail to analyze finance and enact policy.”

He went on to say that “when Apple ran three years of losses, they called in Steve Jobs to run the show.”

But a school board is not the same as a tech company, like Apple, or an agency like Finance Canada.

This is not simply a financial exercise. Education is about the development of our future citizens. We are not talking about computers. Schools are in the “business” of educating vulnerable children with a variety of strengths and weaknesses. This is not a “one size fits all” situation, where every student learns in the same way. Some students need a different approach to succeed.

One of my concerns with this cost-cutting exercise is the effect it will have on special education.

Back in the 1980s, school boards had various special education classes. Not anymore. Classroom teachers are now expected to teach large classes of students with many exceptionalities.

Advertisement 2

The Education Act identifies five categories of exceptionalities for exceptional students: “Behavioural, communicational, intellectual, physical and multiple.” As a retired special education resource teacher, my interest and experience are with learning disabilities, which fall under the communications umbrella.

Ontario Education Minister Paul Calandra speaks during Question Period at Queen’s Park last spring.

When I started teaching in 1976, I had little understanding of student exceptionalities. Later, it was my own children who initiated my learning into that field of education.

I taught for four years before choosing to be a stay-at-home mom with our three children. I’d like to report that the three of them sailed through school with no problems. However, one had difficulty learning to read and write. My husband and I didn’t understand why this smart little person couldn’t recognize letters and the sounds associated with them. We asked the school to investigate and in turn we paid for a private psycho-educational assessment. Our child was diagnosed as gifted and learning disabled. (Who knew that you could be both?) We were fortunate to have the benefits of special education classes and teachers, and great guidance counsellors for our children. We’re grateful for the education they received.

Morrissey