School closure ban means Ontario boards spending ‘limited’ funds to keep buildings open: docs

The Ford government’s refusal to listen to a request from the province’s largest board to close and consolidate schools is forcing educators to spend money on buildings that would otherwise be shuttered, internal government documents admit, at the same time that the number of boards posting annual losses grows substantially.

Government briefing documents written for Ontario’s education minister at the beginning of the summer say a moratorium on closing schools, in place since 2017, is stretching already thin school board budgets.

“Ongoing moratorium means boards are spending their limited school renewal funding on maintaining and operating schools that may otherwise have closed,” reads one line of the internal documents, obtained by Global News using freedom of information laws.

The admission comes just months after the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) sent a letter to the Ford government, begging to be allowed to shutter schools where needed in the face of a rough financial picture.

“The moratorium on school closures has severely limited the ability of the TDSB to address under-utilized and under-enrolled schools effectively,” the TDSB wrote in April.

“These circumstances have prevented us from providing the breadth of programming and … has also created costly operational pressures that take money away from increasing opportunities for students and require us instead to invest inefficiently in under-utilized, aging schools.”

Neethan Shan, acting TDSB chair, told Global News the board had never formally received a response about the closure moratorium from the province beyond a general communication about budget deficits.

“There were schools that were very close to each other and they were crumbling infrastructure in many ways,” he said.

“While (consolidation) improves programming and options for students, it also saves us money because we are now spending this money on maintaining facilities that can be used for improving student achievement.”

Shan said the board had calculated that consolidating schools could save it roughly $600,000 every year for each consolidation.

A spokesperson for the minister of education told Global News the school closure moratorium was popular with parents.

“Parents expect their children to be able to go to school close to home in their local communities,” the spokesperson said.

“We heard from parents that they do not want to see the same liberal track record of schools being closed across the province. We stand with parents and are keeping schools open at this time, with the expectation that schools act as responsible stewards of public dollars and balance their budget.”

One of the issues TDSB said it faces is aging schools, with older buildings running higher bills, forcing it to spend money on schools with fewer amenities.

Toronto is not the only board struggling with older buildings, the documents show, with an internal calculation that the average school in Ontario is roughly 40 years old.

Kathleen Woodcock, president of the Ontario Public School Board Association, said the money boards used to maintain older buildings like those in their fourth decade is often poorly spent.

“We’re putting money into paying for heat and hydro and all these things in old buildings that aren’t energy efficient — and it’s a waste of money, essentially,” she told Global News.

The same government documents that admit the pressures of a ban on school closures appear to validate the TDSB’s assessment of financial difficulty, showing a growing number of school boards are in the red.

“Sector wide, school boards are maintaining a healthy reserve level; however, some school boards have depleted/are projected to deplete their reserves over the course of the next few years,” the government documents explain.

“Recent information suggested the number of deficit boards are on the rise, meaning more boards are starting to draw down on reserves.”

The government’s records show that the number of boards posting a surplus dropped by 30 per cent between 2020-21 and 2022-23 — from 61 to 43. The number of boards posting a deficit grew from 11 to 29 over the same period.

The net budget for all school boards combined at that time also fell into the red. In the 2020-21 year, the Ontario-wide surplus was $211.2 million, falling to negative $131.2 million in the 2022-23 year.

Internal projections for the 2023-24 year were redacted from the information released to Global News.

The Ministry of Education told Global News that boards must “act as responsible stewards of public dollars” by running balanced budgets.

“At a time when Ontario has been providing school boards record setting funding to ensure students have the best education possible, school boards should not be recording deficits,” the spokesperson said, pointing to funding increases.

“Overall, school boards are in good financial health, with an accumulated surplus of $1.3 billion but we’re seeing a startling disconnect at some boards when it comes to financial management.”

Ontario NDP education critic Chandra Pasma said that growing deficits were forcing boards to make difficult decisions — and cut programming or other spending lines to balance the books.

“If the school is running a deficit, in the short term, it doesn’t mean anything beyond that the school board is doing their best with insufficient resources to give you the support and the resources and the staffing that kids need,” Pasma told Global News.

“But because the government has a balanced budget policy for school boards, over time it means that the school board is going to have to make cuts. And we see every year that there are school boards that have to make really painful cuts.”

Woodcock said school boards had tried to keep cuts away from the classroom in recent years but at the cost of other important budget lines.

“If they have to make cuts, they’re trying to make them as far away from the classroom as they possibly can,” she said.

“Unfortunately, that can lead into things like professional development, which is critical in the education sector, but we have to cut that so we can make sure that we don’t have that deficit. As long as we keep the cuts as far away from the students and their programming as possible.”