Ontario education minister faces backlash over proposal to eliminate trustees

School trustees are taking Ontario’s education minister to task after suggestions were made about eliminating the elected officials as a way to reform the school system.

The Office of Ontario’s Education Minister confirmed Paul Calandra made those comments during the Association of Municipalities Ontario conference this week.

This comes after Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s government launched investigations into some school boards for financial mismanagement, which included the Brant Haldimand Norfolk Catholic School Board.

As of today, five school boards are now under the supervision of the province.

And in May, legislation was tabled that would allow the province to take over a school board without review.

On Thursday night, trustee associations called the minister’s comments concerning.

They accuse the province of using the current state of funding and the supervision of school boards to move towards centralizing control of the system.

They add that this provincial oversight will not improve the quality of education.

“The provincial government, the minister is taking it upon himself to assert provincial authority in an overreach with an appointed bureaucrat, who arguably has no direct ties and certainly no democratic accountability in the communities that they serve,” said Alan Campbell, president of the Canadian School Boards Association.

“Those parents are calling the trustees because it’s the trustees that help navigate that system. It’s the trustees who have the contact to the bus consortiums, it’s the trustees who have the appropriate staff member in the board to help mitigate that concern and to help continue to ensure that the parents and the child are experiencing a positive experience while they’re attending that school site,” said Michael Bellmore, president of the Ontario Catholic School Trustees’ Association.

Meanwhile, Ontario’s opposition leader, Marit Stiles, took to X, calling Calandra’s comments ridiculous, and that “This does nothing to make classrooms less crowded, fix crumbling schools, or set our kids up for success.”

Liberal MPP John Fraser also said in a statement, “Ontario has nearly 5,000 public schools and more than two million students. We are a big province. Local decision making and accountability have always been one of the cornerstones of Ontario’s education system.”

CHCH News did ask the minister’s office about what it is about the current governance model that requires change and what a centralized approach would look like, but we have yet to hear back.

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