Tough choices ahead for TDSB
The public board, the province’s prime target for closures, operates under its official capacity by 71,000 students
With a staggering 71,000 fewer students than the province says it has room for, the Toronto District School Board faces having to close the rough equivalent of 171 schools now that Queen’s Park no longer will help pay to keep underused schools open.
While the tough new policy targets many of almost 800 schools across Ontario whose student loads fall short of capacity by a total of nearly 327,000 students, it is the Toronto board that will be hardest hit by the scrapping of top-up dollars for declining enrolment.
Across its 461 elementary schools, the board has 48,030 fewer students than its official capacity.
In its 98 high schools, it is operating 23,397 students under capacity. Those statistics leave the board’s enrolment falling short by the rough equivalent of 143 elementary schools and 28 high schools at typical current size.
“Closing anywhere near that many schools would cause destruction to our system and we’d start to go down the path of American cities that have had the heart taken out of them by losing schools,” warned board chair Chris Bolton.
While he admitted the board “will have to consolidate schools — and we can, we’re not slouches in this regard,” Bolton warned that closing too many too fast could “destroy people’s confidence in the system; they’d start worrying when they buy a house that the neighbourhood school could close two years later. “You don’t want to drive people from public schools,” he cautioned. “But as trustees, we’re going to have to have some hard, heart-toheart conversations.”
Those talks promise to be heated. Trustee Cathy Dandy called closing schools “the most wasteful, inefficient, myopic thing any government can consider, and (it) flies in the face of what every progressive jurisdiction is doing.” She called it foolish to close schools “at a time when kids have increasingly complex needs and we could be putting in mental health centres, health centres and programs for seniors” to better serve communities.
Dandy also dismissed as “ridiculous” the way the province calculates a school’s utilization rate, because it fails to include areas such as lunchrooms and parent centres.
But Education Minister Laurel Broten said Thursday she is remov- ing the cash crutches for underenrolled schools in urban areas because “it’s not prudent fiscal management to be turning on lights and heating for schools that are not operating at capacity. We’re looking at tough choices outside the classroom so we can protect full-day kindergarten, a cap on class sizes and teaching jobs.” The move will save an estimated $43.7 million in 2013-14 and $72.5 million in 2014-15. The government is giving boards a year before withdrawing the funding, but the process the province requires to close schools can take at least two years — one to consult the public in a cluster of neighbourhood schools, and another year to prepare the buildings for change, warned Daryl Sage, the TDSB’S director of strategy and planning. “We undertook 10 (closing) reviews in 2009-2010 and it involved 97 meetings and took two years to complete — and with our resources, that’s about as many as we can handle in a year,” Sage noted. “If we needed to close, say, 150 schools, and we closed 10 schools a year, it would still take us 15 years to reach that goal — yet the top-up grants are ending next year.” Sage added that enrolment is complex; many schools are overflowing — the board still has 500 portables in use — and some schools that seem underenrolled are used by the community in ways that don’t count in the formula. And with enrolment starting to creep back in early grades, plus fullday kindergarten and intensification downtown, Bolton worries about closing schools the board might need in future. However Sage said the board expects enrolment won’t climb back to 2002 levels until 2035, and that still wouldn’t fill all the empty seats.