Over the past year, the Ministry of Education has taken control of eight school boards in Ontario, including the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) and the Toronto Catholic District School Board (TCDSB). The Ministry has framed this unprecedented level of provincial intervention as necessary in response to concerns about financial sustainability, mismanagement, and fractious relations within some boards.
Amid this wave of takeovers, the Province expressed that changes must be made to school board governance and, on April 13, introduced Bill 101, Putting Student Achievement First Act, 2026, outlining its proposed reforms. Minister of Education Paul Calandra has indicated these changes are intended to reduce governance challenges, strengthen oversight and accountability, address financial mismanagement, and ensure greater consistency across the province. The legislation would significantly narrow the role of elected trustees, shifting many of their responsibilities into newly created positions, and limit boards to a maximum of 12 trustees.
Yet chronic underfunding and the outdated funding formula will remain largely untouched. Unfortunately, the trend of underfunding systems is not new—it was also documented in SPT’s recent research on the home care system. Despite being a wealthy province, many social and community services are working to meet the needs of Ontario’s large, diverse population with increasingly fewer resources. When funding formulas remain outdated for decades, systems become strained, reactive, and less able to deliver equitable outcomes. Restructuring oversight without modernizing the funding model risks shifting responsibility without addressing the root issue.
With city council and school board elections scheduled for October 26 and nominations opening on May 1, the proposed changes in Bill 101 are particularly consequential, raising significant questions about the future of local democratic representation in public education and what that means for students and families.
In this post, we will examine the important role that trustees play and how they will be affected if Bill 101 is passed, the financial challenges facing school boards, and the implications for local decision-making.
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Why Elected Trustees Matter and What Changes Are Proposed
School board trustees are democratically elected to represent the interests of specific communities within the public school system. Trustees serve as an important link between Ontario’s large, centralized public education system and local communities, ensuring that local voices are reflected in decisions. As elected officials, trustees are accountable to their constituents and play a key role in maintaining transparency, oversight, and democratic accountability in the governance of public education. For many trustees, particularly those in large, diverse urban centres like Toronto, advancing values of equity, inclusion, and opportunity within the school system is necessary to effectively represent their communities.
Many trustees enter the role with a strong desire to improve education and to do so in such a way that centres community voice and experience. Trustees are sometimes the most accessible elected officials for families, helping parents navigate complex school systems, advocating for students facing barriers, and ensuring that local realities shape board decisions. For many communities, including newcomers and low-income households, trustees can serve as a crucial point of access to public institutions. They have also played a pivotal role in advocating for students with disabilities/special education needs, helping these families navigate and access supports within an underfunded system that often falls short of meeting their needs.
Trustees also act as a bridge between school board administration and community by establishing and supporting committees that address operational, budget, policy, and governance issues. Many boards also have community- and equity-focused committees. The TDSB, for instance, has a number of Community Advisory Committees (CACs), including the Black Student Achievement CAC and the Urban Indigenous CAC. These committees provide important opportunities for students, parents, and community members to work alongside trustees to shape policies, programs, and budget decisions.
While trustees will continue to sit on committees, the proposed legislation would shift key responsibilities to two new bureaucratic roles—a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chief Education Officer (CEdO)—thereby limiting trustee decision-making authority, and, by extension, community input. The CEO would replace the Director of Education, require a business qualification, and be responsible for financial and operational oversight, including budget preparation. The CEdO would require a teaching qualification and focus on advancing student achievement. The CEO would be responsible for preparing the school board budget.1 Trustees can suggest amendments to the budget; however, if trustees can't agree on amendments, then the Ministry of Education will have the authority to step in and to make decisions. This change represents one of several that grant the Province greater control over local school board decisions and raises questions about the value of democratically elected trustees and community input.
While the proposed legislation would impose a maximum 12 trustees per school board, in practice this would only affect the Toronto District School Board, which currently has 22 trustees. This would bring it in line with the Toronto Catholic District School Board. Although both school boards serve the same geography, the TDSB is about 2.5 times larger than the TCDSB. The TDSB serves around 235,000 students in over 579 schools. The TCDSB serves around 84,000 students across 195 schools.
Despite the critical role trustees play, the position is formally considered part-time, compensated through an honorarium rather than a salary, and under-resourced by design. Under the current system, trustees receive a base amount of $5,900, with an additional amount tied to student enrollment. Even with this adjustment, compensation remains modest—for example, the honorarium for a trustee at the TDSB was $24,535 for the 2024-2025 term. Bill 101, if passed, would further reduce trustee compensation with a cap of $10,000 per year.
Trustees also operate with very limited institutional support. Unlike most elected officials, they typically do not have dedicated administrative staff or offices, meaning they must manage their own correspondence, scheduling, community engagement, and meeting preparation. The proposed legislation would further constrain this support by placing new limits on trustee discretionary spending—restricting allowable expenses to mileage or transportation costs when significant travel is required to attend board meetings and to essential tools such as a phone or computer.
Reducing compensation and further limiting institutional support risks making the role difficult to carry out as anything more than a secondary commitment. In practice, this would require most trustees to maintain full-time employment elsewhere, limiting their capacity to engage meaningfully with their communities and fulfill their governance responsibilities.
In narrowing the role and scope of elected trustees, Ontario families and communities would see a weakening of an integral part of the education system—one that helps ensure accountability, represents community voices in decision-making, advances equity-based initiatives, and strengthens the education system as a whole. Further restricting trustees’ responsibilities would not simply change school board governance—it would strain an important point of access and support for families navigating the system and fundamentally alter how communities participate in shaping their public education. Above all, and taken together with other recent legislative changes such as Bill 33, the proposed changes in Bill 101 would, if passed, further expand centralized provincial oversight and authority over school boards matters. This would widen the gap between those who make decisions about local schools and the families and communities most affected by those decisions, pushing issues of local consequence even further from the people they impact.
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The Financial Challenges Facing School Boards
The Province has cited concerns about financial mismanagement to justify taking greater control of school boards. Under the Education Act, the Province can assume control of a school board under three conditions:
- financial default or probable financial default,
- accumulated deficit or probable accumulated deficit,
- or serious financial mismanagement.
Bill 33, the Supporting Children and Students Act, 2025 which received Royal Assent on November 20, 2025, expanded these powers. The bill amended the Education Act to allow the Minister to order an investigation of a school board when there are concerns about whether trustees or directors of education are fulfilling their duties "in an appropriate manner." If necessary, these powers allow the Minister to issue directions or even vest control of the board under provincial supervision.
Prior to 2025, provincial supervision of Ontario school boards was relatively rare, affecting only a small number of school boards in more than two decades. In the past year alone, however, the Province has placed eight boards under supervision. The most common reason for the recent takeovers is financial problems, particularly concerns around deficits and financial sustainability. During supervision, trustees generally lose all governing authority and supervisors assume full control over governance, operations, and finances, and public decision-making processes become far less transparent.
Although the Province has pointed to record investments in public education, multiple analyses of education funding suggest a different trend. Research by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that Ontario school boards are receiving, on average, $260 less per student in the 2025-26 school year than in the 2018-19, once adjusted for inflation and enrolment. This amounts to a total funding gap of $561.7 million for the 2025-26 school year. The figure is even higher for school boards in Toronto, where the TDSB receives approximately $400 less per student and the TCDSB receives approximately $370 less per student.
Separately, an analysis from The Local found that the largest school boards are also the ones placed under supervision: six of the eight largest school boards are currently under supervision. These are also the school boards that receive the lowest levels of provincial funding per student.2 The TDSB, the largest school board in Ontario with 235,812 students, receives $14,650 per student—less money per student than any other board. At the other end of the spectrum, Conseil scolaire de district catholique des Aurores boréales, one of the smallest school boards with 841 students, receives the highest amount of funding per student at $37,501.
Taken together, this evidence suggests the challenges facing school boards is not simply a function of governance, but of a funding system that does not meet the needs of students. For years, researchers and advocates have called for a comprehensive review of Ontario’s education funding model.3 The current funding formula, which is heavily driven by student enrolment numbers, does not reflect the actual needs of students and communities and leaves some boards with significant funding gaps. These structural pressures are especially acute in large, urban boards. The TDSB, for example, spends more on special education than it receives, out of necessity rather than requirement, and operates school pools without any dedicated provincial funding.
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Equity Measures On the Line
The proposed Putting Student Achievement First Act, 2026 compounds boards’ financial pressures by significantly reducing trustee authority over budgets, resource allocation, and oversight. With financial decision-making shifting to a CEO and student achievement oversight moving to a Chief Education Officer, trustees—and the local families that have access to them—will have fewer opportunities to advocate for equity-based investments. In fact, the TDSB has already seen equity-focused initiatives rolled back since being placed under provincial supervision. For example, the provincially-appointed Supervisor, with the support of the Minister of Education, ended the TDSB’s lottery system for enrollment in specialized schools. The lottery system was implemented in an attempt to increase access to these programs for under-represented groups. Although the lottery system has come under scrutiny, proponents and opponents alike were concerned that the new enrollment process was decided on without community input.
More recently, the TDSB announced it would end its practice of allocating additional staff to high-needs schools using its data-driven Learning Opportunity Index (LOI). The LOI ranks elementary schools based on external factors known to impact student achievement, including household income, reliance on social assistance, parental education, and one-parent families. This decision to end the equitable distribution of teachers was made without trustee and community input and represents a step away from the board’s stated commitment to equity.
In addition to the implications already described, Bill 101 includes additional governance and accountability measures that, if passed, would grant more authority to the Province in the areas of capital projects and public communications by board officials.
Facilitating Community Voice
Teachers, students, parents, researchers, and community members would likely agree that Ontario’s public education system is in need of reform. However, the Province’s proposed reform to significantly limit trustee powers comes at a significant cost to students and families. Instead, the conversation should focus on how to strengthen trustee effectiveness and accountability, taking into account the important role they serve for communities, the responsibilities they hold, the financial powers available to them, and the limited recognition and institutional resources provided for the role.
Above all, the Province of Ontario must ensure that any proposal to change the public education system is grounded in meaningful community consultation, transparent public debate, and evidence-based research. The proposed Putting Student Achievement First Act, 2026 was prepared without robust community feedback, and opportunities to influence it during the legislative process are limited. Reforms that reshape the governance of public education should be transparent, carefully scrutinized, and guided by the communities that rely on the system every day.
Next Steps
Once a member of provincial parliament (MPP) proposes a bill it must go through the Legislative Assembly to become law. The bill is introduced with the first reading. The second reading gives MPPs an opportunity to debate and vote on the principle of the bill. Then the bill is referred to a committee. The Putting Student Achievement First Act, 2026 passed first and second readings, and is now referred to the Standing Committee on Social Policy. During this stage, the Committee can call witnesses, examine the bill in detail, and make amendments.
The Standing Committee on Social Policy is comprised of Members of Provincial Parliament including:
- Chair: Brian Riddell Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, Cambridge
- First Vice-Chair: France Gélinas New Democratic Party of Ontario, Nickel Belt
- Second Vice-Chair: Andrea Hazell Ontario Liberal Party, Scarborough—Guildwood
- Members: full list of committee members
The committee process can last anywhere from a few days to months, depending on how much work the committee is told to do. After the committee process, the bill, with any amendments, will be referred back to the House for a third reading. This is when the final decision on whether the bill passes will be made. While a date for the third reading of Bill 101 has not yet been confirmed, it could happen as soon as early May.
Take Action
In the months leading up to Bill 101, the Minister of Education indicated that all options were on the table, including the full elimination of trustees. However, in part thanks to the advocacy of parents and others, the proposed amendments to school board governance include keeping trustees. There is a clear need for this advocacy to continue.
As the Province considers Bill 101, Putting Student Achievement First Act, 2026, there is a critical opportunity to engage, learn more, and call for meaningful change—one that addresses the structural funding challenges facing school boards while safeguarding democratic representation in public education.
Participate in the Standing Committee on Social Policy
Members of the public can make written comments on Bill 101 to the Standing Committee on Social Policy. Guidelines for the content and format of submissions are provided on the Legislative Assembly website under ‘Submit materials to a committee’. The deadline for written comments is Monday, April 27 at 6pm and should be sent via the submission portal.
While the deadline to make an oral presentation on Bill 101 has passed, members of the public can attend the committee hearing on Monday, April 27 at the Legislative Building at Queen's Park.
Contact Elected Officials
You can also express your concerns and opinions with elected officials, including the Premier of Ontario Doug Ford, Minister of Education Paul Calandra, and your local Member of Provincial Parliament.
Hon. Doug Ford, Premier: [email protected]
Hon. Paul Calandra, Minister of Education: [email protected]
Find Out More and Get Involved in Local Campaigns
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Read the Media Briefing slide deck for Bill 101, Putting Student Achievement First Act, 2026. This provides an accessible overview of the changes proposed in Bill 101.
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The Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) is calling on the provincial government to immediately rescind Bill 33 and invest in what makes schools safe: smaller class sizes, more staff, and fully funded public education. Find out more and sign on.
- The Fund Our Schools campaign is a project of Toronto & York Region Labour Council, Elementary Teachers of Toronto and Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation – Toronto. Three goals of the campaign are to: 1) fund our schools: restore public education funding, 2) fix our schools: address the repair backlog, and 3) invest in our future: protect education funding for the future.
- Ontario Autism Coalition (OAC) is a registered non-profit with a mission to secure life-long, permanent, scientifically supported, government-funded therapy, treatment, and services for individuals with autism and their families. Their advocacy has focused on education funding and protecting democratic representation in education.
1 These changes to the budget process would only apply to English-language District School Boards.
2 The Local’s analysis examined funding through “Core Education Funding” (formerly “Grants for Student Needs”) which makes up the vast majority of boards’ revenues.
3 In 2002, an independent task force reviewed the education funding formula and recommended a comprehensive overall review every five years. In 2017, the Ontario Auditor General recommended a comprehensive review. These calls have been reiterated by teachers unions.