u/CardiologistTypical9

Disclosure first: I run a small Ontario advocacy site and there's a longer illustrated version of this there — link near the bottom, after the sources.

The way I ended up thinking about it: public education is a car the public owns. We paid for it, our name is on it, and we're still making the payments. The question I got interested in is who's actually holding the keys — and it turns out almost every answer changed in the last two years.

They took the keys. Eight boards have been placed under provincial supervision since 2025. After a vesting order the Minister has control over the board's officers and employees, its revenues and expenditures, its assets and liabilities, its estimates, and the sale of its assets. Your elected trustee is not in that sentence anywhere.

Then they blamed the driver. Deficits were the case for stepping in. But look at the supervised boards' own approved 2026–27 budgets: TDSB about $15M, TCDSB $39M, Dufferin-Peel $36.4M, OCDSB $3.5M. Those are real reductions from worse numbers and the supervisors inherited real pressures — but if the deficit is the proof that trustees were the problem, it's worth asking why the deficit outlived the trustees.

Then the easy parts came off. In Dufferin-Peel, $3.4M of the supervisor's savings came from cutting vice-principal, consultant, senior-management and central-office positions, plus attrition. That's the layer that answers the phone when you need a placement sorted, a plan written, or coverage found.

Then the core systems. The Act lets the Minister set binding policy on what boards say publicly, approve board estimates with conditions, and it bars a board from dismissing its own director of education without the Minister's prior written approval. And the one closest to us: CODE now sits where OPSBA and OCSTA used to, as the employer bargaining agency. Per OECTA's brief the Minister can replace CODE if it proves "unable or unwilling," and CODE's committee can set a process that doesn't require voting at all. OSSTF/FEESO's submission notes the consultation window was two weeks, with central bargaining about to open.

Then the value gets routed. For specified capital work the Minister can select a "person or body" to exercise board powers over project management, revenues and expenditures, contracts and vendors — and direct the board to pay its fees. For scale: the FAO put school buildings at $123.3B replacement value with a $6.5B repair backlog as of March 2024.

What's left is the shell. Property not needed within ten years must be sold. Dufferin-Peel books roughly $17.5M from two property sales to help close its gap, and its own budget calls that one-time and not sustainable. Meanwhile the statute is explicit that good-faith immunity for people acting in these roles does not relieve the board of liability it would otherwise carry.

So: the public still owns it. The public still pays for it. The public may still carry the liabilities. The decisions, the direction and the value are increasingly somewhere else.

Is that a corporate raid or is it repair? Honestly, I can't prove the first one and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. The government's position is that supervision restores accountability and pushes money into classrooms, and some of those reductions are consistent with that. What I can say is that the structure matches the pattern — discredit management, take control, strip overhead, take the core functions, monetize the assets, leave the original owner holding the obligations — and that the machinery to finish the job now exists in statute.

The thing I'd watch for, and the reason I'm posting rather than concluding: as of August 2026 I can't find a single case of the Minister handing a board's contracts or capital work to a private firm under those new powers. No P3 school builds either. If that changes, this stops being an argument about structure. If it doesn't, then this is a centralization story and it should be called one.

I drew the whole sequence out as seven illustrations, with every statement tagged as documented fact, government position, analysis or open question and the source behind each one — that's here if it's useful: https://www.endthewaitontario.com/investigations/the-car-is-public

Things I genuinely don't know, if anyone here does:

• Is the SBCBA s. 21 amendment actually proclaimed and in force, or still awaiting commencement?
• Has anyone's local heard anything concrete about how CODE is running the employer side?
• Is there any published criteria for when a supervised board gets its elected trustees back?

Happy to be corrected on any of it.

Parent of an autistic kid here, not a teacher, so feel free to tell me where I've got this wrong.

I've been going through the May 2026 Auditor General special education audit and some of the numbers genuinely stopped me. The one in the title is real: three Toronto Catholic schools, each serving 14 children assessed at the highest level of need. One school staffed 9 education assistants. One staffed 3. One staffed 2. Same needs profile, same board. The only variable is the building.

The other findings, since I assume a lot of you lived this audit rather than read it:

• 18% of EAs absent on any given day, and 49–72% of those absences never filled by a qualified replacement
• only 21% of teachers in inclusive classrooms said they could meet most of their special-ed students' needs most of the time
• 87% said they sometimes, rarely, or never had the resources to actually implement an IEP
• kids waiting on a board psychoed assessment: a third had waited over a year at two of the audited boards. Families who paid $2,500–4,500 privately got supported sooner.

What worries me is the timing. Eight boards covering roughly a third of Ontario's schools are now under provincial supervision, and the supervisor's mandate is to balance the budget. The most expensive line in any school budget is exactly this — EAs, assessments, IEP supports. ETFO is already reporting cuts to special ed under supervision.

I pulled the audit findings together with the staffing data here if anyone wants the sourced version: https://www.endthewaitontario.com/the-most-expensive-child#cost (parent-run, everything cited to the AG report / FAO / FOI records)

My actual question for this sub: from inside the classroom, is the EA absence/non-replacement number low, accurate, or worse than the audit captured? And for those at supervised boards — have you seen special ed touched yet, or is it too early?

I ask because my kid is one of the 67,509 still waiting on OAP funding, and for a lot of those kids, the EA is the only consistent public support they get. If that line gets cut to balance a book, I'd like to know before it happens, not after.