The provincially-appointed supervisor at Ottawa’s largest school board says holding town halls with parent councils has helped to shape some unexpected priorities for the $87-million capital budget.
Three of those priorities for the
Ottawa-Carleton District School Board
came up repeatedly while he was speaking with council chairs: air conditioners for classrooms, water quality and public address systems that work properly, said Bob Plamondon, who was
appointed as supervisor last June
.
Plamondon does not give media interviews and elected trustees no longer make decisions at the
OCDSB
, one of six school boards under provincial supervision. However, Plamondon often gives updates when he addresses three provincially-mandated committees, including the parent involvement committee, known as PIC, a volunteer advisory body that meets six times a year.
Plamondon announced in November that he
planned to hold meetings
with the chairs of school councils as a pilot project to learn what’s important to families. Some have questioned why more people can’t attend the meetings, but Plamondon has argued that the format is more effective with fewer people.
The town hall exercise has been helpful in terms of generating ideas and “informing the budget” Plamandon told the members of PIC on Wednesday.
“Facilities was a very common subject that was brought up at these these meetings,” he said. “For example, in the rural schools, they talked about water quality. Not that the water was unsafe, but it may have had an odour, it was unpleasant.”
Other school councils reported that their PA systems were not working the way that it should. That’s a safety issue, said Plamondon.
But the top issue was air conditioning in the classrooms. That came up over and over again.
The capital budget has changed as a result. These three items were not covered anywhere in the $87-million capital capital budget, said Plamondon.
“So we’re going in with our RFPs (requests for proposal) right now on capital spending, with new RFPs in these areas.”
That means some things had to fall off of the capital budget priority list, said Plamondon. One example is solar panels.
“There were many millions of dollars allocated to solar panels, which is a good initiative to have that provide some electricity sustainability,” he told the members of PIC. “But when I think about the priorities around student success and well being, these three areas that I’ve referenced — and there were others — rose to the top.”
Air conditioning in schools has been raised as a perennial issue across the province, including by teachers’ unions. During a heat wave last June, the OCDSB said
not all schools have air conditioning
, although all have at least one area with partial or portable air conditioning such as a gymnasium, main office or library.
A report from the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario released in December 2024 found that almost a third of OCDSB school buildings are
below a “state of good repair.”
At the time, the OCDSB faced an estimated backlog of $882 million for renewal projects, not including administrative buildings not used as learning sites.
Elected trustee Donna Blackburn, who attended the PIC meeting, said it’s very expensive to retrofit older schools with air conditioning and the money has to be spent strategically.
“Every year we do some upgrades to air conditioning,” she said. “But we don’t have the money, nor does any other board, to get air conditioning throughout every school. This is a province-wide issue.”
Meanwhile, solar panels reduce operating costs, and they also generate money for the OCDSB by selling excess electricity to the grid, said Blackburn.
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