If the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board approved a fifth consecutive deficit budget, it could have been placed under provincial supervision, trustees heard on March 18.
Trustees at Ottawa’s largest school board have reluctantly voted seven-to-five in favour of a plan featuring the elimination of 150 jobs.
“We really can’t run another deficit budget,” Ottawa-Carleton District School Board chair Lynn Scott said. “We are out of reserves, and I am heartened by the fact that in this staff appear to have done their utmost to ensure that classroom staffing will be protected.”
The OCDSB is facing a $20-million deficit on its $1.2-billion budget for the 2025-26 school year and anticipates a slight decrease in enrolment next year.
The board is under a contractual obligation to finalize numbers for academic staff such as teachers by March 25. At the same time, the OCDSB does not have the provincial funding numbers for the coming school year, although an increase is not expected.
That has left trustees between a rock and a hard place. After four years of deficit budgets, there is no money left in OCDSB reserves. If the board approved a fifth consecutive deficit budget, it could be placed under provincial supervision, trustees heard on March 18.
Under the Ontario Education Act, school boards must produce a balanced budget. If that does not happen, the province may appoint an investigator to review the financial and administrative affairs of a school board, reporting to the education minister.
A supervisor may be appointed by the minister to take control over the administration of the board, with the authority to take whatever action the supervisor thinks is necessary to manage school board affairs.
Evening Update
“We are being monitored. We don’t want that monitoring to go to supervision. Things will be much, much, much worse,” trustee Donna Blackburn said.
“I’m not prepared to take the chance of seeing what supervision looks like.”
Failure to approve a budget and and being under supervision by the province could result in decisions that would be out of the board’s control and that would be made “without any thought whatsoever for community values and the important things that are in our community,” Scott said.
“I think it’s better that we approve the academic staffing now, meet our contractual obligations with our teacher certified staff and look to continue to advocate very hard to see improvements in the funding before we have to make a final decision on the remainder of the staffing.”
The cuts in the plan include about 80 non-academic positions, saving $7.08 million, and about 70 staff in discretionary academic roles such as e-learning, saving $8.823 million.
The staffing allocation would also be decreased by 46.78 full-time equivalent positions due to the modest projected decrease in enrolment next fall.
Reductions will be applied across all offices, services, departments and portfolios, including senior staff, director of education Pino Buffone said.
“We’re looking to make reductions, starting with my own team, for all the right reasons,” he said, “because we’re trying to apply to difficult decisions across the system.”
Small details were revealed March 18 as trustees questioned senior administrators, including that 14 education assistant positions would be among the cuts.
Trustee Lyra Evans said she was disappointed by the lack of detail in the report made available to the public and trustees.
“I’m just going to vote this down. I don’t feel I have been provided with enough information to make an informed decision,” she said.
“I don’t believe we can understand the impact to our equity programming, to our special education programming, or to our low-income communities with the information we have been provided.”
Many trustees placed blame squarely on the Ontario government. The province has chosen to underfund the school board, trustee Amanda Presley said. Provincial grants do not cover the costs of hiring replacements for absent staff, the budget has taken a hit through inflation and short-term funding for services such as transportation will end this year, she said.
“I am very upset that staff around this table have been forced to make these decisions and bring us this plan, which I know they worked very hard on, to cut positions that no one wants to cut,” Presley said.
“It’s a brilliant plan on the part of the government,” trustee Suzanne Nash said, “because we can’t raise taxes, and we’re the scapegoat.”
Staffing consumes about 81 per cent of the board’s budget, with academic staffing accounting for $659 million and non-academic staffing — including education assistants — accounting for about $315 million.
The number of “required” teacher positions is generated by a provincial formula based on enrolment, class size and collective agreement requirements. That includes classroom teachers, student success teachers, guidance teachers, learning support teachers and teacher-librarians in high schools, as well as reading intervention teachers in elementary schools.
“Discretionary” academic positions include principals and vice-principals, special education teachers, English as a Second Language teachers, instructional coaches and consultants.
“I understand that $14 million of our deficit is from overspending on special education, and that’s because we do go above and beyond as a district,” trustee Nili Kaplan-Myrth said.
“It’s not a large number of EAs (education assistants) that are proposed to be cut compared to the number that we have. But we fought very hard as a group of trustees to add the EAs just a year ago.”
The staffing reductions are to come through attrition, including retirements and resignations, not filling vacant positions and eliminating positions.
Senior administrators are scheduled to meet with teachers’ unions on March 26. The education assistants are under a different contract, and more details about those staffing decisions are to be announced later this spring.
Even with the staff cuts, the OCDSB will still be looking for an additional $4 million in savings, to come during the remainder of the budget process.
