It’s dark without trustees; parent organizing is the light
As an American in your gracious country, I was raised with certain adages of civic reason and responsibility drilled into my head. Among them: “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” To combat English tyranny (as the story goes), the founding fathers of the United States devised “a system of checks and balances” to ensure that no one small group or individual could run the country into dysfunction or dictatorship.
It may help us to think about checks and balances, or the lack thereof, in relation to public education in Ontario. After two years of heavy parent organizing, my assessment is this: the role of trustee is a critical one, but only insofar as trustees are empowered to check school board staff and balance the Ministry of Education on behalf of families. Without these levers, they are useless — and perhaps even counterproductive.
Last June, the TDSB staff wielded unchecked power across two seemingly unconnected issues: 1) arbitrary principal transfers and 2) the passing of a special education plan. On both matters, trustees rejected staff proposals but were subsequently told by the director of education and other senior staff that the prescribed plans would move forward regardless. These overreaching moves by staff are plausibly defensible thanks to the legacy of an education consultant named Margaret Wilson. In her 2015 report to the Ministry (then controlled by Liberals), Wilson alleged a culture of bullying among trustees towards staff and accordingly recommended taking steps to reduce trustee power, including a reduction of pay and administrative support, and the elimination of office space. But most concerningly, her report effectively sought to bequeath absolute power to staff over so-called “operational” decisions. The fallacy of this recommendation is that there is no real distinction between operational decision-making and policy, if the former is consequential to the lives of students. Despite cries at the time that the changes were anti-democratic, Wilson’s recommendations were adopted.
In theory, the trustee serves as the “parent voice” in the stewardship of public education. But when a majority of trustee votes are openly trumped by board staff, then trustees – the families they represent – are all silenced. The staff’s silencing of trustees at the June 2025 board meeting punctuated years of trustee inability to mount successful resistance to the Ministry’s direct and indirect funding cuts.
The “No Cuts” budget position, which was advocated for by me and others including labour unions and a minority of trustees, holds that by bifurcating funding responsibility to the Ministry on one hand and education delivery to the board on the other, parent complaints are shuffled around, with neither party in a position to take full accountability. If the goal is to ensure that the Ministry step up as the responsible party for education, then the trustees, serving as docile Ministry scapegoats, are obstacles to achieving that. Reinforcing the notion that weak trustees are unwitting executioners of public education were comments made by Trustee Dan MacLean during the June 2024 board meeting, wherein he ruefully admitted that despite his high hopes, his role as trustee has been to effectively manage the decline of public education. This year’s budget vote only magnified the continuing weakness of trustees, who caved to cuts in hopes that good behaviour would forestall a takeover. As it turned out, they passed budget cuts like good boys and girls but were still taken over.
My message to locked-out trustees is this: parents will defend you most enthusiastically when you show up ready for a fight. Even though you don’t officially have a job you still have a greater platform than most to organize and speak out. Kudos to the ones who haven’t stopped.
That said, if we are going to win back trustees as institutional stewards of public education, we must be explicit that we cannot return to the status quo. Rather, we need trustees to have the political capital of regular elected officials, whose collective vote has the power to override staff decision-making, and whose chair should have an open line of communication to the Minister. At the same time, we can’t give absolute powers to trustees either, as Margaret Wilson’s report expressed, and we certainly can’t give it to the Minister, as the proposed Bill 33 does.
Allow me to propose that the third leg of the governance stool must be the independent advisory committees that are already mandated for each board under the Education Act. In the TDSB, these are known as the Parent Involvement Advisory Committee (PIAC) and the Special Education Advisory Committee (SEAC). Like the trustees, these bodies also need teeth, perhaps with an escalation channel that leads straight to the Attorney General if its recommendations to correct Education Act deficiencies are not being taken seriously by board staff, trustees, and even the Ministry itself. Moreover, it is only by standing in solidarity across multiple boards that these advisory committees have a chance to compel the current government to deploy more funding in the short term, and a more responsive education funding process in the long term.
For this school year, I proposed a multi-pronged strategy:
Through the front door: Respectful outreach to the Minister by PIAC/PICs province-wide, leaning into conservative narratives about parent choice, if necessary. This is the time to build and strengthen structural mechanisms for parent power in a way that is taken seriously by decision-makers.
Through the side door: Vociferous push back on Bill 33, which allows the Minister direct and unilateral control over board activities through amendments to the Education Act. If passed, Bill 33 would, among other things, mandate the involvement of police officers in schools and allow the Minister full “control and charge” over the sale of board property, through one of its regulations, including the right to identify a specific buyer. Note that individuals representing organizations can request to testify as a committee witness here: https://www.ola.org/en/apply-committees
Through the back door: While pressure on the Minister’s office is always valuable, the supervisor holds a great deal of sway. If a finding is not in his report, it simply won’t be taken seriously. Therefore, please direct an unrelenting flood of emails to Rohit Gupta (rohit.gupta@tdsb.on.ca and/or supervisor@tdsb.on.ca) demanding that i) he recognize the existence of the structural deficit and recommend that the province pay what it owes, and ii) that he direct staff to take seriously recommendations from PIAC and SEAC. To facilitate you family’s individual complaints, the Fund Our Schools campaign has also made a communication tool to track your concerns as well as the timing of the supervisor’s response: https://www.fundourschools.ca/send-a-message
In summary, if we are being intellectually honest, we have to admit that our trustees were well-intentioned and hard-working but nevertheless failed to stop educational decline. Their absence for the moment brings disconcerting political darkness but also presents an opportunity to hold the Ministry directly accountable, bridging the institutional gap between funding and education delivery. In the meantime, sidelined trustees (and other organizers) still have the opportunity to raise parent engagement around the need for more funding and against unilateral ministerial decision-making proposed by Bill 33. In the long-term, if and when trustees are reinstated, they must be oriented to check school board staff and engage directly with senior ministry officials, especially concerning funding issues. At the same time, parent and special education advisory committees from across the province should be elevated to ensure that no one party, as among the director of education, trustees, and the Ministry itself, can ever hold unilateral powers over public education. Above all, students and families in the TDSB and across Ontario urgently need transparent mechanisms that identify student needs and inform funding decisions according to high standards for human rights, academic achievement, and a diversity of opportunities for an incredibly diverse population of students. In this temporary moment of darkness, I’m betting on parent involvement to get us there.
Please checkout www.torontopiac.com for more information on PIAC.
For more on the role of parent power in the time of Ministry supervision, please watch my discussion with former Premier of Ontario Kathleen Wynne, TDSB Trustee Matias De Dovitiis, and disability rights lawyer David Baker: https://youtu.be/Xr2pmqf0olw.
Katrina Matheson is a parent of 2 students in the TDSB and organizer with the Toronto Schools Caregiver Coalition (TSCC)