TDSB under supervision: Special needs kids face a bureaucratic maze

William Paul  – 2025-09-18

With over 40 000 special needs students attending Toronto District School Board (TDSB) schools, it’s easy to understand why parents are concerned about navigating a system which often appears opaque. Until the Ford government replaced TDSB trustees with an appointed supervisor, they at least had someone to whom they could turn for help dealing with the  maze of requirements for their kids to get help, the uncertain assurances for help to come and the fear for their kids when those plans fell short due to lack of funding or staff.

In early June at the last Special Education Advisory Committee (SEAC) meeting of the school year, parents once again came forward with worries for their kids. Mehreen spoke of a growing reliance on unqualified people to replace unavailable staff. Yolanda said she couldn’t find a safe kindergarten placement for her nonverbal autistic daughter who escapes from class, puts foreign objects in her mouth and throws things at people. She wanted something more appropriate for her child but after pushing her case through the prescribed complaint process was told that the assessment to determine whether her daughter could get special treatment had been denied.

There was nothing new about this. At a SEAC Town Hall in November 2024, more parents related similar experiences: a child on an assessment waiting list for years, another with severe autism lacking a safety plan, parents told that support for their child would have to come at the expense of help for another, a child with attention and learning problems sitting in the school office for weeks at a time. Over and over, SEAC has heard from parents about their special needs kids being excluded from school if the principal doesn’t think they have the resources to keep them or the students around them safe. They can refuse admission to school under  Ontario’s Education Act (section 265m.1 ).

 

TDSB without trustees

At last week’s TDSB SEAC meeting parents had serious questions about the changes that have come with the ascendance of the board’s supervisor Rohit Gupta. SEAC member Nora Green said that trustees were “public facing”, elected and answerable to parents who would reach out to them. Trustees would mediate situations like those above. Now that they’re gone, what do families do when they hit a brick wall with local principals? Next on the list of people to contact on the mandated Parent Concern Protocol are superintendents. But none of them have public emails – by the way, you could solve that problem today just by posting them. Without the trustees, Supervisor Gupta is next on the contact line. His email should replace those of the trustees, but realistically, what are the chances of getting a response from him?

SEAC chair David Lepofsky was looking for anything positive that might come from the takeover. He asked Associate Director, Louise Sirisko, if the supervisor would approach the Ministry of Education (MOE) to support “more robust funding” for special education. Currently the TDSB is about $38 million in the hole for this budget line. Sirisko said that Minister Paul Calandra would listen to suggestions about changing the budget. But she had a curious take on the current funding process: all students get a per-pupil amount just for being at school. More money is provided to cover those who are either identified under a category of special need or just clearly need  extra help. Fine, but this doesn’t explain why the TDSB and other boards are often short funded. It’s clear that there needs to be a better way to fund special education.

Lepofsky also raised the question of repeating last November’s SEAC Town Hall, noting that TDSB staff decided not to go ahead with the original proposal. Without trustees or meetings to hear parent delegations, would staff reconsider this decision? But without trustee advocates, a decision like that really is up to staff.

 

What about the Special Education Plan?

And  what about Supervisor Gupta’s reversal of the trustees‘  vote against TDSB staff’s proposed Special Education Plan in June? This raises critical questions about both trustees’ roles – should they ever be reinstated – and staff prerogative.

Every year, school boards must submit a special education plan to MOE. This year, the one proposed by TDSB staff included increased caps on sizes of two different kinds of special education classes. Lepofsky spoke against this change at the June 18 Board meeting noting that it entailed a “…blank cheque – across the board permission”1 to act on class size limits. It was a way of saying “just trust us” that left parents of these kids holding the bag if it was their child’s class size that was raised. Once again, they’d be left to struggle with TDSB staff to resolve the situation.

Trustees were being asked to vote on a plan that contained a class size increase they didn’t want to approve. This led to an awkward but fundamental question from Trustee Alexis Dawson: “what is governance and what is operations and what are we approving versus what will go ahead irrespective of our approval.” 2 

CirclesHere’s the issue. Board staff apparently have the final say over operational matters like staffing, who to hire and promote, maintaining schools and so on. This is accepted practice though David Lepofsky, a lawyer, challenges the board to point to the section of the Education Act or regulation that says so. What this all came down to then was a proclamation from Director Clayton Latouche that a special education plan containing an unwanted class size increase needed to be passed by trustees based on his assurance that it was “quite robust.”3

To make that clearer Associate Director Louise Sirisko, explained that it was outside the purview of elected trustees to do other than decide whether or not the special education plan was “in alignment with legislation”4 which it was, she argued, because staff said so.

Just trust us.

Here’s Trustee Dawson: “So we are simply adding a stamp of approval not to the actual content of the plan but to the checklist of criteria that plan meets.”

Sirisko: “That is correct.”5

Whatever anyone might think about the distinction between governance and operations, it’s pretty clear that increasing special education class sizes could well be the thin edge of the wedge to make more of them larger; it’s a solution to the governance problem of not having enough money to run programmes. So, this looks like a governance matter slipped into a requirement to approve the plan.

Trustees saw through the ruse and voted against accepting the plan. They were summarily turfed out at the end of the school year by Paul Calandra who perversely complains that these elected officials just have too much power. Rohan Gupta, the supervisor with no experience working in education, reversed their decision and staff got what they wanted: their Special Education Plan approved for MOE. The Special Education Advisory Committee wasn’t asked what they thought about the reversal, even though it is supposed to be consulted.

 

Dark tower

What now? Parents looking for help to mediate tough situations for their special needs kids aren’t going to find it soon. The supervisor doesn’t answer emails, posts his decisions periodically and is otherwise unavailable to anyone who wants to know what is happening within the dark tower that has become the TDSB. Questions put to Louise Sirisko about Board versus staff purview, reasons for reversing the decision on the special education plan and whether a special education town hall might go ahead were met with a request from TDSB Communications to direct such queries to MOE.

David Lepofsky hopes that, there might still be opportunities to address issues like exclusions of special needs kids, accessibility and underfunding. Now that trustees are gone, he adds that SEAC has new responsibilities to use its platform. Like so many issues facing parents and students, people connected to special education must bring more and broader organization within the community to fight the creeping authoritarianism that is replacing elected trustees with a maze of bureaucracy.

 

 

Notes:

  1. David Lepofsky, TDSB – Regular Board Meeting, June 18, 2025 Time stamp: 1:01:15
  2. Alexis Dawson, TDSB – Regular Board Meeting, June 18, 2025 Time stamp: 4:07:34 https://www.youtube.com/live/9-8NovC7qdg
  3. Clayton Latouche, TDSB – Regular Board Meeting, June 18, 2025 https://www.youtube.com/live/9-8NovC7qdg Time stamp: 4:08:25
  4. Louise Sirisko, Regular Board Meeting, June 18, 2025 Time stamp: https://www.youtube.com/live/9-8NovC7qdg 4:11:56
  5. Alexis Dawson, TDSB – Regular Board Meeting, June 18, 2025 Time stamp: 4:14:01 https://www.youtube.com/live/9-8NovC7qdg

 

Further reading:

Report to Toronto District School Board Special Education Advisory Committee, 2025-09-02. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qefrSFrLdB7TJpJPR_hithsDoOrwqVNw/edit