Why is Toronto DSB trying to erase high schools for special needs kids?
~ TDSB Multi-Year Strategic Plan
This bureaucratic utterance doesn’t exactly ring with hope and promise. But it’s just hollow when you stack it up against recent announcements to cut off enrolment for grades 9 and 10 next year at Heydon Park SS and Eastdale CI. Parents of the vulnerable students who attend these two small schools are worried for the future of their children and they’re angry about it. The Toronto DSB, operating under its cone of silence, has no response. There has been no consultation about the decision and of course, no challenge from elected TDSB trustees whose work and access to the Board was halted when they were suspended by Education Minister Paul Calandra last year.
Falling through the cracks
The TDSB is failing its students with special needs. I think the reasons for this are varied but stem largely from the Ministry of Education (MOE) as a report from Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (ETFO) explained last spring about conditions for special needs kids across the province.
The TDSB’s Special Education Advisory Committee (SEAC) held a Town Hall meeting in November 2024 so that parents of the board’s roughly 41 000 special needs students could air troubling stories about the treatment of their kids: lack of appropriate help, exclusion from school used as part of a safety plan, lack of staff support, years of waiting for a needs assessment. As SEAC chair David Lepofsky said: “It was a game changer” – so much so that the Board refused his request to have another.
A board as huge as the TDSB represents all kinds of young people with physical, social, cognitive, mental health and developmental variations. For years, there’s been a debate about how to best help young people without cutting them off from their peers: what’s called the least restrictive environment. Inclusion in the regular classroom has long been held up as the highest standard who despite the
ir needs, should learn alongside their peers.
But if inclusion really means diminished support for young people, it is the most restrictive environment. It leads to all the problems above: students unable to manage in regular classrooms because there is so little help available. For instance, MOE funds about enough for a classroom teacher with 3 special needs students in their class to get help from an educational assistant about once a week.
Imagine what it must feel like to be an adolescent with extremely complex needs. These are kids who haven’t succeeded in regular schools or have been unable to attend at all. They are isolated and frightened to be there. These are kids for example, with mild intellectual differences combined with autism, physical and mental health issues – all of which interact with each other to make life in a regular school terrifying. These are LGBTQ and transgendered kids trying to figure out who they are. They need a haven, not a bean counters’ version of inclusion. Imagine, what it’s like to be a parent searching for such a place.
These schools are havens
For years Heydon Park SS and Eastdale CI have fit the bill for these kids. Their smaller enrolment of about 130 and 120 students, helps. They offer individualized programmes leading to a high school diploma or certificate, teach students life and employment skills in areas like fashion, culinary arts and photography, have small classes and parents say, a dedicated staff: “angels.” Parents from both schools told me about the remarkable progress their children had made. One spoke of their son who had struggled in a full-time Mild Intellectual Disabilities (MID) class for middle school who is now thriving at Eastdale. This is a young man who presents with MID, Autism, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and anxiety. He’s now working towards his secondary school diploma. A Heydon Park parent described their child as having a range of intellectual deficits – able to read at a grade 4 level, but completely unable to manage in a large secondary school. Teachers at Heydon Park help her deal with physical needs and understand enough about kids like her to help her learn things that weren’t possible before she arrived at the school.
One parent explained that because of psychiatric issues, their daughter hadn’t even been able to attend school before she arrived at Heydon Park; since then she’s been there every day. There’s no chance of her negotiating her way through the hallways of a regular secondary school, but she feels at home and safe at the smaller school. Another student was tolerated at elementary school, but didn’t make friends because she was different. She presents with physical disabilities, PTSD, ADHD, cognitive issues and anxiety. She’s made friends at Heydon Park, where her parent says she is “100% supported”. Teachers found her a walker, then another device to help her stand up. This isn’t something teachers normally do. The school is the “best kept secret” in the Board.
Crickets from the Board
The TDSB has little explanation to offer parents worried about the future of these schools and what will happen to their children. Superintendent Anastasia Poulos sent a letter to Eastdale parents outlining its low “utilization rate” and only 4 students registered for grade 9 next year. She assures parents that “staff will offer placements at other schools where more program choices will be available.” Parents asked: “What does that mean?” Likewise, Jennifer Chan, superintendent for Heydon Park cited “very low registration numbers” as the reason for cutting off enrolment. Not much comfort there.
The Board’s media department is sticking to this narrative. There were no answers to my questions about who made the decision to cut off enrolment or whether it was related to MOE spending priorities. The same was true for information about “placements at other schools.” How would the Board would deal with students who likely wouldn’t do well with the change?. What about encouraging more enrolment at the two schools? Surely with 41 000 special needs kids across the TDSB, there might be some more of them who could be helped at Eastdale and Heydon Park?
The parents with whom I spoke certainly aren’t buying what the Board is saying: Why does the Board not promote these schools? Why has it cut off open houses, so parents can see what the schools have to offer? Why do they have to find the schools themselves or hear about them from someone else? Why not promote the schools at Identification Placement and Review Committee (IPRC) meetings held each year to plan for the future as special needs students approach secondary school age?
Trustee Michelle Aarts told me that in discussions over the Secondary Alternative School (SAS) Review, Eastdale had been identified as a possible venue for faltering alternative schools that needed another space. The 2024 report on their status noted that they tend to “engage a higher proportion of students with Special Education Needs, 2SLGBTQ+IA students, students with mental health concerns, and students looking for a less traditional school to support their graduation goals. In many instances, students noted that SAS is a lifeline for them and is the main reason they have continued in school learning.”1 Since then, no other work has been done. All reviews are on hold.
What’s really going on here?
As with so many issues the TDSB faces like removing class size caps and the inadequacy of the Family Service Office, speculation naturally moves into the spaces left by the Board’s unremitting silence. What is actually going on here?
Are these schools going to be sold? Currently there is a moratorium on closing schools, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen under a government that does as it pleases. There is some fine reporting by journalist Gabe Oatley of Toronto Today describing a November 2025 meeting in which TDSB supervisor, Rohit Gupta, signalled a possible change to the mandate of the Toronto Lands Corporation(TLC). This is a wholly owned subsidiary of the TDSB that manages its real estate portfolio worth between $15 and $20 billion. In the past, real estate sales were supposed to serve the interests of local communities. Now that could change. Trustees no longer sit on the TLC board and it doesn’t report to them. A recent regulation under the Education Act gives more control to the Education Minister regarding the circumstance of land sales, particularly to whom board properties might be sold. This is a government currently under investigation by the RCMP over cronyism related to land acquisitions across the Greenbelt.
Is education for special needs students being lost in Paul Calandra’s power play against school boards across the province? He has placed 8 school boards under supervision now, leaving trustees with no influence to support their constituents. His boss, Doug Ford says the Tories haven’t decided whether or not to remove trustees as a level of government. But, as things stand, they cannot provide a voice for parents worried about their children being lost in the maw of TDSB bureaucracy.
The Board’s SEAC chair, David Lepofsky wrote last week: “TDSB’s Supervisor (Rohit Gupta) has implemented none of the recommendations that TDSB’s SEAC forwarded to him to improve education for students with disabilities/special education needs and has not given SEAC an opportunity to be heard on them before making his decision.” Instead, Gupta has raised the cap on class size for both regular and special education classes and put out a budget survey asking parents to prioritize the need for special education supports and resources; this a requirement under the Education Act not an optional extra. He does not attend SEAC meetings which are no longer live-streamed; the community cannot see what the TDSB is doing to support special needs or those of any other young people in its community.
What future is unfolding?
How much does the Ford government care about any people who are different, who don’t have enough money for a post-secondary education, who can’t find affordable housing or sufficient food, who are drug-addicted? While he cuts Ontario Student Award Programme grants, he admonishes the students who can scrape together funds to attend college or university to avoid “basket weaving” courses because Ontario needs engineers, coders and tradespeople. Where do the kids from Heydon Park and Eastdale fit into this dystopia?
Sara Ehrhardt, trustee for Eastdale asks what will happen to kids who can no longer find a safe place at that school. How will we even hear about what comes of them? It’s what powerful politicians and their friends do that’s so significant – through their silence and lack of transparency. Deborah Williams is the trustee for Heydon Park who has fought to keep the school viable and thinks that it benefits, not just the students who go there, but the public good. The province she says, is focused on privatization and austerity. It is “treating our students like widgets in a grand machine. They’re not widgets.”