Fifteen Classes, No Explanation
Christopher Allen — The Old Guardian
The Toronto District School Board’s 2026-27 budget presentation makes one claim clearly and repeatedly: there will be no reductions to school-based special education supports.
The board’s own Parent Involvement Advisory Committee didn’t buy it, and neither should you.
The question the board hasn’t answered
On June 10, 2026, PIAC formally adopted a set of recommendations, moved by Farheen Mahmood and seconded by Crystal Stewart, requesting written answers from TDSB staff on a long list of budget questions. Buried in that document, question 26, is one of the sharpest lines in the entire request:
“The presentation states that school-based special education staffing remains unchanged, yet 15 Diagnostic Kindergarten classes have reportedly been eliminated. Please provide enrollment data used to support the closures of these classes.”
That is not an accusation. It is a committee, the body specifically constituted to represent parents on exactly these questions, pointing directly at a contradiction in the board’s own materials and asking the board to explain itself.
As of this writing, more than a month later, there is no public record of that question being answered.
A second, independent voice says the same thing
PIAC’s question sat unresolved for weeks, one document, one claim, unconfirmed. Then, in the July 6 wave of school council letters sent directly to Supervisor Rohit Gupta, Cresthaven Public School’s council raised the same program, independently and without apparent knowledge of the PIAC document, describing what its letter calls “the dire situation in the school’s Diagnostic Kindergarten and ISP classes.”
Two sources. No connection to each other. Same specific program. Same conclusion: something is wrong with Diagnostic Kindergarten this year, and the board’s public claim that special education staffing is untouched does not match what parents and committee members are seeing.
Diagnostic Kindergarten classes exist to identify and support the youngest students with developmental delays and disabilities, before those needs compound into larger, more costly problems later in a child’s education. It is not a peripheral program. It is early intervention, the kind of support that is cheapest and most effective when it happens early, and most damaging to lose.
What the budget numbers actually show
The board’s own 2026-27 budget document offers a possible answer to how “no reductions” and “classes eliminated” can both be technically true at once.
The Special Education Fund itself is down $7.3 million this year, a 1.8 percent decline in absolute dollars. At the same time, the board’s public materials cite a 2.2 percent increase in special education spending per pupil. Both figures come from the same document. Both are accurate. They are not describing the same thing.
Per-pupil spending rises when the number of dollars falls more slowly than the number of students does. TDSB enrollment is projected to drop by 4,912 students this year. A shrinking total, divided among fewer children, can produce a larger number per child while the actual resources available to any given classroom, or any given Diagnostic Kindergarten program, shrink in real terms.
That is arithmetic. It is not evidence that support held steady. And it is entirely consistent with a board that can say “staffing is unchanged” in a budget presentation while individual schools report specific programs disappearing.
The pattern, not just the program
This isn’t really a story about fifteen classrooms. It’s a story about what happens when the only people asking hard, specific questions, a parent advisory committee and a handful of school councils, get silence in return, while the language in official presentations stays carefully worded enough to survive a surface read.
PIAC asked in writing, through the proper channel, more than a month ago. Cresthaven raised it independently through the letter campaign. Neither has received an answer. The board’s own numbers suggest a real explanation exists. Nobody at the TDSB has offered it.
Until they do, the claim that school-based special education staffing “remains unchanged” should be read for exactly what it is: a sentence that survives scrutiny only if nobody asks what’s underneath it.
Sources: TDSB Parent Involvement Advisory Committee, SCS.26.06.1, June 10, 2026. Cresthaven Public School Council letter to Supervisor Rohit Gupta, July 6, 2026. TDSB 2026-27 Budget, tdsb.on.ca.
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