The Board That Answers No One
Christopher Allen — The Old Guardian
Thirteen school councils. Two waves of letters. Zero replies.
Between June 22 and July 6, 2026, parent-elected school councils across the Toronto District School Board sat down and did the thing Regulation 612 says they exist to do: they wrote to the person now running their children’s education system and told him, in plain language, what was actually happening in their buildings. Not talking points. Not survey data massaged for a press release. Direct accounts from Bowmore Road, Montrose, Perth Avenue, Williamson Road, Carleton Village, Cresthaven, Swansea, Annette Street, Runnymede, Mountview, Grove Community, High Park Alternative, and Berner Trail.
As of this writing, twelve of those thirteen councils have received nothing. Not a form letter. Not an acknowledgment of receipt. Nothing.
“I’m still in contact with all the councils,” campaign coordinator Kamin Peyrow Lee told The Old Guardian, “and no one has gotten any acknowledgement from the supervisor about their letter as far as I know.” The single partial exception, Berner Trail Junior Public School, got a response, but Lee is careful about why: the school had already been in contact with its superintendent over a specific local issue, and a protest had been scheduled for the same day the letters went out. “That protest got a lot of attention,” he said. “So technically Berner Trail JPS have received a response from the board about their specific issue, but I would not say that it was the letter that got the response.”
Read that twice. The formal channel, the one Ontario law says exists specifically to give parents a voice, produced silence. Public pressure produced a reply. If you want to know what this board actually listens to, that’s your answer, and it came from the people running the letter campaign themselves, not from The Old Guardian’s own conclusion.
What the letters actually said
The thirteen schools weren’t a coordinated messaging operation reciting the same script. They were a large elementary school and a small alternative one. A designated Model School and a school with a diagnostic kindergarten program. Schools with strong new leadership and schools still working through a turbulent year. What they shared wasn’t talking points. It was the same handful of experiences, arrived at independently.
Bowmore Road and Montrose, two schools with no apparent connection to each other, both named the same closed facility as the single most significant loss their students would feel: the Island Natural Sciences School, an outdoor education centre closed by the TDSB this year. Montrose surveyed twenty-one families and heard it over and over. “We had graduation and 6 out of 8 students who spoke cited Island School among their fondest memories from grade 6,” one parent wrote. “I am saddened and angry that my child and future grade 6s will not have this experience.” Bowmore’s letter called it a rite of passage that had, for years, been “an equalizer for all students, ensuring that regardless of a student’s background or socio-economic standing, all were afforded the opportunity to make important curriculum connections.”
Perth Avenue’s council reported something sharper: their Holiday Market, a fundraiser and community tradition, was cancelled after the school’s principal was told by TDSB’s own Risk Management team that the decision reflected a “reduced risk tolerance” during the period of provincial supervision. Not a budget line. Not an enrollment number. A parent-run community event, cancelled, with supervision itself cited as the reason.
Williamson Road, serving more than 500 students, has no full-time vice-principal and no full-time teacher-librarian. Parents there also described something else worth noting alongside Perth Avenue and Bowmore’s account of shrinking supervision: a growing reliance on screens to manage students during lunch, not as enrichment, but as a substitute for staff who aren’t there.
None of these are anonymous complaints. Every letter came with a named contact and a phone number, offered specifically for media follow-up. These are people willing to put their names on what they’re describing.
What the board’s own numbers say
The TDSB’s 2026-27 budget, published on the board’s own website, tells a story that doesn’t match the one the board tells in public.
The Special Education Fund is down $7.3 million, a 1.8 percent decline in absolute dollars, according to the board’s own revenue tables. At the same time, the board’s public materials cite a 2.2 percent per-pupil increase in special education spending. Both figures are technically accurate. They are not describing the same thing. Per-pupil spending rises when total dollars fall more slowly than enrollment does, and TDSB enrollment is projected to drop by 4,912 students this year alone. A shrinking pie divided among fewer students can produce a larger slice on paper while the pie itself gets smaller. That is arithmetic, not investment, and the difference matters enormously to a parent trying to figure out whether their child’s support will still be there in September.
Computer spending is down $8.4 million, 21.2 percent, the steepest cut anywhere in the instructional budget. This is the same fiscal year the Ontario government is putting $60 million into Edwin, a new provincewide digital learning platform from Nelson Education, rolling out to all 72 school boards starting this September. The province wants a platform. The board is cutting the devices. Nobody has explained how those two facts are meant to coexist.
And underneath all of it sits the number that actually explains where the board’s savings came from. Of the $59.5 million in “Supervisor Savings Measures” that brought this year’s deficit down from a preliminary $74.5 million to $15 million, $34.8 million, 58 percent of the entire total, came from Central Staff Reductions. Not efficiencies. Not waste. Headcount.
What thirteen letters and a budget table have in common
Put them side by side and the pattern isn’t subtle. A board under provincial supervision cut the people, cut the devices, and quietly let per-pupil framing paper over a real decline in special education dollars, all while telling parents that supervision exists to fix mismanagement. Meanwhile, thirteen school communities wrote directly to the person in charge, using the one formal channel still available to them, and got back exactly what you’d expect from an institution that has already told you, through its own numbers, where its actual priorities sit.
Silence is data. This board has now generated a great deal of it.
Sources: TDSB 2026-27 Budget, tdsb.on.ca. TDSB Parent Involvement Advisory Committee, SCS.26.06.1, June 10, 2026. Letters from the Bowmore Road, Montrose, Perth Avenue, and Williamson Road school councils, July 2026. Correspondence with Kamin Peyrow Lee, campaign coordinator, July 2026. CBC News, Edwin platform reporting, 2026.
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