Two Schools, One Question:
Did Supervision Actually Fix Anything?
The Old Guardian
Ontario’s case for taking over the Toronto District School Board rested on a simple promise: elected trustees had failed, and a Ministry-appointed supervisor would restore the accountability parents and students had lost. A year in, two cases inside the TDSB’s own walls put that promise to a direct test. One suggests the promise was kept. The other suggests it wasn’t. Read together, they say more about what supervision actually is than either side’s talking points do on their own.
The Transfer That Didn’t Stick
In June 2025, weeks before the province took control of the TDSB, the board announced it was transferring Barrie Sketchley, the longest-serving principal in Ontario’s history, out of Rosedale Heights School of the Arts, the school he helped found 33 years earlier. The board framed it as a routine rotation. Students didn’t see it that way. Hundreds walked out of class. A petition to reinstate him drew nearly 2,900 signatures. Parents said a policy requiring consultation before a principal transfer had been ignored.
Two months later, the newly installed provincial supervisor reversed the decision. Sketchley stayed at Rosedale Heights through his planned retirement the following June. A superintendent’s letter to the school community called it a “win-win,” and the parent advisory council chair agreed, writing that the reversal meant “their voices were heard.”
Whatever else is true about supervision, this is a case where it worked the way its defenders say it should: a contested, opaque decision made by TDSB management got overturned in response to sustained public pressure, and the person the community wanted stayed put.
The School That Keeps Shrinking
Heydon Park Secondary School tells a different story, and the timeline matters.
In June 2025, days before supervision began, the TDSB announced it would stop accepting Grade 9 students at Heydon Park, its only high school built specifically for young women, transgender, and non-binary students, many with intellectual disabilities. The board cited low enrolment, nine applicants for the fall. Parents and the school’s advocacy network disputed that framing directly, pointing to TDSB’s own projections showing enrolment had been climbing in the years before the cut, not falling. A planned open house that typically drove new registrations had also been cancelled that spring.
Then something happened that the pro-supervision case doesn’t account for. A Local Feasibility Study, already scheduled for August 2025 to explore ways to keep Heydon Park viable, was cancelled outright when supervision began that June. Not delayed. Cancelled. The one process designed to give the school’s community a formal say in its future disappeared at the exact moment the province took over.
A year later, in June 2026, the story continued under the supervisor’s watch, not before it. Citing construction safety concerns at a nearby elementary school, the TDSB announced Heydon Park students would be relocated out of their building as early as January 2027 to make room for the displaced students. Parents at the school say they found out through a letter, with no advance consultation. “The latest decision by the board shows a lack of transparency and consultation,” multiple parents told CTV News Toronto. A school council co-chair put it more simply: “We need the stability. We need the security.”
That is the same complaint, using nearly the same language, that TDSB families have been raising since before supervision existed. A full year into provincial control, it hadn’t changed.
What Connects Them
Put side by side, these aren’t contradictory stories. They’re the same institution behaving two different ways depending on which lever got pulled.
Sketchley’s case shows supervision can work as advertised: an opaque, community-opposed decision reversed once enough people pushed back. Heydon Park shows the opposite is just as true: a vulnerable community’s own request for a formal process to be heard was cancelled the moment supervision arrived, and the pattern of unilateral, after-the-fact decisions has continued unbroken since.
The honest reading isn’t that supervision is a failure, and it isn’t that supervision is a fix. It’s that supervision has been applied inconsistently, responsive when the backlash was loud and visible, unmoved when it wasn’t. Rosedale Heights is a large, well-connected arts school with an active advisory council and media attention within days. Heydon Park serves roughly 110 students, many with intellectual disabilities, in a building its own advocacy group calls “the TDSB’s best kept secret.”
If accountability under supervision depends on how much noise a community can make rather than on a consistent standard applied to every school, that isn’t accountability. It’s a different version of the same problem the province said it was fixing, just with a different set of names attached.
A note on how this piece came together: This story started as an attempt to test the strongest case for supervision, not undermine it. Columnists making the case for provincial takeover of the TDSB pointed to both the Sketchley transfer and the Heydon Park enrolment cut as evidence the board’s pre-supervision governance had failed. On the facts, they were right about that much. Where the record diverges from their framing is what happened next. Reading the opposing argument in good faith, then checking every claim against primary sources, is what turned up the part that argument left out, that supervision fixed one and quietly worsened the other. That’s the process, applied the same way regardless of which direction the evidence points.
Sources: CBC News, CTV News Toronto, Global News, TorontoToday, and Heydon Park Secondary School Advocacy (heydonadvocacy.ca).