When a Catholic School Can’t Speak for Its Own Children
The human cost of provincial supervision at the Toronto Catholic District School Board
The Old Guardian | Chris Allen
Elizabeth Garkowski didn’t ask for much.
She asked that her daughter Grace, who has Down syndrome, receive the educational support she was entitled to at St. Joseph Catholic School on Leslie Street in East Toronto. She asked that the specialized programming that made St. Joseph a destination school for families of children with disabilities be maintained. She asked that the people responsible for her daughter’s education be accountable to her when things went wrong.
What she got was a form letter and a phone number for Queen’s Park.
When Beach Metro Community News asked the Toronto Catholic District School Board for a statement about Bill 33 and its impact on St. Joseph school, the board responded with nine words: “The Board is currently under Ministry Supervision.” Speak to the Ministry of Education.
A Catholic institution, asked about one of its own schools and one of its own students, pointed a mother of a disabled child to a secular provincial government for answers.
This is the story underneath the budget numbers. And the budget numbers are bad enough on their own.
The cuts already made
The TCDSB is projecting a deficit of $39.5 million for the 2026-27 school year. That number is actually presented as progress — it is down from the $65.3 million initially projected, meaning provincially appointed supervisor Frank Benedetto has already found $25.8 million in savings.
Here is what that $25.8 million looks like in practice.
The Fifth Block literacy program — a legacy program that had served TCDSB students for years — has been phased out and replaced with a Ministry-approved Early Reading Intervention model. Not because anyone at the school level asked for it. Because the supervisor decided it.
The International Languages Elementary program — offering instruction in Italian, Portuguese, Mandarin, Ukrainian, Spanish and other heritage languages — has been eliminated after more than fifty years. Nearly 20,000 students will no longer receive weekday language instruction. Seventy-seven teachers have lost their jobs. The program that built cultural and linguistic bridges between Toronto’s Catholic school system and the communities that sustained it for generations has been replaced with a Saturday option that costs families $20 to access, where the weekday program was free.
Bell times at select elementary schools have been adjusted for transportation efficiencies. Central staffing has been cut across the board.
The TCDSB’s enrollment is also declining — 1,500 fewer students projected for 2026-27 — reducing provincial revenue by $7.7 million. That revenue loss doesn’t get cut. It gets absorbed.
And $39.5 million still remains.
Where the axe points next
The Ontario Auditor General’s May 2026 special education audit documented what is happening inside TCDSB schools right now, before the supervisor finds the next round of savings.
Three Toronto Catholic schools, each serving fourteen children assessed at the highest level of educational need, had wildly different EA staffing: one school had nine educational assistants, one had three, one had two. Same board. Same needs profile. The only variable was the building.
Across the TCDSB, between 49 and 72 per cent of EA absences go unfilled by a qualified replacement on any given day. One in three students waiting for a psychological assessment at the board has been waiting more than a year. Families who can afford to pay between $2,500 and $4,500 for a private assessment get supported sooner. Families who cannot afford it wait.
At St. Joseph specifically, Garkowski watched three EAs disappear from her daughter’s school in a single year — a 42 per cent cut to EA support staff. The school’s multiple exceptionality room was shut down. The learning disabilities classroom was closed. In total, approximately $700,000 in funding cuts since 2018 have stripped the specialized programming that made St. Joseph a school families of children with disabilities specifically sought out.
Grace is no longer going to recess with her peers. She is no longer being integrated with her peers at all.
“My daughter’s not receiving an education,” Garkowski told Beach Metro Community News, “and it’s her human right.”
The supervisor still needs to find $39.5 million. Special education is the most expensive line in any school budget. The AG audit has already documented the system is at or beyond its breaking point. ETFO has already reported cuts to special education under provincial supervision at other boards.
The math is not complicated.
The mechanism
Bill 33, the Supporting Children and Students Act, passed in November 2025, granted the Ontario Ministry of Education expanded powers to intervene in the operation of local school boards — over governance, budgets, delivery of education, student well-being, infrastructure, and community engagement.
The TCDSB has been under provincial supervision since June 2025. Supervisor Frank Benedetto is paid $2,000 a day, up to $350,000 per year plus expenses. He has declined media interviews, referring all questions to the Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Education has not responded to numerous media inquiries over the past year.
Decisions made under supervision are not subject to the same public accountability as decisions made by elected trustees. When Benedetto eliminated the International Languages program, parents learned of it through a letter the same day it was announced. No public consultation. No trustee vote. No appeal process.
TCDSB trustee Markus de Domenico, who has been fighting the International Languages cuts publicly for months, asked the question that cuts to the heart of what is being lost: “Are we all supposed to do what everybody else does? This is why Catholic education, for example, is unique. The language program here is not something the trustees just invented. Fifty years — five decades of this at Toronto Catholic — is super important.”
Trustee Maria Rizzo was more direct about the mechanism: “The first things that they cut are the things that the province provides no money for.”
Read that again. The province does not fund what makes the TCDSB distinct. Then the province installs a supervisor whose mandate is to cut what the province does not fund. Then the province points to the cuts as evidence of financial mismanagement being corrected.
This is not rescue. This is a controlled demolition dressed up as fiscal responsibility.
What Catholic Social Teaching says
The Catholic tradition has a name for what is happening to Grace Garkowski and the students like her across the TCDSB. It is the preferential option for the poor — the principle that society’s most vulnerable members deserve not equal treatment but priority treatment, that the measure of an institution is how it cares for those who cannot advocate for themselves.
It is one of the most consistent threads running through Catholic Social Teaching from Leo XIII through to Francis. It is not a peripheral idea. It is foundational.
A Catholic school board operating faithfully under that principle would not be cutting EA support for children with Down syndrome to balance a budget handed down by a government that has chronically underfunded special education for years. It would be fighting loudly and publicly for those children. It would be naming the injustice. It would be making noise.
Instead, when a reporter asked about Grace, the board said: talk to the Ministry.
That is not the preferential option for the poor. That is institutional surrender.
The pattern
In my previous piece for The Old Guardian, I documented that the TCDSB’s Catholic voice disappears almost entirely outside of ceremonially safe moments — Christmas, graduation, Corpus Christi. During Lent, the board’s communications are functionally indistinguishable from a secular public board.
The International Languages cuts make the same argument in a different register. Italian, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Mandarin — these are not abstract languages. They are the mother tongues of the communities that built Toronto’s Catholic school system. Generations of families chose Catholic schools partly because those schools understood and honored where they came from.
The supervisor eliminated that in an afternoon.
Calandra’s response when asked about the cuts was revealing: the changes bring the board in line with what is offered across the province. Uniformity, not distinctiveness. Standardization, not identity.
That is the project. A Catholic board that looks, sounds, and operates like every other board in Ontario. Funded the same way. Governed the same way. Cutting the same things. Answering to the same authority.
The supervisor doesn’t need to abolish Catholic education. He just needs to make it indistinguishable from everything else. And he is well on his way.
From one parent to another
Garkowski did not give up. She created petitions. She started interest groups. She organized a walk-in demonstration at St. Joseph with other parents. She presented a petition calling for Bill 33 to be revoked and trustees to be reinstated.
“Having this walk-in demonstration was a way for us to stand in solidarity,” she told Beach Metro. “I think when some school communities start showing up with these demonstrations, it sets the stage for other schools to say ‘hey, we can do that.’ I think it creates a snowball effect.”
She is a Catholic parent at a Catholic school, fighting for her disabled daughter in a system that has been legislatively stripped of its ability to fight alongside her.
My son doesn’t attend a Catholic school. But I understand what it means when an institution that was built to protect the most vulnerable is restructured — quietly, legislatively, one directive at a time — until it can no longer do so.
The $39.5 million still needs to be found. Special education is the most expensive line. The supervisors are not accountable to the families they affect. The Ministry is not returning calls.
Grace is not going to recess.
The Old Guardian is an independent publication committed to source-driven, unspun journalism on Ontario education policy and institutional accountability. Elizabeth Garkowski’s account was reported by Matthew Stephens of Beach Metro Community News in December 2025 and January 2026. The Auditor General findings cited are from the May 2026 Special Education Audit. Budget figures are from CP24, CityNews, and the TCDSB’s own budget engagement materials.