When Oversight Fails, Families Pay the Bill
This case didn’t end with accountability.
It ended with a lease agreement.
After months of internal correspondence, escalation, and a formal review by the Ontario Ombudsman, a Toronto family reached the end of the road. There was no reversal. No appeal. No corrective action. The Ombudsman concluded there was nothing further that could be done.
So the family did what the system could not.
They rented a place closer to their child’s school to ensure she could continue her education alongside her classmates.
That decision was rational. It was protective. And it was costly.
It is also an outcome worth examining, because it illustrates something deeper than a single dispute. It shows how Ontario’s new model of centralized school board governance handles failure, and more importantly, who absorbs the consequences when oversight runs out.
Under the current framework, authority has been consolidated. Trustees have been sidelined. Decision-making is centralized under provincially appointed supervisors. Oversight bodies operate within narrower mandates. This is not conjecture. It is how the Supporting Children and Students Act, 2025 now functions in practice.
In seeking clarity, I wrote directly to the Minister of Education asking how these new powers are defined, exercised, and reviewed. The questions were specific: how “matters of public interest” are determined, whether investigation or vesting powers had been used at the Toronto District School Board, what safeguards exist when court review is explicitly excluded, and how parents are meant to seek recourse if these powers are exercised unfairly.
The response from the Ministry was polite, professional, and revealing.
It confirmed that trustees are no longer permitted to act in their capacity as board representatives, including speaking publicly on behalf of the board. It emphasized that supervisors now assume full governance and decision-making authority. It highlighted the government’s confidence in the experience and qualifications of those supervisors.
What it did not do was answer the questions.
No criteria were provided for when extraordinary powers are triggered. No disclosure was offered on whether or how often those powers are being used. No safeguards were identified for parents and communities when review by the courts is explicitly barred. No independent oversight mechanism was outlined. Instead, the Ministry pointed to its intentions: improving confidence, modernizing governance, and focusing on student outcomes.
Intent, however, is not a substitute for process.
This is where the gap becomes visible. Authority has been centralized faster than accountability has been explained. When families encounter harm, exhaust internal processes, and find that external oversight has no jurisdiction to intervene, they are left with choices that are not really choices at all.
In this case, the system closed ranks procedurally. The family absorbed the cost privately.
This should not be misunderstood as success. It is not evidence that the system worked. It is evidence that unresolved institutional decisions now come with a price tag, and that price is increasingly borne by families willing and able to pay it.
Supporters of the current model will argue that not every case can be fixed. That is true. But transparency does not require perfect outcomes. It requires clear standards, defined limits, and honest disclosure about where accountability begins and ends.
What we should not accept is a governance model where those limits are only discovered after months of effort, and where the final remedy available to parents is to rearrange their lives at personal expense.
When oversight fails quietly, families compensate privately.
Ontario may believe it has strengthened control. What it has not yet demonstrated is how that control is constrained, reviewed, or corrected when it produces harm. Until it does, confidence will continue to be asserted rather than earned, and students will continue to be carried along by decisions they did not make and cannot appeal.
The question policymakers should be willing to answer is straightforward:
Is this the accountability model Ontario intended — one where institutional dead ends are resolved not by correction, but by families paying the bill?