Ottawa's biggest school board needs to avoid a fifth straight deficit
Even the rising cost of toilet paper has become a concern
Ottawa's biggest school board will need to burn the midnight oil in the coming months to find ways to avoid a fifth straight deficit.
Boards are supposed to balance their books every year, so with four deficits under its belt, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB) has clearly been struggling for several years. Listening to the leaders at the English public board, finding more ways to trim won't be easy.
Already, it's been shifting money around to prop up areas where it sees the most need. For instance, more children are struggling to regulate their emotions, and the board says it's been hiring educational assistants who can help in those classrooms while pinching pennies in other areas.
When board chair Lynn Scott recently had the ear of local MPPs, she told them how snow removal was getting expensive. Even the price of toilet paper had soared 62 per cent, she said, so the board is buying a cheaper product.
Scott and counterparts across the province have been calling for the Ontario government to do more to cover rising costs at school boards.
"If the funding continues on the same track that it's been over the last few years, what we are doing right now is not sustainable," Scott told CBC News in an interview.
'Not unique in the province'
After the first few deficits, the OCDSB had to start submitting extra financial reports to the Ministry of Education so the government could keep a closer eye.
At a meeting on Tuesday night, the board will embark on yet another months-long budget process that will culminate in June and it isn't sure how things will turn out.
"We're probably dealing with a $15- to $17-million shortfall," said chief financial officer Randy Gerrior. He anticipates the board might need to reduce administrative staff, or not fill positions.
And Gerrior says Ottawa's English public board is not a special case.
He often meets with other senior business officials from school boards across Ontario, and says more than half are struggling with deficits.
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Provincial data from August confirm 31 of Ontario's 72 boards were running an in-year deficit. Back then, the OCDSB wasn't one of them, but it has updated its figures to reflect salary increases for teachers and would now find itself on the list.
"We're not unique in the province," said Gerrior. "Even universities and hospitals are running with the same problem right now."
Minister of Education Jill Dunlop addressed questions about those deficits in an emailed statement.
"Our government is investing historic levels of funding in public education to a total of $29.1 billion to school boards this school year including an increase of over $34.3 million for the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board," she wrote.
Pay pressures
Gerrior explains the board did receive extra money, but it was not enough to cover the backpay teachers were owed after the provincial government's wage restraint legislation from 2019 was found unconstitutional.
That backpay from Bill 124 and other negotiated salary increases meant that the balanced $1.17 billion operating budget approved last June for the 2024-25 school year has since turned into a budget with a $4.2 million deficit, according to Gerrior.
And there are pressures elsewhere.
The Ottawa-Carleton board is paying a lot more for substitutes when a teacher or early childhood educator calls in sick. In a document it prepared in the past year, it said its staff were taking 13 sick days a year in 2022-2023, which was still less than the provincial average.
The issue of teachers taking more sick days has been discussed for several years across the province, but now the OCDSB is paying about $30 million a year on substitutes, up some $12 million from pre-pandemic days.
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"Some of it is illness-related, some of it is stress-related, some of it is accident-related," says Scott.
A few of those leaves come after student meltdowns in the classroom, Scott adds. She's been a trustee for 30 years and has seen a lot. One major change is the rise in the number of children since the pandemic who show "dysregulated behaviour."
Students might shout at a teacher or talk back or they might even physically attack staff or other students, says Scott.
"It can also mean that sometimes we basically have to evacuate a classroom," says Scott. "So it has an impact on the other children in the class as well. And that's never a good thing."
The board has spent money to train staff to de-escalate such situations. It has an attendance program in place to monitor absenteeism and says wellness matters. But Scott says the province should be helping school boards cover those substitute staff and the extra assistants needed in classrooms.
'Stagnant enrolment'
Then there's a struggle that is the OCDSB's alone — at least locally here in Ottawa.
The three other school boards are seeing many more students enrol every year. But the OCDSB keeps missing its estimates and its enrolment is stagnant. Its share of the student population is not holding.
This fall, the OCDSB counted 75,966 students, which is not much more than it had five or six years ago.
Contrast that with the Ottawa Catholic School Board, which added more than a thousand students in a single year to land at 50,859 students this autumn.
The Conseil des écoles catholiques du Centre-Est said it was thrilled to report a 5.1-per-cent, one-year jump in enrolment this fall to 28,210 students, while the Conseil des écoles publiques de l'Est de l'Ontario said it had 18,486 students, an increase of 3.5 per cent.
Enrolment matters because the main source of any board's funding from the government is tied directly to the number of students it has attending its schools every day.
The Ottawa-Carleton board had to cut 42 positions this fall after it failed to meet its forecast.
Review of elementary programs
Scott says the school board has been concerned about enrolment for a decade — especially in its English program — and knew it needed to take a good look at the programs it offered. It was set to do a major review, but then the pandemic hit.
Now, it's digging into that.
The elementary program review announced earlier in January will likely attract more attention and heated debate than these budget troubles.
The board announced plans to reduce four programs down to two. In other words, it would provide just French Immersion and "enhanced" English while cutting its alternative schools and a program that allowed students to start French in Grade 4.
Some 12,000 students and many teachers could end up at different schools come September 2026, though the proposed redrawn boundaries will be made public at the end of February.
Both Scott and Gerrior insist the program review was due to happen before the financial picture worsened. But if it goes ahead, it will help.
"It's not going to save us money, but it will, I hope, let us make better use of the dollars that we have," said Scott.
Nineteen OCDSB schools are running at less than 60 per cent capacity, while 52 are too full and have many portable classrooms outside, according to a recent report by the Financial Accountability Office of Ontario.
Closing schools isn't the option: the Ontario government has had a moratorium on closing schools since 2017. Asked when it might be lifted, Minister Dunlop pointed to how the former Liberal government had closed 600 schools, but the PC government is focused on building new ones.
If the review of elementary schools is ultimately approved, students and teachers would shift and more students would go to schools closer to home, which could save transportation costs.
Gerrior adds that offering four different streams isn't efficient, and the English public board could use its limited resources better if it offered two streams well. The Ottawa-Carleton board also offers extra supports that it might not be able to afford, he adds, and will need to focus on what it's responsible to provide.
"I think we've been shaving the ice cube for so long now that it really requires fundamental change," adds Gerrior.
As for the minister of education's emailed statement, Jill Dunlop didn't seem to suggest the board's sought-after extra funding would be coming.
"I expect school boards to do their part by being responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars, making sure there is minimal disruption to parents and students when they reorganize classrooms based on enrolment criteria and are creating a serious plan to address teacher absenteeism."
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