Most Toronto schools need repairs, says TDSB report

Toronto's public schools are in rough shape, according to a recent report from the Toronto District School Board.

The report — which was provided to school trustees late last month — says most of the TDSB's 550 operational schools are in need of immediate repair.

The report assigned a percentage score to each building, using an industry standard which gives higher scores to those in greater need of repair. The scores are based on each school’s condition in 2012.

Some schools scored far over 100 per cent, putting them well into what the report considers "critical" condition. The poorest-scored schools include the Seneca School in Etobicoke (170 per cent), the Metropolitan School for the Deaf (169 per cent), Oakwood Collegiate Institute (143 per cent) and Highcastle Public School (142 per cent).

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Only 114 schools scored "good" or "fair." The six best-scored schools were Carleton Village Public School, Givins/Shaw Junior Public School, North Toronto Collegiate Institute, the Claude Watson School for the Arts, Brookside Public School and the Thomas L. Wells Public School, all of which scored 0.

School trustee Shelley Laskin has 15 schools in her ward that are in poor or critical condition. She wants to see a separate budget set up for maintenance.

"We don’t have that money to do the regular maintenance. So we can’t inspect the roof. We have the cost of repairing the holes in the roof and that just escalates," Laskin told CBC News.

So far this winter, the head of TDSB's facilities says there have been 66 schools with leaking roofs. Two were repaired at about $400,000. Seven boilers were replaced at about $1 million each.

The report is included below.