Bloated school boards can’t cry poverty while blowing money on lavish weekends

Imagine spending a summer weekend in downtown Toronto with 17 of your colleagues. After travelling first-class on Via Rail, you stay at the Marriott City Centre Hotel where rooms range from $374 to $1,199 per night. Along with enjoying some delicious meals, you might even catch a Blue Jays game.

When everything is totalled up, the cost of this weekend excursion comes to more than $38,000. For most people, that’s rather pricey, particularly if you’re paying with your own money.

But there’s no need to worry in this case because, according to recent revelations, the London-based Thames Valley District School Board (TVDSB) footed the entire bill. Yes, you read that correctly. The school board used taxpayer money to pay for 18 of its senior staff to go on a three-day $38,000 retreat from August 19 to 21. No doubt it was an enjoyable weekend for these well-compensated executives.

However, it was far less enjoyable for the parents and taxpayers who paid the bill. To make matters worse, TVDSB is dealing with a massive deficit.

Originally the deficit was projected to be $18 million, but TVDSB whittled it down to $7.6 million by cutting 58 elementary school and 24 high school teaching positions. They also chopped 17 early childhood educator jobs and four positions in speech and psychological services.

While $38,000 is only a small amount of the board’s budget, this lavish retreat was not what you’d expect from an organization struggling to make ends meet.

And the bloat at TVDSB goes far deeper than one expensive retreat. For example, according to the TVDSB website, the board employs 11 superintendents of student achievement. That’s right, 11 senior administrators with the same job title, and of course, salaries to match their titles. One wonders how any school board could need that many superintendents.

TVDSB also employs a full-time “human rights and equity advisor” as a member of its senior leadership team. Lest that person be overwhelmed with too many “equity” matters, the advisor also has an executive legal assistant to help deal with this onerous workload.

Sadly, TVDSB is far from the only school board with a bloated bureaucracy. Between all the superintendents of achievement, learning coaches, cultural advisors and equity directors, there’s no shortage of people at the top levels of virtually all Ontario school boards. No wonder there aren’t enough classroom resources.

And of course, school board administrators always claim that their boards are woefully underfunded in part because, according to them, provincial funding is falling below the rate of inflation. However, according to Statistics Canada data, per-student spending in Ontario increased by 0.5 per cent above the rate of inflation from 2012/13 to 2021/22. In other words, not only is K-12 education spending keeping pace with inflation, it’s exceeding inflation.

This raises the question—have school boards outlived their usefulness? Considering their excessive spending and the number of times they openly defy clear directives from education ministers, one wonders what value these bloated school boards bring to the education system.

At a minimum, the Ontario government should allow parents to redirect provincial per-student funding to any school of their choice. If this leads to a mass exodus from government schools, so be it. Indeed, a real school choice policy could be just the wake-up call school boards need. Even allowing partial funding to follow students to independent schools (like British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Quebec already do) would be a marked improvement from the status quo.

The Ford government talks a good game about getting back to basics, but its implementation has been seriously lacking. That’s because school board officials have their own ideas, and these ideas don’t often align with the wishes of parents and other taxpayers.

Wasteful retreats like the TVDSB held for its top executives are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s time for real change to happen in Ontario education. Letting public money follow students to the schools of their choice would be a step in the right direction.