While attending the opening of secondary school expansion in Galt (present-day Cambridge) on November 14, 1967, Premier John Robarts made a stunning announcement about the ongoing restructuring of Ontario’s school boards and educational administrative systems.
“Our objective should be to reduce the number of administrative units to approximately 100 boards of education. Each of these boards will be responsible for education in the public elementary and secondary schools. It is the intent of the Government of Ontario that these boards be established on a county-wide basis in southern Ontario.”
It was that last part — establishing the county level as the basic unit for operating school boards — that excited those wanting to modernize education in Ontario and angered those, especially in rural areas, who believed it would unravel community ties, permit more government interference, and destroy local democracy.
Robarts’s announcement was part of an overall shift under his watch, first as minister of education from 1959 and as premier from 1961, to move Ontario away from structures that, in many rural areas, still resembled those established by Egerton Ryerson in the 19th century.
As the 1960s began, there were thousands of small school sections, each with its own set of trustees. It was estimated that around 3,700 public and separate boards existed, with many overseeing fewer than 100 students and still operating out of poorly equipped one-room schoolhouses.
In September 1961, Robarts introduced legislation, later known as the Robarts Plan, which introduced new streaming for secondary school students that would make it easier to prepare for post-secondary studies or provide the vocational training needed to enter a changing labour market. New facilities would be needed to meet the needs of this program, which required an upheaval in how schools were operated outside of urban areas and larger tax bases to draw funding from.
As R.D. Gidney observed in his book From Hope to Harris: The Reshaping of Ontario’s Schools, “the small elementary school or the district high school with modest enrolments, lacked the specialist teachers, the program variety, the options, and the equipment to educate children of different interests and abilities or to prepare young people properly for jobs.”
When the province offered additional grants to induce rural trustees to close small schools in favour of centralized facilities, many refused. As the Kitchener-Waterloo Record observed, these trustees adopted an attitude of, “if the one-room school was good enough for me, it’s good enough for my children.”
When gentle nudges to consolidate schools failed, the province took decisive action. In 1964, Minister of Education William Davis introduced Bill 54, which would reorganize school boards with townships as the base unit instead of school sections.
“The small rural school section has served Ontario well,” observed the ministry’s 1964 year-end report, “but the superiority of township school areas has become evident from experience gained since World War II. Chief among the numerous advantages of larger units is that they provide for more broadly based financial support through wider assessment, all of which is available to assist in the education of every public-school child in the area.” The report noted that the legislation reduced the number of rural school boards from 1,850 to 423.
Provincial school inspectors were not sorry to see old, dilapidated small schools disappear. The Ottawa Journal reported on the conditions in some of the remaining tiny schools in Carleton County, which lacked proper sanitary facilities. They also commented on the nature of teaching so many grades at once. “Even if you have a cracker jack of a teacher,” observed one inspector, “he or she can’t be equally a cracker jack with grade one and grade eight.”
The loudest opposition occurred in Waterloo County. Local officials in Baden were unreceptive to seeing their public school absorbed into a larger board covering Wilmot Township. During a heated township council meeting in June 1964, councillor Quentin Hallman declared that school board consolidation was “dictatorship from the top” and warned that farmers from nearby Woolwich Township planned to protest at Queen’s Park (which they did not). In a public meeting in August, residents voted against joining the new board.
Baden’s trustees visited Davis in November to demand that they retain their independence, but were told they had received plenty of advisories that change was coming. The trustees continued to refuse to join the Wilmot board, which planned to consolidate 13 existing schools (including four with only one room) into four or five new 10-room central schools. When nominations for the new board were held, none of Baden’s residents stood for any of the positions.
“No one here is complaining about the lack of school facilities,” Baden trustee Harold Schmidt told the Kitchener-Waterloo Record in December 1964. “In a small town a lot of activities revolve around the school and we don’t wish to lose this contact by becoming part of a larger area.” Plans to build a two-room extension and an auditorium in Baden’s public school were denied by the province, likely because they felt it should be up to the new Wilmot board.
On December 30, a new three-trustee school board for Baden was illegally elected. They planned to use the old board’s $24,000 budget surplus to fight the province in court. The meeting also saw accusations ranging from improper voting practices in Wilmot to spying by the province. Of the 36 attendees, 24 voted to continue fighting the province.
Photo of a stove in a one-room schoolhouse near Listowel (School Section #8, Wallace Township). Kitchener-Waterloo Record, April 14, 1965
Opposition politicians appeared to favour the government. While addressing a farmers group in New Hamburg, Brant Liberal MPP Robert Nixon suggested he might ask the province to investigate the situation in Baden, but admitted their fight was hopeless and they should turn their surplus over to the new Wilmot board.
While the Wilmot board moved to run the school in Baden, the rebel trustees held out until mid-February 1965, when, in a closed-door meeting with some ratepayers, they turned over the remaining funds to Wilmot after the latter contemplated legal action to recover the money. No village officials refused to attend the meeting, indicating they had had enough of the grandstanding.
While township-level boards were legislated, the province promoted ones organized on a county level. Consultative committees were established across Ontario to assist in the reorganizations, with some areas, such as Grey and Peterborough counties, establishing their new administrative bodies within a year.
But by 1967, the province felt the pace of reform was too slow and watched as it collapsed in some areas. For example, proposals in York County to create a two-tier system (a regional board, with three local boards underneath it) was rejected by county council in June 1967. Analysts felt the issue was a divide between those who believed in creating more efficiency and modernization versus those who believed in a system more rooted in community values.
The result was Robarts’ speech in Galt in November 1967, which followed his second consecutive election victory as premier. The proposed consolidation of school boards at the county level would also see elementary and secondary schools come under the same board for the first time. Work would begin in the public system first, followed by a later announcement about separate schools. The goal was to have the new boards in place by New Year’s Day 1969.
“The larger units will make it possible to extend to all students the benefits now enjoyed by our more favoured school systems,” Robarts noted. “Under a single, larger unit, it is possible to provide more adequately for youngsters who have special talents or special problems.”
An Ottawa Journal editorial praised Robarts’s decision and the effects it would have on education. “Larger school districts hold the shining promise of higher standards of education and equality of education for the school children of Ontario. That should be the main criterion; not administrative neatness or political convenience. The more prosperous communities will be helping to upgrade schools which have been too long struggling on the inadequate tax revenue provided by poorer areas.”
The result was Bill 44, which amended The Secondary Schools and Boards of Education Act to reduce the number of boards. The legislation allowed Hamilton, London, and Windsor to operate boards separate from their surrounding counties, while Metropolitan Toronto would operate under a two-tier system (a Metro board and individual boards for its component cities and boroughs). With a few exceptions, the new boards would be elected by the public, as opposed to elected for elementary and appointed for secondary. Depending on the size of the student population, the new boards consisted of between 14 and 20 members. Separate school supporters would be elected to public boards, where they would only be able to vote on matters relating to secondary schools (as public funding for separate schools didn’t extend beyond grade 10).
Cover of the 1968 Report of the Minister of Education
The numbers on the final tally vary widely, but a table in the 1969 Report of the Minister of Education lists the reduction as going from 1,358 boards at all levels (including public, separate, and special cases like crown lands) in 1968 to 192 in 1969.
While there was much praise for promoting conditions that would offer a wider range of educational opportunities to students, there was growing discontent in rural areas, especially in the southwest. Transition committees were set up, but there were complaints from teacher federations and local politicians about the lack of consultation and the short timeframe to create the new boards.
The loudest opposition arose from those who distrusted the idea of amalgamations and viewed larger institutions with suspicion. When Haldimand County began its consolidation process, former Sherbrooke Township reeve declared that eight-room schools were large enough, and anything larger promoted “rowdyism.” Meanwhile, Harold Schmidt, now the chairman of the Waterloo-Oxford High School Board, told an audience in Tavistock in January that the Nazis also conducted consolidations, where they replaced bibles with Mein Kampf.
At the end of January 1968, a 120-member delegation representing 29 school boards and 23 municipal councils across southwestern Ontario urged the province to abandon county units and reorganize school administration based on existing school boundaries. A brief presented to Deputy Education Minister Jack McCarthy criticized what they perceived as a growing trend to eliminate longstanding municipal governments and concentrate power in the hands of a few. The trustees feared the new boards would cost too much and worried about existing areas that overlapped counties.
Over the following months, more school trustees and municipal councillors issued statements and adopted resolutions demanding delays, often citing tax increases. Davis indicated he was willing to be flexible, but only after the new system was implemented and given a couple of years to prove itself.
The process was delayed in only one jurisdiction. The Ottawa area received a year’s extension; there were preparations for a regional government in Carleton County, and it was the only large city in the province that didn’t already have a board administering both elementary and secondary schools.
Several outgoing township boards left unwelcome financial surprises. Some spent their accumulated surpluses and others slipped money back to their constituents through lower mill rates, both of which had the effect of hiding the growing cost of education. The new boards were left with financial arrangements that cost plenty to fix. Areas where schools were amalgamated, and where previous schools operated on shoestring budgets, saw large tax increases in 1969. The province increased municipal grants to offset some of these costs and reduce anger, but the public alarm that was raised over the consolidation process would fuel antipathy towards plans for regional governments during the early 1970s.
The new boards took shape over the next few years, hiring directors, superintendents, and other staff to meet the new, wider educational realities. In many ways, the changes saw practices that had been in use in urban areas spread to rural ones. School consolidations continued, with some schools absorbing nearly a dozen predecessors. The ministry of education handed off many of its responsibilities (such as school inspections) and acted in a more advisory capacity.
Despite the protests, the new structure would remain in place through the 1990s, with the occasional consolidation occurring along the way. In 1997, the Fewer School Boards Act further reduced the number of boards from 124 to 72 and removed education from the residential tax base. Currently, Bill 33 proposes to give the province greater control over boards and trustees — a goal that likely would have confirmed the worst fears of the opponents of the 1960s reforms.
Sources: From Hope to Harris: The Reshaping of Ontario’s Schools by R.D Gidney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Report of the Minister of Education 1964 (Toronto: Government of Ontario, 1965); Report of the Minister of Education 1969 (Toronto: Government of Ontario, 1970); Robarts by A.K. McDougall (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986); Schools for Ontario: Policy-making, administration, and finance in the 1960s by David M. Cameron (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972); The Fewer School Boards Act and the Toronto District School Board: Educational Restructuring 1997-2003 by Duncan MacLellan (paper, 2007); the November 16, 1967 and May 10, 1968 editions of the Globe and Mail; the June 14, 1964, July 11, 1964, November 23, 1964, November 27, 1964, December 31, 1964, January 16, 1965, and February 13, 1965 editions of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record; the November 15, 1967 and January 2, 1968 editions of the Hamilton Spectator; the March 8, 1965, November 17, 1967, and March 15, 1968 editions of the Ottawa Journal; and the January 2, 1968, January 30, 1968, March 3, 1968, and April 19, 1968 editions of the Windsor Star.
Donate Now