If I were a trustee for the Toronto District School Board, I’d be sweating bullets right now. Well, more than they are already. The province’s largest school board in terms of student enrolment is already facing the prospect of laying off hundreds of staff with the expiry of COVID-related educational funding. And education and community advocates are warning that reduced staffing could undo any hope of reversing the pandemic-induced loss of learning among Toronto’s young. And now a new law introduced by Education Minister Stephen Lecce on Monday afternoon could bring other, more painful and controversial choices to the fore.
Bill 98, the Better Schools and Student Outcomes Act, does a number of school-related things, but one of the most noteworthy is the way it changes how school boards have to dispose of surplus property. Every board periodically finds itself with a property it no longer needs or can no longer use, and the current rules are designed to keep those lands and buildings in public hands: before a board can sell a property on the open market, it has to offer it first to a number of different public bodies, including a “coterminous” school board (so, in the case of Toronto, the Toronto Catholic board or a French-language board), a municipality, or the government of Ontario itself.
With a set of legislative changes in Bill 98, the government is putting itself very nearly at the front of the line: the coterminous school boards would retain priority, but if they decline to bid on the land, then the Ministry of Education would have the right of first refusal. Any site could be repurposed for provincial priorities including child care, long-term care, and affordable housing.
You can already hear the objection: the Doug Ford government is proposing once again to take public property and give it away to its developer buddies, etc. And I have no doubt that claim will be made in cases all over the province if the Tories actually try to execute these powers — there are school boards in every part of the province that struggle to match declining enrolment with their current built assets.
But Toronto combines a number of specific circumstances that put it directly in the crosshairs of this new law. The first is simply that, because it was built to teach the baby-boom generation, before the full funding of Catholic schools was implemented in the 1980s, it now has a huge number of schools with low enrolment. This isn’t new. The board has been slowly disposing of surplus sites for many years. But it’s a slow process in part because it’s controversial whenever there’s a proposal to shutter a neighbourhood school.
Then there’s the additional, more recent, fact that land values in Toronto are so astronomical that governments struggle to find space for all their other priorities, very much including affordable housing and even parks.
So the TDSB’s assets represent low-hanging fruit from the perspective of Queen’s Park: the city with the most dire needs for affordable housing also happens to have public lands that could be repurposed and that are, to be kind, not being put to their best use.
Notwithstanding all of the above, the province shouldn’t treat Toronto like a treasure to be looted. The province’s population, after all, is still growing. And, indeed, the justification for the government’s expansive housing policies has been the historic levels of immigration we’ve seen and will see in coming years. We will, in short, still need schools.
But the status quo also really does pose problems that end up on the premier’s desk: the province is, in effect, being asked to subsidize under-enrolled schools either directly or by changing school funding rules. The TDSB, for example, isn’t currently allowed to levy development charges on new homes the way other school boards are. The policy long predates the Ford government, and through both premiers McGuinty and Wynne, the line from Queen’s Park was that a board with so many surplus sites shouldn’t be resorting to making homes more expensive in the province’s most expensive city.
The answer, I would suggest, is for the province to treat under-enrolled school sites in much the same way it is already treating major transit projects: these should be areas that provincial policy targets for loads of new housing. The fundamental problem is the same in both cases: in order to ensure that we don’t squander public money on costly assets, we want to direct population growth to the places best able to accommodate it. And since the province already has several years of policy-making experience with transit-oriented growth, nobody needs to reinvent the wheel — the province could apply many of the rules it’s already written elsewhere and apply them here.
This could potentially solve a number of problems at once. Toronto’s planning rules have resulted in some neighbourhoods being stuffed full of new housing but without the capacity to educate their children — even as other schools are half-empty. This would partially reverse that. It would substantially expand the areas of the city where new housing would be allowed, beyond the hyper-focus on rapid transit lines. And, while it wouldn’t present the potential windfall of real estate for Queen’s Park that seizing the school sites would, it could still be economical: filling existing schools should almost always be cheaper than building new schools anywhere else in the province.
It still might not be possible to save every single school: Ontario’s population is aging, and it’s hard to see a future in which we don’t need more long-term-care homes and fewer schools. But that doesn’t mean that these sites shouldn’t be safeguarded and preserved.
Correction: An earlier version of this article mistakenly stated that the province would have right of first refusal for surplus school buildings. TVO.org regrets the error.
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