For the past two years, Jenny, an elementary-school teacher in northern Ontario, has been holding her classes in the school library.
“It hasn’t been a library for about five years now, because we needed the classroom space,” she says. Her school has also transformed its daycare into a makeshift classroom and set up a portable classroom outside.
“This is not a space that was built to be a classroom,” says Jenny, whose name TVO Today has changed to protect her identity.
“Originally, there wasn’t a whiteboard or a chalkboard to use. There wasn’t a bulletin board. The setup for the projector is not great. I have benefitted a lot from other teachers having spent a lot of time requesting these things, but we’re cobbling these resources together to try to make it work.”
Jenny is not alone. Across the province, teachers in overcrowded schools are being forced to transform libraries, gyms, dance spaces, theatres, and staff rooms into makeshift classrooms. Meanwhile, their boards are struggling to find the funding in their budgets to acquire new portable classrooms and build the necessary infrastructure to support Ontario’s growing student population.
How we got here
Augusto Riveros, a professor at Western University whose research focuses on urban education, identifies a few root causes for overcrowding in Ontario’s schools.
“I’m mostly concerned with how this reflects the chronic underfunding of education in the province,” he says, referencing the school-repair and -maintenance backlog, which was $16.8 billion in 2022.
“The ministry announced in 2021 that they would add $1.5 billion per year to address this. The concern is how this funding is going to catch up to the tremendous deficit that exists in school infrastructure across the province.”
Agenda segment, November 28, 2022: Double the money, double the education?
In addition to a lack of funding, Riveros says that the process by which school boards are allocated funding for capital projects such as new schools is “reactive” instead of “proactive.”
“What this means is that school boards can only apply for new school construction when they have demonstrated the need for those new spaces,” he explains. “So projections are not taken into account. This exacerbates school overcrowding because boards cannot receive the funding to build new schools as they project new neighbourhoods to be built — they only receive funding once their existing schools are already over-capacity.”
Because of this, Riveros says, school boards have to rely on temporary facilities, such as portable classrooms, for longer than they expect.
“Some boards must wait for many years until they finally get the funding for new schools, and not all funding is guaranteed. The province only funds the most urgent cases. There’s a waiting list — a long waiting list — for schools to be built in the province.”
According to Riveros, another contributing factor is a disconnect between city planning and school planning.
“School boards are independent from municipal boards,” he says. “What happens right now is that school boards have to wait until a new development is approved, and then they have to respond to that new demand and mobilize resources, which creates a lot of pressure on school boards to respond and accommodate for growth. Education planning is an afterthought to urban planning.”
Riveros says these factors, alongside demographic changes in the province, create the conditions for schools that are overcrowded, understaffed, and in disrepair.
“We really need to sound some alarms, because our educational infrastructure is failing,” he says. “We are going to have more issues around this as time passes and the funding doesn’t change.”
Augusto Riveros (left) is professor at Western University whose research focuses on urban education (Courtesy of Augusto Riveros); Karen Littlewood is president of the Ontario Secondary Schools Teachers’ Federation. (Courtesy of Karen Littlewood)
A spokesperson for the Minister of Education told TVO Today via email that “our government doubled funding and has made the single largest investment in Ontario school building history with $1.3 billion dollars to build and renew schools across the province last spring. We also made sweeping changes that cut construction times nearly in half and we expect school boards to get shovels in the ground as quickly as possible.” Each year, they write, “school boards receive $40 million in temporary accommodation funding to purchase or lease new portables, while also receiving $1.4 billion in school renewal funding. It is up to the school boards who own and operate their schools to determine where and how to allocate their funding, based on local needs.”
Students, teachers affected
Karen Brown, the president of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, says overcrowded and underfunded schools lead to a litany of downstream effects on students and staff.
“With overcrowding, we see that people pull their children out of the public system into private schools because of the lower class sizes there,” says Brown. “We see some of our most vulnerable students: those with special needs, those who require that little extra attention so they can level the playing field, the ability to support them is not there.”
Most concerning, says Brown, is an increase in school violence.
“Violence happens as a result of unmet needs,” she says. “Students who have particular learning gaps or special needs don’t have the educational assistant or the right programs for them to excel. These students are also in these classrooms; it’s overcrowded, they’re getting frustrated, and they have not had the ability to learn self-regulation and the skills to cope in a very loud and busy environment. We see these students acting out. That’s how violence happens.”
Brown says a survey of ETFO’s members found that 77 per cent had experienced violence in the classroom. As a result, Brown says, teachers are leaving the profession.
Karen Brown is president of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario. (Courtesy of Karen Brown)
“They’re getting burnt out, going on long-term disability, or taking medical leave. And occasional teachers will refuse to work in that classroom with so much violence. This results in collapsing more classes and so on.”
This is part of the reason, she says, that there are nearly 40,000 people in Ontario with teaching qualifications who are not working in the field: “We don’t have a shortage of teachers. We have deteriorating working conditions that are not suitable, and people are refusing to take them.”
A “cumulative effect”
The teachers who remain, says Karen Littlewood, president of the Ontario Secondary Schools Teachers’ Federation, are left trying to mitigate these impacts on students.
“The people that are working in education try to go above and beyond every day to deliver quality programming, to make sure that students don’t see the impact of this underfunding and shortchanging,” she says. “That’s where you have teachers and education workers who are taking advantage of back-to-school deals at Staples, because they are the ones providing supplies in their classrooms.”
This resonates with Jenny, who says she has had to make many adjustments to teach in the library.
“It’s a large echoey space, so the ability to just hear what someone is saying isn’t the same as in a classroom. There’s space to run around, which is very distracting for some of the kids,” she says. “I’d like to think it doesn’t affect my students as much as it affects me.”
“I would love to see a government that is going to invest in education and invest in healthy spaces for students to be learning,” says Littlewood. “The money isn’t there anymore to do everything that we can to give students that really rich learning environment.”
Without additional investment, she says, the quality of both the educational experience and working conditions in Ontario’s schools will continue to decline.
“All of this has a cumulative effect,” she says. “I’d like to view the Ontario education system to be world-class, as it has been in the past, and believe that students are getting everything they need in the system. But after repeated shortchanging, it’s led to this degradation that will take years to repair.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Augusto Riveros was a professor at Queen's University. In fact, he is a professor at Western University. TVO Today regrets the error.
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