Students and staff at the country’s largest school board do “not always” experience a safe learning environment, according to the provincial auditor general’s latest report.
While the Toronto District School Board’s (TDSB) rate of violent incidents is lower than the provincial average, it is “at the highest level recorded,” the report released by Shelley Spence’s office on Tuesday states.
The annual report covered nine performance audits on various topics including the Ontario Place redevelopment, the implementation and oversight of the province’s opioid strategy and safety, financial management and capital at the TDSB.
Aside from safety, the report found that the board complies with government legislation, directives and funding arrangements when it comes to using operating and capital funding but that “financial and capital resources are not consistently allocated in the most cost-effective or efficient way.” It also found that the board’s schools are, on average, “in the worst condition in Ontario.”
Violent incidents at the TDSB went up from 244 to 407 occurrences a year, an increase of 67 per cent, between 2017-18 and 2022-23, the report stated. During the same period, other boards saw an increase of 114 per cent.
The rate of incidents for the TDSB was 17 per 10,000, while the provincial rate was 22 incidents per 10,000 students.
The report also found that the board is only centrally tracking some of the bullying at its schools.
While 375 bullying incidents were reported through the board’s Student Safety Line between 2017-18 and 2022-23, the 2022-23 student and parent census reported higher numbers — 23 per cent of Grade 4-12 students said they were physically bullied, and 71 per cent said they were verbally bullied.
“TDSB's central tracking of all bullying incidents is much lower than this, suggesting that they are not centrally capturing a large number of bullying incidents that are occurring,” the auditor general’s report said.
“The system for tracking incidents of bullying needs improvement,” Spence said during a press conference after the release of her report on Tuesday.
Spence’s office also found a disconnect between the rate of increase for mental health and wellness staffing and the demand for services.
There was a 71 per cent increase from 2017-18 to 2022-23 in student referrals for mental health support services, but the number of positions for the staff who provide such services, including social workers and child and youth counsellors and workers, went up by just 42 per cent.
When it came to fire and lockdown drills, around 38 per cent of TDSB schools “did not report conducting the minimum number of fire drills required by the Ontario Fire Code annually,” and 31 per cent didn’t report doing the minimum number of lockdown drills.
“The TDSB does not have an effective process to ensure the required number of drills are performed by each school, each year, or that they are performed in accordance with TDSB policy when performed,” the report stated.
The auditor general also touched on criminal history checks of staff, saying the board doesn’t have a process to “periodically check” this.
“About 23 per cent of the TDSB's current employees, who joined the TDSB prior to 2003, when a background check was not mandatory, do not have a criminal background check on file,” the report noted, adding that 16 per cent, around 31,425, of annual offence declarations required by employees under legislation were not completed between 2018-19 and 2022-23.
These declarations are supposed to include all of an employee’s criminal convictions up to that date.
The auditor general’s report also examined sick days at the board, noting that both the use and cost are rising.
Permanent staff sick days increased from about 12 to nearly 20 days per year, an increase of 58 per cent, between 2014-15 and 2022-23. The provincial average in the latter year was around 15 days.
The cost of supply staff during that period went up by about 70 per cent, from $82 million to $139 million, the auditor general’s report indicated.
But the report said that in 2022-23, the board couldn’t find supply teachers to cover about 20 per cent of the absences.
“In these cases, the affected students may have been supervised by TDSB staff without teaching qualifications or may have been combined with another teacher's class, which can negatively impact student learning,” the report said.
Special education classes generally saw the highest rate of absences that weren’t covered by supply teachers, the auditor general noted, adding that educational and special needs assistants “were one of the hardest groups to replace.”
The auditor general also looked at school conditions, noting that according to third-party assessments, the “TDSB has the worst condition of school buildings of all school boards in Ontario.”
The board estimates it has a renewal backlog of about $4.1 billion, which Spence’s report notes doesn’t include the 46 school roofs that need to be repaired at a cost of around $200 million because they contain reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) — the same material that led the Ford government to shut the Ontario Science Centre.
“The TDSB has had assessments performed of these roofs that identified they are safe for the time being and do not represent an imminent safety risk to students or staff,” the auditor general’s report stated.
Spence’s report said the board had $309 million in “unspent and uncommitted funding and reserves” as of Aug. 2023 that it could use for renewal projects.
In her report, Spence wrote that TDSB staff said the board couldn’t use all of its repair and maintenance funding each year “as it is limited by what work can be completed during the summer months when fewer staff and students are present, when it is safer to do some repair and maintenance work.”
NDP Leader Marit Stiles, who represents the Toronto riding of Davenport, said the conditions of TDSB schools is “not surprising” given the age of the schools and the size of the board.
“I think what's shocking is that this government has not just not only addressed those issues of fixing our schools … the situation has actually continued to get worse since then,” she said on Tuesday.
The TDSB would likely have less maintenance and repair costs if it could operate fewer schools, the auditor general’s report said, but boards cannot close underutilized schools due to the province’s moratorium on school closures.
Stiles said that’s “not on the radar” for her and that the province needs to “fund schools properly, fix the funding formula and address the capital repair backlog.”
Education Minister Jill Dunlop provided no indication that she’s considering lifting the moratorium and said the board has “struggled to make the best-use of its funding including for capital improvements.”
“We provide enough taxpayer money to cover the board’s costs. The TDSB needs to provide an adequate plan to balance its budget, not ask government to close schools, something that parents have told us they are against,” she said in a statement.
The board and the ministry accepted all of the auditor general’s recommendations outlined in the report. These included doing a “root cause analysis” to better understand the violence that is occurring, concentrating mental health supports where there is greatest need, establishing a centralized system to track bullying, implementing a process to check that schools are doing the necessary fire and lockdown drills and working with the education ministry to establish a process for more frequent police background checks for employees.
The TDSB responded to each of the recommendations, saying for some that it would require more funding from the ministry. For example, on mental health supports, the board said it would raise the need for “additional long-term investment” with the ministry “while deploying a range of professional and paraprofessional supports that take into account available financial resources.”
On tackling violence incidents, the board said it would work with the city and the police service to “analyze trends observed in community violence data and their impact on incidents in TDSB schools, and leverage those findings to inform the allocation of supports for mental health, and social and emotional development where appropriate.”
Dunlop said the government updated the bullying prevention and intervention strategy in 2021, requiring boards to “have processes to track and monitor all instances of reported bullying.” She added that the province has provided “record amounts for mental health supports” to the board this year.
-With files from Jessica Smith Cross
