Peel school board supervision a ‘smokescreen’ for underfunding, chair says
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The chair of a school board recently taken over by Ontario’s minister of education is defending the management and finances of the board, saying the supervision is a “smokescreen” to distract from provincial underfunding.
Education Minister Paul Calandra announced Wednesday that he was putting Peel District School Board under supervision due to a plan to lay off 60 teachers and repeated budget deficits.
Peel is the seventh board placed under provincial supervision since Calandra became minister last year, and he has also given the York Catholic District School Board two weeks to make a case for avoiding the same fate.
Peel board chair David Green said the deficits had always been covered in the past by dipping into the board’s reserves, and part of the reason for deficits is that the board has been spending more on special education than it receives for that from the province.
“It has nothing to do with bad management or anything like that,” he said.
“It has to do with the fact that we are underfunded … This is just a smokescreen to divert the attention away from ministry not providing proper funding to support our students.”
Green also said the loss of teachers from dozens of classrooms aren’t “layoffs” of full-time teachers. To save money, resource teachers are being moved into classrooms being covered by long-term occasional teachers, whose contracts are being cut short, he said.
Calandra has said that disrupting all of those classrooms mid-year for about 1,400 students was not acceptable.
“You can just imagine what that does in schools, and the chaos it causes for students, let alone parents who built a relationship, and obviously (affects) the teachers as well,” he said in an earlier interview.
Calandra has been signalling for months that he is planning on broader school board governance changes, including possibly all but eliminating the role of trustees. He said he expects to make a final decision “soon.”
Any changes will not include closing or amalgamating school boards, merging the public and Catholic systems, or introducing charter schools, he has said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 30, 2026.