Social Policy in Ontario

Getting rid of school board trustees is the right thing to do

Posted on February 21, 2026 in Education Debates

Source: TheStar.com — Authors: Martin Regg Cohn

TheStar.com – Politics/Political Opinion
Feb. 20, 2026.    ByMartin Regg Cohn, Political Columnist

Think back to the last municipal election campaign, when your local school trustee might have stopped by to promise accountability in the education system.

Perhaps they tried to persuade you that trustees embody true grassroots governance of our schools. More probably, you have no recollection of ever seeing or hearing from your local trustee, let alone voting for him or her.

Possibly you have no clue what their name is after all these years — and all those elections. The reality of local democracy today is that turnout for most trustee elections is abysmally low — typically in the range of 10 to 30 per cent of eligible voters.

Yet our freshly empowered trustees gain a free hand to meddle in massive school board budgets. And then point fingers in ideological or tangential debates about what’s taught in classrooms across the province.

Trustees weren’t always so disconnected.

More than 200 years ago, school trustees were Ontario’s first elected politicians, predating by decades the MPPs and MPs who later sat at Queen’s Park and on Parliament Hill. In a province dominated by one-room schoolhouses, they played a pioneering role as “trustees.”

All these years later, trustees are no longer the leading edge of democracy, they are a lagging indicator of dysfunction and distrust. Today, trustees have been overtaken in relevance and importance by senior levels of government — municipal, provincial and federal — on measures of accountability and also accounting.

To date, a record seven local school boards have been taken over by outside supervisors appointed by Education Minister Paul Calandra. He says an eighth school board, York Catholic, is in disarray and may be added to the list of dysfunctional boards that already includes Toronto’s public and Catholic boards, Peel District and Ottawa-Carleton public — adding up to roughly one-third of all students in the province.

Calandra’s stated goal is to restore solvency and stability — fiscal and pedagogical — to the system. The minister has catalogued a litany of unauthorized budget deficits, implausible fiscal plans, botched agendas for staff and students, and classroom funding sacrificed for pet projects or fanciful causes.

Opposition critics suggest Calandra has a hidden agenda to disempower trustees. Hidden or not, if Calandra advances that agenda publicly — when elected MPPs return to the legislature next month — it will be about time.

Martin Regg Cohn is a Toronto-based columnist focusing on Ontario politics and international affairs for the Star.

https://www.thestar.com/politics/political-opinion/getting-rid-of-school-board-trustees-is-the-right-thing-to-do/article_286f4851-e67e-4d34-ab02-4d0ad285cbf7.html

Tags: Education, ideology, jurisdiction, participation

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