Doug Ford Got Rid of Toronto’s School Trustees. At One School, Things Blew Up.

Communication breakdowns with school administration, the removal of the locally elected representative who could advocate for students and the feeling that the province is not hearing their concerns have driven parents at one public school in Toronto to attempt to take matters into their own hands.

Two thirds of the way into the school year, parents of students at Bowmore Road Junior and Senior Public School are still looking for answers about an abrupt change to the school’s teaching model, why eight teachers were suspended and why there has been so much turnover of principals and vice principals over the past several years.

Bowmore is one of the largest K-8 schools in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), with over 1,000 students. The TDSB was one of the first of eight school boards taken over by Ford’s Progressive Conservative government in the last year.

The government claimed the boards had been misallocating resources and wasting money, and so replaced each board’s elected trustees with a single supervisor of the minister’s choice. As soon as the takeovers were complete, the provincial government began making changes to the way they function.

These have included hundreds of recently announced layoffs at the Peel and Toronto school boards, the reintroduction of controversial Student Resource Officer programs and a province-wide memo threatening teachers over the potential for “political” content at graduation ceremonies.

Because of what they see as a continued lack of communication from the school, along with the board’s apparent inability to address their concerns, parents at Bowmore have drafted an open letter to the minister of education criticizing the current situation at the school and warning of its implications.

“Years of provincial funding cuts and top-down governance changes have pushed our school to the breaking point,” the letter says.

“Our children are anxious,” it continues. “They sense adults struggling to make sense of mismanagement that no one seems able to stop.”

The transformative changes to public education have led education advocates, labour organizations and parents to describe the Ford government’s actions as an attack on local democracy.

“This is a public institution that’s acting like a private corporation,” Jenn Engels, a parent in the Bowmore Road community and co-chair of its parent council, told PressProgress. Engels has a child that attends Bowmore and another who graduated from it in 2024.

Michelle Aarts, elected in 2022 as the TDSB trustee for the east-end ward that includes Bowmore, said there was one constant with everything happening there.

“What was at the core of all the issues was a lack of communication,” Aarts, who is also the parent of a child that attends the school, told PressProgress. “Just an unprecedented lack of communication.”

Since the province took over the board last June, trustees like Aarts have been effectively removed from their elected positions.

In addition to setting board-wide policy, trustees would act as ombudsmen for parents in their constituency who had issues or concerns about something happening in their child’s school. But with the takeover, according to Aarts, trustees have been instructed by the Ministry of Education to not represent their community in any official capacity.

Aarts said she has been locked out of her TDSB email account, and that contacting it provides only an unhelpful bounceback message.

When the email was tested by PressProgress, a message came back saying, “The User you are trying to reach is no longer with TDSB.”

A screenshot of the bounceback message received when attempting to contact the TDSB email address for Michelle Aarts, elected as a trustee in 2022. (Eric Wickham)

According to Aarts, this has caused a number of issues for parents looking for support.

“I had a family parent contact me last week who found me through other connections, who wanted some help navigating special education,” Aarts said. “They copied me on an email that was like, ‘I am completely outraged at all this, I go to my trustee for help and all you’ve provided me with is this bounceback that is not monitored and doesn’t even direct me to support.’”

Aarts said she thinks the bounceback message is intentionally unhelpful.

“Not providing information is meant to frustrate people and make it seem like it’s my fault or a trustee’s fault that they’re not getting a response,” Aarts said.

Neither the TDSB nor the Ministry of Education have responded to PressProgress’ requests for comment.

There have been some dramatic changes at the school level for Bowmore as well. While the issues at Bowmore began before the province took over the board, advocates and community members say the new setup has not helped.

“The board’s limited budget is being drained to cover extra administrative staffing, new security cameras, supply coverage and legal fees — money that should be strengthening classrooms, not patching over chaos,” said the parents’ letter.

Near the start of this school year, Bowmore’s administration abruptly decided to change the teaching model for some grades, in part, the school said, to address safety issues. The school switched from a “rotary” system, with students moving from class to class to learn different subjects, to a “core” model, with students learning a variety of subjects from a single teacher.

Parents have said the model change did not address safety issues but did force teachers to completely revamp their teaching plans. This led to many teachers dropping the extracurricular programs they ran for students on their own time. It also led to the suspension of eight teachers and two being removed from the school altogether.

The teachers’ union is currently grieving these personnel changes.

 

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Engels said she didn’t think safety was the reason behind the model change, and that parents never heard a clear answer on the actual reason the school changed their teaching model — but she has her own theories.

“I think it’s got to be about administrative wins,” said Engels. “If it had anything to do with educational outcomes, they would be falling over themselves to provide that information.”

Engels said she thinks the school board wants more generalized educators, rather than teachers with specializations on specific subjects, as a way to address chronic underfunding and teacher shortages.

“I don’t envy the school boards, who are having to do more with less every year,” Engels said. “From what I understand, they’re not even allowed to say, ‘Well it’s because we’re massively underfunded.’”

According to William Paul, the editor of School Magazine and a retired principal, while the issues at Bowmore were serious, they were also solvable. He believes that the TDSB school trustee not being allowed to officially represent the community led to the situation escalating.

“If Michelle [Aarts] actually had some clout left, she would have gone to the principal,” said Paul, noting that Aarts would probably have been able to reason with the principal as a representative of the community.

“‘This arrangement that teachers have amongst themselves for sharing the load for the coursework in grade 7 and 8 seems to be working, the parents like it, teachers like it, the kids seem to be doing okay, why change it?’”

When parents asked for answers, Aarts said the principal and superintendent refused to meet with them as a group. The principal at the time instead met with parents one on one.

“Unfortunately, each of those parents came away with a different message,” said Aarts.
“And so, of course, they compared notes, and when they compared notes, they came away with different like, it’s ‘Oh no, he told me this and he told you that — he must be lying, they’re lying to us.’”

Aarts said that on top of the instability caused by staff turnover, students with exceptional needs have not been supported because of a lack of adequate staffing.

Despite being removed from her role in an official capacity, Aarts was asked by parents to help organize a meeting for parents, which she did despite trustees being ordered by the minister to not contact schools or represent the TDSB.

“Those people still have a right to representation, this is not about my role as a trustee,” said Aarts, who added that the stipend trustees received (around $25,000 annually) has also been suspended.

“Personally, I don’t care, it’s not very much money,” Aarts said. “I became a trustee because there was significant work that needed to be done to improve the system, to improve access to education, and the service of education, especially for equity-seeking groups.”

In November, Education Minister Paul Calandra announced that public school boards would have to establish “Student and Family Support Offices” to offer parents “a clear, effective way to get help regarding their child’s education.” To many parents, this signalled the province’s intention to end elected school boards for good, and a campaign was launched to protest the loss of what they saw as the only recourse they had to advocate for their children.

Aarts said that the TDSB already had a similar support office with five staff, and that it is now a fraction of what it once was.

“Now the office is two staff and no trustees,” said Aarts. “I have not met anybody who has heard back from that office, including my kid and my husband.”

Engels called the new system “laughably inadequate.”

“I mean, it’s not funny in the least, because it’s so pathetic,” Engels said. “But to say what we’re providing is better than what you had before is so absurd, it’s insulting.”

The situation at Bowmore, according to the open letter, is a “warning sign for the entire public education system in Ontario.” While community members have organized to fill the void created by the handling of this situation, they and former educators remain concerned about the long-term impacts the changes by the Ford government will have on local democracy in public education.

“Ford and his ministers lead with a very backwards, ‘Just do as I say, I’m the boss,’” said Aarts.

“Which amuses me, whenever Ford is saying, ‘I was in business, people need to run things like businesses’ — he’s not a good business person, he’s not a business leader.”

Aarts said that last spring, education partners were able to get great traction in the media about the underfunding of schools, including clear narratives about how bad special education supports are. Aarts says she thinks that probably earned the attention of the premier.

“Doug Ford does not like to be disliked, he does not like negative press, and this is extremely negative press,” said Aarts. “I don’t think Calandra was brought in for anything more than to shut down the narrative.”

“He doesn’t build,” she said of Calandra, whose portfolios prior to his March 2025 appointment as education minister included long-term care and housing. “Anywhere he’s placed, he’s a wrecking ball.”

Although Engels said she is “disturbed” by the Ministry of Education’s attempts to shut down communication with parents, she appreciates efforts by the new principal, Hager Awara, to work in dialogue with the community to address their concerns in what Engels called an “impossible situation.”

“I have nothing but appreciation and respect for this new administrator who has come in,” said Engels. “I feel really bad for the principals who are trying to be good communicators, be collaborators with the parents — as they are supposed to be.”

“It’s a public institution, and the word coming from the top is like, ‘Shut out the parents,’ so that puts administrators in an incredible bind.”