A statement from Joe Tigani, educational assistant and president of CUPE’s Ontario School Boards Council of Unions (OSBCU):

On Friday afternoon, Ontario education minister Stephen Lecce announced the amount of funding that the provincial government will provide to school boards for the upcoming school year as well as new ways this funding information is being presented, which the minister is calling a ‘new funding model.’

The Ford Conservative government’s new funding model is not fundamentally different from the old one.

Per pupil funding will be increasing by only 1.86% in 2024-25, below what the government itself is projecting inflation will be. In the 2024 provincial budget presented just over a month ago, the government is saying inflation will be 2.6% in 2024 and 2% in 2025.

Over the last year (12 months from March 2023 to March 2024), inflation has been 2.9%. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) calculated the difference between that real increase in costs and what the provincial government is going to provide to school boards next year is a loss of about $300 million for schools, or roughly $141 per student.

The cosmetic change of relabeling 18 provincial grants into six “funding pillars” isn’t helpful either.

The apparent simplicity in 12 fewer pillars than grants is superficial as the funding model is still based on a complex set of calculations as outlined in the extensive 267-page document called Technical Guide for School Boards 2024-25. In fact, it is 47 pages longer than last year’s 220-page Education Funding Technical Paper 2023-24.

All minister Lecce has done is made it more difficult for parents and education workers to compare how much money this Conservative government is underfunding schools from one year to the next.

Clearly minister Lecce and premier Doug Ford know they’re shortchanging students and parents again come this September.

What’s been announced doesn’t do anything to meet the current shortfalls in school staffing, and it sadly doesn’t invest in more frontline staffing that would improve the lives of students and parents.

The frustrating thing is this provincial government has the resources to do so much better than these cuts, but it chooses not to.