EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media website devoted to covering provincial politics at Queen’s Park.
Less than a year before the Ford government’s education minister said he would never allow the Toronto District School Board to close its pools, one of his predecessors told the board it was spending too much on swim programs.
Swimming programs that don’t recover costs are a “deviation” from the board’s mandate and have “taken away resources that could have been used to support K-12 students to reach high levels of achievement,” then-education minister Todd Smith wrote to then-TDSB chair Rachel Chernos Lin in a June 13, 2024 letter obtained by The Trillium.
Smith, who left politics for the private sector last August, noted the TDSB’s then-projected deficit of $35.3 million, after trustees found $17 million in cuts.
“In addition to the inability to balance its budget, I note concerns with TDSB’s financial management which are exacerbating the deficit the school board is facing,” he wrote, pointing to two new associate directors that were added in 2022-23, the board’s failure to remove one-time COVID-19 funding from its ongoing budget, and “underspending” of repair funds.
“TDSB continues to offer non-core Kindergarten to Grade 12 programs and does so without them being on a cost recovery basis, for example, adult general interest courses and swimming programs,” reads another bullet point. “This is a deviation from TDSB’s mandate and has taken away resources that could have been used to support K-12 students to reach high levels of achievement. Similar programs tend to be offered by community groups or the City of Toronto.”
“It seems these reasons and other financial management practices, have led to the deterioration of TDSB’s financial position to the point where the reserves are almost fully depleted,” Smith wrote.
In a statement to The Trillium on Tuesday, the new education minister’s office said the board should focus on "administrative savings."
“Closing swimming pools has never been a solution to the Toronto District School Board’s (TDSB) financial issues, despite our record increase in education funding this school year,” Emma Testani, Education Minister Paul Calandra’s spokesperson, said in a statement. “We have asked the board to find savings of less than 2 per cent, and instead of looking for administrative savings they are taking aim at cutting services that serve students.”
She said the TDSB is “uniquely positioned” as the only one in the province to own a “significant number of swimming pools serving students across the city in a number of communities, for years.”
“While core education funding does not pay for swimming pools, TDSB has the responsibility to operate their pool program on a cost-recovery basis,” Testani said.
The TDSB now has a projected deficit of $58 million — the amount TDSB board chair Neethan Shan previously told The Trillium the board needed to find in savings.
TDSB staff initially proposed a number of ways to tackle the deficit for the 2025-26 school year, including cutting a music program, aquatic instructors, and possibly closing more than half of the 66 swimming pools the board has in its schools that aren’t leased.
The board faced backlash from both the minister and the community about these proposals.
Shan said he thinks Smith’s letter “played a role” in staff trying to identify areas the government considered “outside the core function” of kindergarten to Grade 12 education when recently proposing ways to tackle the board’s deficit.
Shan said he and many other trustees also don’t support cuts to swimming programs.
“We’re fortunate that we have a number of schools with pools, and so if we have that asset already with us, it makes sense to be offering these programs, especially to communities that do not have access to swimming programs or access to pools,” he said.
Last week, board trustees approved about $20 million in reductions to the deficit, leaving about $37.4 million for trustees to debate at meetings in the coming weeks, according to the board.
The approved reductions included $7.5 million through the “alignment of class sizes to collective agreements and Regulations,” $5 million through “new procedures and improved support for employees,” $7.5 million through “central budgets,” and $0.6 million through a “commitment to nurturing local schools.”
Shan acknowledged that the board has a “responsibility to continue to explore ways to find cost-recovery models for our programs.” The TDSB is facing a $12-million annual shortfall when it comes to operating and maintaining its pools, said Shan, adding that there is also a $130 million repair backlog.
He said that since the swimming pool closures were first proposed, the board has directed the Toronto Lands Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of the board, to assess whether it’s feasible to keep them open with new leases so the board would have access to the pools during the day for students, and other providers or the city would have access in the evenings or on weekends, “as long as they're sustainable.”
“If pools are important for us as a school board, if it's important for the ministry too, let's sit down and work together to find a path for making it sustainable and making it more accessible to more students as well,” he said.
Shan previously said the board had requested a meeting with Minister Calandra to “sit down and figure out solutions together.”
On May 7, the minister said he had received a letter from the chair asking for a meeting and that the government would “certainly oblige them on that,” but that he was “not moving off my path” to appoint a financial investigator to review the books.
Calandra has taken aim at the spending practices of school boards, including the TDSB.
At the Ontario legislature on May 1, he suggested the board look at the number of employees making $100,000 or more.He added that the board and trustees are “all about protecting themselves.”
“I simply will not allow pools to be closed,” he added a week later.
Shan said on Wednesday that it was unclear whether the board could take Calandra’s statement as a “ministry directive.”
“It's helpful to know that that's how the minister feels about the pools, which was a clarity we actually sought, so hopefully there is some direction that can be more formal than that,” he said.
The government has launched a few financial investigations at boards, including the TDSB. Testani confirmed that the government has appointed PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as the investigator to probe the board’s finances. The investigator’s report, which is due by Friday, will recommend whether Calandra should issue directions to the board or place it under supervision.
“The investigator will find a way to put it back on track. And if they don’t do it, I’ll take it over and I’ll do it for them,” Calandra said of the TDSB on May 1.
Provincial school board funding has declined over the Ford government’s time in office when inflation is taken into account, The Trillium reported earlier this month.
If the province had kept funding education at the rate of inflation, the TDSB would be $178.3 million richer this year — just over three times its $58 million deficit.
On Friday, the government touted “record” education funding for the 2025-26 school year — $30.3 billion in “core education funding” — but the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation said it "does little to address more than a decade of chronic underfunding in Ontario’s public education system."
Shan said that, while trustees don’t want to have to consider the closure of swimming pools, underfunding in several areas, along with the continued moratorium on school closures, contributed to the proposal to do so.
Opposition party leaders said it was hypocritical of the government to point to swimming programs as a cost-cutting measure, and then, a year later, declare them untouchable.
“It’s totally hypocritical,” NDP Leader Marit Stiles said. “The province holds the purse strings, and they're forcing boards into impossible situations.”
Swim programs are a “valuable part of an education,” Green Leader Mike Schreiner said, adding that the TDSB has said the government’s moratorium on school closures is hurting its bottom line.
Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie said she was “very fortunate” to have swimming in her school as a child.
“I think we should find the proper funding so that all of our children can benefit from a well-rounded education,” she said.
Asked about Calandra’s recent comments following Smith’s letter last summer, Shan said “to give the benefit of the doubt, it was the different minister, and … it was also a different government.”
He added that he thinks community advocacy helped to steer the conversation.
“So as a result of all those things, I'm assuming the minister . . . wants to (have) the pools open from what he has said, and we are going to make every attempt to keep (them) open as well.”