(Canada) Ont: 'System is collapsing'; 21,000 special needs children excluded from school
- 26 minutes ago
- 3 min read
THUNDER BAY — More resources for special education in Ontario are sorely needed.
That’s the main takeaway from a report (which includes a summary) issued Wednesday morning by the Ontario Autism Coalition. It’s the second such report by the organization that queries families across the province who have children with disabilities in the public education system. The survey collected 657 responses from across 64 school boards, including in the Northwest, said coalition president Alina Cameron.
Schools are being underfunded to the tune of about $6 billion [$4.4B], with about $800 million [$589M] of that shortfall coming from special education, she said.
“That means that there's (fewer) resources,” Cameron said. “There are (fewer) humans to be with our children, and (fewer) trained humans to be with our children, to keep them safe and make sure that their days are successful and that they're accessing curriculum.”
Newswatch requested comment from the Ministry of Education and Minister Paul Calandra’s office but didn't receive a reply by deadline.
Among the autism coalition report’s findings are that just over a quarter of students are on “modified schedules,” effectively meaning they don’t attend full time. That’s up from 19 per cent in last year’s report, Kate Dudley-Logue, the Ontario Autism Coalition’s vice president, told a news conference in Toronto on Wednesday.
“This is a striking increase and shows that schools are being forced more and more to rely on this strategy as a tool to manage the dwindling supports that they have available to them,” Dudley-Logue said.
Further, the report said, a third of students with disabilities were excluded from school activities province-wide, while six per cent (or 21,757 children), continue to be fully excluded and aren’t attending school at all.
“They are either being fully excluded due to the lack of resources, or their families have given up trying to navigate the constant calls to pick up their child and the stress involved with managing all of it,” Dudley-Logue said.
Cameron said there are formal or “hard” exclusions, where paperwork is sent home with a student and a safety plan is put in place, when necessary, but also what the organization calls “soft exclusions.” Those, she said aren’t tracked by the province. . . .
“We’d like to see an injection of cash right off the hop to make sure kids can be in school,” she said.
“To put it bluntly, the system is collapsing,” Dudley-Logue told reporters in Toronto. “And we all know why,” she continued, pointing to underfunding while stressing that it’s not the fault of trustees, teachers or staff. . . .
.
The coalition is also calling for more accountability around individualized education plans or IEPs — legal documents that spell out what accommodations a child with a disability needs and how they are to be taught. . . .
“But the problem is, is that because there aren't enough resources, those accommodations aren't happening in real time and a lot of the IEP recommendations just don't happen for their kids, or they don't know if they're happening.”
The report found that 42 per cent of respondents said their children's IEPs were "followed inconsistently or not at all," and that 66 per cent reported "little or no IEP follow-up."
Cameron said this type of advocacy is especially important right now with Bill 101 making its way through the legislature. The bill proposes sweeping changes to the education system and ones that critics say centralize a lot of power at the ministerial level without directly addressing special education.
One aspect of the bill is to prioritize attendance, but disability advocates say the lack of special education resources are directly causing many of those students to be absent.
Cameron said when the autism coalition spoke to the bill on Monday, Calandra offered exemptions in those cases.
“I just wanted to point out that we aren't asking for exemptions from attendance,” she said. “Our kids want to be at school.”
“When you've got at least 21,000 students who can't be there at all, governance isn't going to fix that.”
Comments