Won't Somebody Please Think of the Children? This Time, I Mean It

There's a teenager in Peel whose most reliable shower happens at school. Somebody on staff at the Peel Alternative School knows that kid's name, knows which mornings are the rough ones, and makes sure there's a towel, a clean shirt, and something to eat waiting before first period. As of this week, there's a good chance that somebody no longer works there. Eight teachers were excessed out of the Peel Alternative School (PAS) with no warning, weeks into a school year that had already started, and the students who depend on them most were the last people anyone thought to ask.

I'll get the disclosure out of the way early, because you'd find it on your own anyway. My wife teaches at PAS, and she's one of the people caught up in this. I have a dog in this fight and I won't pretend otherwise. I'd much rather be back here grumbling about wholesale fibre rates, which is what this blog is usually for. The kids at PAS don't have a blog, though, and most of them don't have a parent with the time or the platform to make noise on their behalf. So today it's going to be me.

What actually happened?

For those not familiar with the jargon, being "excessed" means a teacher is declared surplus at their school and sent back into the board's pool to be reassigned somewhere else. The teachers will land somewhere. That's cold comfort to a sixteen-year-old who just lost the one adult they'd finally started to trust, and who now gets to explain their whole story again to a stranger.

The cause was a change to how PAS gets its teachers. Alternative schools have historically been staffed on a model that reflects who they actually serve. This fall the school was moved onto the same per-student formula used for mainstream secondary schools, where the province funds an average class of 23 students per teacher (and anyone with a teenager in a regular high school will tell you real classes run bigger than that). Run PAS through that formula and eight positions fall out the bottom. Nobody I've spoken to was told this was coming.

Why does the formula matter so much here? Because PAS is what the system calls a Tier 3 school. It serves the most vulnerable secondary students in Peel: kids dealing with trauma, housing insecurity, mental health crises, caregiving responsibilities at home, and years of being told in one way or another that they don't fit. Those students need more adults per head, and the board office hasn't always seen it that way. Every time someone downtown has started counting beans, the school's administration has shown up to plead its case and explain why PAS can't be staffed like a regular high school. Until this year, they'd always won that argument.

There's a second reason the old model left the alternative school alone, and anyone who's run capacity planning will recognize it immediately. Staffing is set in the spring based on projections for September. Every fall, mainstream schools finish their own reorganizations and then refer their most challenging students onward, and a lot of them land at PAS. Enrolment at the alternative school climbs through October and November. Cutting staff in September based on a head count that's guaranteed to rise is the education equivalent of sizing your retail network on a quiet Sunday in August and acting surprised when Black Friday takes it down. I've spent enough years watching networks fall over to call that what it is: a design flaw that everyone involved saw coming.

Who is actually on the other end of that formula?

One of my wife's colleagues at PAS wrote a piece about all this and shared a copy with me personally. It describes students who arrive "carrying years of disappointment, failure, anxiety, trauma, and disconnection from school," and who approach every adult in the building with deep suspicion until that adult earns their trust. That trust gets built through hundreds of small interactions, and it can't be transferred to a replacement by memo. When those relationships get cut, the writer argues, "students may interpret the loss as yet another example of the system failing them."

The line from that piece that stuck with me is simple: "For years, I have told people that I teach hope." At PAS, every credit recovered and every morning a student decides to show up counts as a win. For some of these kids, school is also where they eat, where they wash, and where an adult notices when something at home has gone badly wrong. Some of these kids are entirely on their own, with no parent or guardian in the picture at all. For them, the staff at PAS are the people who find a shelter bed, help them get through the intake, and connect them with legal aid when the paperwork gets beyond what any teenager should have to handle alone. A staffing ratio has no column for any of that.

Didn't the minister already tell us this was a bad idea?

Here's the part that makes this more than a local staffing story. In January, Education Minister Paul Calandra seized control of the Peel District School Board for the second time, and his headline justification was that the board planned to lay off roughly 60 teachers in the middle of the school year. The Pointer reported that plan would have affected about 1,400 students. Calandra's own words at the time, as reported by CP24: "Midway through the year, to be contemplating laying off teachers, reorganizing classrooms to deal with a budget... just would put so many parents, teachers and students in chaos."

He was right. So what should we call it when the board he now controls pulls eight teachers out of the most vulnerable school in the system after classes have already started?

The board is run today by a provincial supervisor, Heather Watt, appointed in March after a career in crisis consulting and as chief of staff to the former deputy premier. In April, Calandra announced that supervisors would not be allowed to speak with the media, explaining that "supervisors are not media personalities." Peel's 2026-27 budget was then filed without in-person public consultation, and it trimmed special education funding by $7.5 million. Parents can't vote out a supervisor, and trustees have been sidelined. Every line of accountability for what happened at PAS this week now runs straight to the minister's office.

I'm a fiscal conservative, and this still makes no sense

Regular readers know where I sit politically. I think governments should spend carefully, and I'll say plainly that the old PDSB board earned a lot of the scrutiny it got. It ran five straight deficits and created nine new management positions in the same year it planned to cut 60 classroom teachers. Somebody needed to step in, and I didn't lose any sleep when the province did.

Being careful with money means putting it where it returns the most, though, and I'd struggle to name a better return on a teacher's salary than a Tier 3 student who stays in school long enough to graduate. The alternative gets paid for anyway, just later and through different budgets: social assistance, emergency rooms, the justice system, and a lifetime of lower earnings and tax revenue. Trimming eight salaries at PAS just shifts that bill onto ministries that never have to explain it at a Peel budget meeting. That's bean counting by people who can't count past the end of the fiscal year.

It's also not clear the approach is working on its own terms. A year after supervisors took over four boards in 2025, every one of them was still reporting a deficit. If the savings aren't showing up anyway, the least the province can do is stop finding them in the one school built for kids with nowhere else to go.

So what can we do about this?

The asks are specific, and none of them require new legislation:

1. Restore the eight positions at PAS for this school year. The minister already told us why mid-year reorganizations are harmful. Apply that standard here.
2. Put the alternative school staffing model in writing. Allocations for PAS and schools like it should reflect a Tier 3 population and the predictable in-year intake from mainstream schools, rather than the default ratio.
3. Explain the decision publicly. If the supervisor isn't allowed to talk to the media, the minister can. Who decided to change the formula, when, and based on what analysis?

I'm under no illusions about my reach here. My dozens of loyal readers are mostly people with strong opinions about BGP, and I doubt anyone at Queen's Park has ever lost sleep over what gets posted on this blog. Still, a few dozen emails about the same eight teachers landing in the minister's inbox on the same afternoon will get noticed by somebody, and every person you forward this to roughly doubles my audience. So make some noise. Email the people below, copy your own MPP (mine is Stephen Crawford in Oakville, and he'll be hearing from me), and keep it short and polite: tell them you're asking for the eight PAS positions to be restored, and ask for a reply.

• Hon. Paul Calandra, Minister of Education: minister.edu@ontario.ca
• Heather Watt, Provincial Supervisor, PDSB: supervisor@peelsb.com
• Rashmi Swarup, CEO, PDSB: rashmi.swarup@peelsb.com
• Jaspal Gill, COO, PDSB: jaspal.gill@peelsb.com, 905-890-1010 ext. 2180
• Harjit Aujla, Chief Education Officer, PDSB: harjit.aujla@peelsb.com
• Paul Da Silva, Chief School Services Officer, PDSB: paul.dasilva@peelsb.com
• Rudy Cuzzetto, MPP, Mississauga-Lakeshore: rudy.cuzzetto@pc.ola.org, 905-274-8228
• Hardeep Singh Grewal, MPP, Brampton East: hardeep.grewal@pc.ola.org, 905-799-3939
• Hon. Stephen Crawford, MPP, Oakville: stephen.crawford@pc.ola.org, 905-827-5141

There's also an election coming. Trustee elections are on October 26, and every candidate running for a Peel seat should be asked, on the record, whether they'll fight to restore alternative school staffing. Trustees came back from the Putting Student Achievement First Act with far less power than they used to have, but a room full of candidates saying the same thing a month before a vote is still hard for Queen's Park to ignore.

Somewhere in Peel this week, there's a towel folded on a shelf in a staff room, waiting for a kid who'll show up tomorrow morning expecting a familiar face. Let's make sure someone is still there to hand it over.