Support staff for York Catholic District School Board are protesting staffing cuts they fault on funding cuts by the Ministry of Education.
YCDSB’s professional support services personnel (PSSP) said the school board recently approved frontline staffing cuts impacting psychology and behavioural resource service staff, as well as speech and language service staff and occupational/physical therapy staff. The group said that 13.5 positions were being impacted.
YCDSB PSSP president Sherry-Ann Bowden-Gordon said these cuts will hurt student well-being and timely service.
“Adequately funding PSSP is essential for ensuring that our members can effectively serve the needs of the most vulnerable students in the YCDSB,” she said in a news release. “Cuts will have a detrimental impact on mental health and well-being, support and direct services to students, families, schools and communities.”
The workers fall under the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF). The scale of the localized cuts was not made available by the unit before publication time. But unions, including the OSSTF, have protested education spending for months and said that despite additional dollars on paper, the Ministry of Education has been effectively making cuts in school funding when adjusting for recent high inflation.
YCDSB received about $600.8 million in base grant funding in 2022-23 according to ministry estimates, increasing to about 601.4 million in 2023-24. The ministry offered a one-time funding boost in 2023-24 totalling about $21.6 million in 2022-23 for YCDSB, but that boost will go down to $10.3 million in 2023-24.
A ministry spokesperson said that the board is well funded, with base funding levels increasing despite enrolment declining by 1.8 per cent. The ministry said it is not accurate to suggest the inflation makes these cuts, with the funding formulas and math being more complex than that.
The workers said that cuts have resulted in the elimination on two early literacy programs called the Story Time and Read With Me that have served 229 classrooms and more than 6,000 students across the board in two years. It said the cuts have been due to “provincial funding shortfalls” that have put “tremendous pressure” on boards like YCDSB.
The union said some of the cuts are through attrition with positions and others are cases where the board had struggles to fill positions. In some cases, the board is using non-staffing funds to create temporary, one-year contracts, the union said.
The cuts will “have a detrimental impact on our students and school communities,” Bowden-Gorden said.
York Catholic District School Board did not respond to a request for comment before publication deadline.
The bargaining unit said that some families will turn to private practice for some areas like early intervention literacy support.
“Unfortunately, many families are not able to fund private support for their children, resulting in a two-tiered system for YCDSB students and a greater impact on marginalized students,” the workers said.
