The Ford government is backing down from its threat to abolish school board trustees in Ontario and will, instead, add limits to their spending, cap the largest boards at 12 members and change how the bureaucracy is managed.
The Putting Student Achievement First Act, tabled by Education Minister Paul Calandra on Monday, changes how school boards in Ontario are run — but leaves elected trustees in place at the public, Catholic and French boards.
“Ontario’s education system must remain focused on its core responsibility: student success,” Calandra said in a statement. “In some school boards, that focus has been lost, and students are paying the price.”
Under the new system, trustees will have less power over the finances of the school boards they run.
Ontario NDP MPP Chandra Pasma said she worried the changes would give more power over school boards to Queen’s Park.
“This is another power grab by the Minister, shutting parents and communities out of our own schools,” she wrote in a statement.
“By further controlling appointments, budgets, and restricting what trustees can even discuss, this government is centralizing decision-making in Queen’s Park and sidelining local voices.”
The role of elected trustees has been a focus for the minister since he took over the education file last year, sidelining them at eight separate boards and musing about how he could remove them altogether.
At one point, Calandra said he could remove all English public board trustees in “one fell swoop” if he chose to.
The changes the government unveiled on Monday leave the existing system relatively untouched structurally, but substantially shift the emphasis of responsibility.
Trustees will still be elected, but capped at a maximum of 12 per board, with five the minimum. The change, the government said, would only impact the Toronto District School Board, which currently has 22 elected trustees.
The honorarium for trustees will be limited to $10,000, with closer scrutiny of expenses. It would also ban school boards from paying certain fees for trustees to belong to certain organizations and for costs to attend “non-essential” conferences, and limit trustees’ discretionary expenses.
Elected trustees will still sit on committees, including those covering discipline, and will weigh in on the budget — but the creation of a new bureaucratic position will curtail their decision-making power.
While Calandra initially intended to eliminate trustee positions altogether, he quickly ran into constitutional challenges.
Both the English Catholic and French-language school boards are afforded denominational and language rights by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms – potentially setting the stage for a Charter challenge if Calandra took that route.
In mid-2025, Calandra told Global News that Ontario’s 31 English public school boards have “no constitutional cover whatsoever,” allowing the province to eliminate the position completely.
The idea, sources said, was unpopular both with the Progressive Conservative party and public opinion polling.
Calandra said while he wanted to “remove distractions” among school board trustees, he determined that it was “fitting” that public school boards kept the same system as Catholic and French-language boards.
“I did reflect upon the fact that, as I had been saying from the beginning, the French system would remain the same,” Calandra said.
“The Catholic system still has trustees in charge of denominational issues. So it only seemed fitting that at the same time, for that level of consistency, that the public system would also have trustees.”
Calandra’s proposed changes also target collective bargaining, mostly taking trustees out of the process. Right now, trustee associations negotiate on behalf of school boards in teacher and education worker contract talks, but the bill would hand that role to senior staff, with the Council of Ontario Directors of Education becoming the bargaining agent for English public and Catholic boards.
The proposed changes largely leave the role of trustees at French-language boards alone.
Within the English and Catholic boards, the government is also changing how the bureaucracy operates.
If the legislation is passed, a new chief executive officer would be in charge of financial decisions, while the chief education officer would handle school decisions. The former would require a business qualification, and the latter would need to have some kind of teaching education.
They would replace the director of education, who is the head of the board’s bureaucracy under the current system.
The new CEO — whom school boards will be in charge of hiring — would be in charge of drafting and guiding the new budget through, although elected trustees could still request changes.
The government indicated, however, that if trustees made changes the CEO did not approve of, he could push back.
“The CEO will be responsible for developing a budget, the CEO will be responsible for delivering the budget to the board,” Calandra told reporters.
“The trustees will have the ability to weigh in on the CEO’s proposed budget, they will have the ability to make suggestions and they will have the ability to say yes or no but not make changes to that budget.”
If trustees aren’t able to agree on budgets under the proposed changes, the minister of education could intervene to decide.
Critics argue that the increased role for the CEO and reduction in power over financial decisions for trustees give the government more control over school boards.
“This is just supervision, but not saying that it is,” Ontario Liberal interim leader John Fraser told reporters. “There’s going to be a CEO — a supervisor — in every board across Ontario.”
The union representing elementary school teachers said the legislation “removes the essential powers trustees need to genuinely represent families and students,” while the union for secondary school teachers suggested the change “signals a troubling corporatization of public education at a time when they would be expected to lead central bargaining.”
The legislation makes other changes to education — including adding points toward achievement in high school based on attendance, new teaching resources and mandatory written exams.
— with files from The Canadian Press
© 2026 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
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