Toronto's two largest school boards have passed budgets for the coming school year that remain mired in deficit, even after rounds of painful cuts to staff and programs imposed by the provincial supervisors now running them. The Toronto District School Board and the Toronto Catholic District School Board both approved spending plans that, despite the reductions, still fail to balance the books. The result is a picture of large urban boards struggling to align their finances with the funding they receive. It also underscores how far the cost-cutting has had to go without fully closing the gap.
For the public board, the numbers show both the scale of the problem and the depth of the response. The Toronto District School Board had projected a deficit of 74.5 million dollars for the 2026-27 year, a shortfall its supervisor set out to shrink through aggressive savings. Measures taken under that supervision produced roughly 59.5 million dollars in reductions, bringing the projected deficit down to about 15 million dollars heading into the fall. In other words, the board managed to eliminate the bulk of the gap, but not all of it.
Those savings came at a cost that will be felt in schools. The cuts included the elimination of hundreds of teaching positions and central office staff, along with several programs, among them outdoor education, that families had come to rely on. Trimming that many jobs and offerings inevitably reshapes what the board can deliver day to day, from class sizes to the range of experiences available to students. Officials acknowledged that a deficit of that size simply cannot be erased in a single year, framing the work as a multi-year effort.
Compounding the financial strain is a steady decline in the number of students walking through the doors. The Toronto District School Board says it expects to have nearly 5,000 fewer students in the coming year, a drop that directly affects its revenue because much of a board's funding is tied to enrolment. Fewer students mean less money, even as many fixed costs remain, creating a squeeze that cuts alone cannot fully resolve. The trend leaves the board trying to shrink its spending as quickly as its student population is falling.
The Catholic board faces a parallel, if slightly different, set of pressures. The Toronto Catholic District School Board says it is about 39.5 million dollars short, a figure roughly in line with where it stood a year earlier, suggesting its gap has proven stubborn to close. It, too, is contending with declining enrolment, projecting a decrease of about 1,500 students. Taken together, the two boards illustrate how the financial difficulties are not confined to a single system but stretch across Toronto's publicly funded education landscape.
Both boards are operating under an unusual arrangement. They are among eight boards in Ontario that have been placed in the hands of provincially appointed supervisors, a step taken over what the province has described as alleged financial mismanagement, persistent multi-million-dollar deficits and a failure to implement cost-saving measures. Under that model, decision-making authority shifts from elected trustees to the appointed supervisor, whose mandate is to bring the books under control. The budgets just approved are the product of that oversight rather than of the boards' own trustees.
The situation has fed a broader debate in Ontario over school-board finances and who bears responsibility for them. Supervisors and the province point to the need for boards to live within their means, while critics question whether provincial funding has kept pace with the real costs of running schools. Caught in the middle are students, families and staff who feel the effects of cancelled programs and lost positions. As the boards head into the new school year still carrying deficits, the pressure to find further savings, and the arguments over how they got here, are unlikely to ease.