BLOG 5 - THE RISING TVDSB DEFICIT (2024-2025) (12 August 2025)
On July 28th, the London Free Press ran an article entitled, “Minister blasts trustees as London-area school board's red ink swells” which stated that the Thames Valley District School Board’s deficit had nearly doubled to $32 million, leading Ontario’s Minister of Education to state that he was “disappointed” to learn about the projected shortfall of $32 million for the 2024-25 budget year and claimed that “[t]his reaffirms just how profoundly trustees failed in their duty to manage public funds and why it was necessary to place the board under (provincial) supervision.”
Let’s unpack the claim that “trustees failed in their duty to manage public funds”. Did they or not? The last budget that TVDSB trustees approved was in June 2024 and at that time we approved a budget with a $7.6 million deficit. School boards in Ontario are allowed to have a deficit under certain conditions, all of which we met, including having a plan to eliminate the deficit within a set timeline. So that was all legitimate and approved by the Ministry of Education back in June 2024. So how did we get from an approved $7.6 million deficit to a $32 million deficit in one year and what role did elected TVDSB trustees, like myself, have to play in the 25% increase in the deficit over the course of the year? As I said, on 24 June 2024 we approved a $1.2 billion budget with a “projected 2024-2025 deficit for compliance purposes of $(7,581,113), to be funded from the August 31, 2024 accumulated surplus.”
However, when we returned to work in the fall of 2024, the deficit began to grow. Why did that happen? Well there were a number of reasons. First, we over predicted student enrolment for the fall of 2024. We hire teachers based on student enrolment and getting the predictions exact is difficult to do. Some years we get it right and some years we don’t. In September 2024, we did not get it right and ended up hiring more teachers than necessary on contract. In addition to lower than anticipated secondary enrolment, we also had lower than anticipated kindergarten intake. The overall decrease from projected enrolment resulted in a loss of approximately $8.7 million dollars in Core Ed revenue for us.
By January 2025, trustees were told that the revised budget deficit for compliance purposes was $16.8 million! I was shocked, to say the least, about how the deficit had ballooned. In addition to the salaries for extra teachers hired for the year, we also had incurred unanticipated increased costs associated with casual salary expenses; transportation (new contracts with bus operators and hiring more bus monitors); our interim director’s salary; program costs, legal fees, and the costs of the internal audit, etc. We also lost interest income as our projected interest income decreased $400,000 due to interest rate reductions. So there were many reasons for the rising deficit.
What did we do about that? Trustees supported and worked with staff, starting in the fall of 2024, to develop a Financial Recovery Plan to eliminate our accumulated debt over 3 years. The image of the chart, accompanying this post, from the Ministry of Education Audit of the TVDSB shows all the work done in 2024/25 to address and bring down our deficit:
So, you can see the work that was being done by staff and supported by trustees, between Sept. 2024- April 2025, to get that deficit down. And recall that this information is from the Ministry of Education report when they audited the TVDSB. Trustees, like myself, took our fiduciary responsibilities very seriously, especially ensuring the effective stewardship of the board’s resources. I was appalled by the flagrant waste of board resources with the ‘retreat’ to the Skydome in Toronto by the Director
Following that audit, at the end of April 2025, the provincial government took over the TVDSB and Paul Bonifero was appointed supervisor. In an email trustees received from Interim Director Bill Tucker, we were told that “Bonifero’s mandate is very simple…return Thames Valley District School Board to financial stability that incorporates a balanced operational budget and a 2% reserve going forward.” So why then at the end of July did Education Minister Paul Calandra say that the TVDSB was projecting a deficit of $32 million (!!!) for the 2024-25 budget and why did the Minister blame trustees, who had been out of the picture from the end of April onwards, and not Supervisor Bonifero who told us that financial recovery of the TVDSB was his top priority?
Stay tuned for my next blog to find out the answer to those questions.
