FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
22 September 2025
QUEEN’S PARK – Today, John Fraser, MPP for Ottawa South and Ontario Liberal Critic for Education, released the following statement to provide an update on his Local Matters in Education Tour.
The most urgent problems facing our children, families and schools lay right at the feet of Doug Ford.
Special education in our schools is a mess. Out of 72 school boards, 71 of them spend more on special education than what the province gives them. This means they are spending $850 million more annually than the Ministry gives them, and it still doesn’t address the need.
The failure to adequately support children with special needs affects every student.
Since the Ford Government ripped the cap off class sizes in 2018, class sizes have steadily grown. In our elementary schools, split grades with larger class sizes have become the rule and not the exception.
It’s putting too much pressure in the classroom. Creating violence. First and foremost, our schools should be safe places. They are not.
Violence in our schools is not effectively being measured, and it’s affecting kids from JK to Grade 12, with problems ranging from incivility to violence. Lockdowns in elementary classrooms are a regular occurrence everyday across this province.
This government needs to make our schools safe places to learn, and to do that they need to properly fund and staff special education. That’s going to cost $1 billion dollars – annually.
We need to also bring class sizes back to where they were in 2018, make split grades in elementary schools the exception not the norm, and invest in more physiologists, youth workers, social workers.