As thousands of Ontario kindergarten students enter the final phase of the full-day kindergarten program in September, the latest numbers show that many classrooms across the province are functioning at full capacity.
According to figures provided by the province, there are currently 640 full-day kindergarten classes in Ontario with more than 30 students per class.
While Ontario school boards are funded for classrooms with an average of 26 students, some kindergarten classes in the Toronto District School Board are packed with up to 33 students per class.
“My son’s in a 31 class size and it’s crazy,” one parent told CTV Toronto.
“They need more attention and they can’t get it with that many kids in the class,” added a mother.
Primary school classes between Grades 1 and 3 are capped at 23 students per class, but there is no size restriction for kindergarten classrooms in Ontario.
The province says schools are permitted to exceed kindergarten class sizes because such classrooms have both a teacher and an early childhood educator looking after the students.
Officials from the province note that having two educators in the classroom not only improves the student-to-teacher ratio but allows for more flexibility when dealing with larger class sizes.
Education minister Liz Sandals says she has no plans to change the current kindergarten program, noting that the full day program is a significant upgrade from earlier models.
“The old staffing model we had 20, up to 23 (students) per adult, so the full day kindergarten ratio is an improvement,” she said.
Many parents disagree, noting that crowded classrooms mean that their children receive less one-on-one time with their teacher during one of the most critical periods of a child’s development.
Annie Kidder, head of People for Education, says she has received many phone calls from parents upset over ever-expanding class sizes in Ontario.
“I would definitely argue that 30 (students) is too big,” she told CTV Toronto.
“What you want to make sure is that this is an incredibly rich program, that there is lots of attention paid to children because it’s really the time when they are developing,”
Claudia Mueller, a mother from Toronto, says over-crowded classes caused her to remove her daughter from the full day kindergarten program.
“Not a good education for them to be stuck in a class with 33 kids,” she told CTV Toronto.
The Ontario government has made the full day kindergarten program a key priority on its agenda and has invested $1.4 billion to implement the program across the province.
With a report by CTV Toronto’s Naomi Parness
