Schools in Toronto will receive $256 million in funding over the next two years to help repair and renew school buildings across the city, the province announced on Monday.
Ontario Education Minister Mitzie Hunter announced that an additional $1.1 billion would be distributed to schools across the province for necessary repairs and structural upgrades.
The investment will be added to the already allocated $1.6 billion.
The TDSB is expected to receive nearly $300 million of the provincial investment, which would bring the school board’s total budget for repairs up to $579 million.
The Toronto Catholic District School Board will receive an additional $40 million for an overall total of $107 million.
“The money is urgently needed to help address school boards’ growing renewal and repair backlog,” Hunter said at Harbord Collegiate Institute in the city’s Palmerston-Little Italy neighbourhood this afternoon. “There are roughly 4,900 schools in Ontario. About half of these are more than 40 years old. Every day they serve nearly 2 million students.”
The money is intended for schools to repair or replace old ceilings, roofs, flooring and playing fields, and modernize electrical and plumbing systems.
Every school except for new ones will have some work done, according to the head of facilities for the TDSB.
Work at Runnymede Public School is already underway, while Harbord Collegiate Institute -- which will turn 125 years old next month -- and Central Technical School will also get much-needed repairs soon.
Back in January, CTV Toronto obtained documents that showed 136 of the Toronto District School Board’s then 591 schools were designated as being in “critical” condition. The rating score relates to how badly the building requires renovations or replacements of core systems and is ranked by the province through a system called the Facility Condition Index.
At the time, the TDSB said that the main issue causing the backlog of repairs is funding.
“A school with a long list of repairs, antiquated components or inefficient systems, is not serving those students at a level they deserve,” Hunter said Monday.
“That is why we are flowing funding right away so that over the summer, school boards can get to work right away on their list of priorities and deliver the most important upgrades in time for September.”
Last year, the Auditor General of Ontario recommended that the province increase investment in school revitalization to 2.5 per cent of the schools’ replacement value. The auditor general also suggested that two-thirds of funding allocated for Ontario schools go toward infrastructure repairs rather than new construction projects.
