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“As part of the investigation of the school boards’ affairs, the investigation teams will be responsible for providing the minister with recommendations for any necessary future action, including potential directions he may issue to the school board or supervision,” she added. 

News of the investigators come as pc28����District School Board trustees called on the Ontario government to provide more funding, with chair Neethan Shan said the board is “confident” the investigator will look at its books and realize how underfunded it is.

“We are hoping they’ll come and be able to identify and tell us where they think we will need to cut, and they’ll have to find those things,” Shan told reporters, adding trustees have already made deep cuts in the past, including reducing central staff costs.

And, he noted, the board spends more on certain areas than it receives from the government — such as special education, which costs the TDSB $38.5 million more than it receives in funding.

“We want to know where the province thinks that we can cut, and that conversation can lead to possible solutions,” he said. “But we are confident that conversation will lead to them actually finding the truth: that we are severely underfunded, that there needs to be an adjustment to the funding formula.”

Calandra announced the investigations in April — as well as the provincial takeover of the Thames Valley District School Board — saying a “broader problem, a pattern of mismanagement and misplaced priorities” had led to multi-year deficits. 

Shan said while “time is tight” for reports to be returned to the minister by the end of May, “we are fully willing to co-operate.”

NDP Leader Marit Stiles, a former TDSB trustee, said the financial investigations are a “distraction from the fact that this government doesn’t want to admit that they’ve cut per student funding education by $1,500 per student.”

School boards, she added, “have been trying to do more, or at least the same, with a whole lot less funding from this government … They’ve been trying to find ways to lessen the impact on kids, but it is students that ultimately feel it.”

At $29 billion, the government is spending more on education, but boards have said that when inflation is factored in, funding has not kept up with their actual costs, including a number of mandatory items such as Employment Insurance premiums.

Stiles said the Education Ministry “already has access to all this information” about school board budgets.

“This is just the government trying to find somebody else to blame, as always, for their failures to properly fund education and to support our students,” she said.

During question period at the legislature on Thursday, Calandra said “we are sending an investigation team in there to look at how the (pc28����District School Board) spends money to ensure that maximum resources are being spent in the classrooms.” He reiterated that he did not want pools to be closed, as the board is currently considering to help deal with a $58 million deficit.

“I suspect what will be found is that money is not being put into the classroom for classroom education as it should be, and I will ensure, through this process, that it is, because that is the ultimate goal of an education system — to maximize resources that are going for students, to maximize the resources that teachers have to give our students the ultimate opportunity to succeed,” he said.