On World Teachers' Day, local teaching affiliates are joining forces to sound the alarm on challenges and underfunding in public education.
On Friday, the Franco-Ontarian Teachers' Association, the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario, the Ontario English Catholic Teachers' Association, and the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation came together to deliver a clear and urgent message to the provincial government: public education must be funded as a priority.
The federations highlighted the growing crisis locally caused by underfunding, including overcrowded classrooms, reduced supports, deteriorating infrastructure, increased violence, and an escalating teacher shortage.
They also sounded the alarm on Bill 33 - a wide-ranging legislative proposal that if approved would expand the education minister's ability to investigate a school board's conduct and give directions - and take over a board's powers if those directions aren't followed.
According to the local affiliates, $6.3-billion dollars has been cut from education in Ontario since 2018. In response, school boards have been forced to make difficult decisions to cut programs, lay off staff, and defer vital maintenance on aging buildings.
Mario Spagnuolo, local ETFO President, says violence in schools continues to rise due to lack of funding.
"Last year the numbers went up nine per cent in terms of violence rates in our school board, this year it's gone up another five per cent. When I first started in this job a decade ago, we saw probably a quarter of the violent incidents that we're seeing now, there's been that much of an increase."
Spagnuolo says parents need to be the ones speaking up.
"Calling your MPP is probably the easiest thing to do, they do pay attention to the phone calls, but those phone calls have to be strategic... the blame has to be placed on the Ford government, it can't be placed on school boards, and it can't be placed on educators. We're doing the best that we can. The government funding is the only source of funding that school board's get, there's no other way of getting funding, so if the funding has dried out... there's not much more that we can do other than cut."
Lakia Wilson-Lumpkins, President of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, says what is happening in Ontario is exactly what happened in Detroit.
"What happened to us was very slow, very deliberate, and over years we lost over 100 schools, which meant that we lost many of our teachers, and many of our students. Now, some may or may not care about, but it decimated our communities because as schools left... families left."
She says the governments in the U.S. and Canada continue to play games.
"There's a very strategic goal of undermining, underfunding education, blaming, and villainizing, and politicizing education so that parents will turn their back and choose some other organization to educate their children."
Lisa Gretzky, NDP MPP for Windsor West, says teachers' working conditions are students' learning conditions.
"When they're going into classrooms that are under-resourced, that is not conducive to being able to support every student in their learning. When you are missing key people in a classroom to support children with special education needs those students are not getting the support and the education that they deserve, and is there right to have. When you're looking at schools where there's no air conditioning."
Gretzky says Bill 33 dismantles the democratic system.
"So when you take that away, when you remove those trustees you remove that accountability. When the government is making decisions from above without being connected to that community, then what we're going to see is decisions being made that are going to negatively impact the community."
World Teachers' Day, celebrated annually on October 5, highlights the vital role teachers play in building inclusive, high-quality education systems.
Bill 33, the Supporting Children and Students Act, 2025, is currently in the legislative process and is not yet law; it was introduced on May 29, 2025, and passed second reading on June 5, 2025.