Ontario schools often send special needs children home, survey finds

One in two Ontario elementary school principals and four in 10 high school principals say they have sent children with special education needs home for the full day because their needs can’t be met, according to a new survey by People for Education.

The reasons are three-fold:

• If the special education support is unavailable, the principal may recommend the student stay home; for example, if an educational assistant who usually works with a student is absent and no substitute is available.
• If a school is unable to provide adequate care or safety provisions for the student.
• It’s requested as a provisional measure to ease a major change or disruption, such as a student starts classes or enters a specialized program.

“It’s terrible to think that there are cases, which there certainly are, where principals are forced to ask parents to keep their kids home,” People for Education’s executive director Annie Kidder said.

But she added, “It’s not necessarily because there’s a bad guy here. It is out of a sense that the support isn’t available or that the students’ presence would cause difficulties either for the student or for other students in the class.”

The statistic was part of People for Education annual survey of elementary and secondary school principals, which this year focused on the state of special education students.

The province’s special education grant is about $2.7 billion which is about 10 per cent of the overall education budget but school boards say they can’t keep up with demands and funding distribution is based on decade old data.

People For Education wants the province to set up a special education ombudsman office, a one-stop shop for parents looking for answers about making sure their special needs children get equal access to education.

“There needs to be a provincial office where parents can go for either information or support or to resolve problems,” Kidder said.

Click here to read the full report.