Are there enough schools to support Ontario housing targets?

For years, the Toronto District School Board has posted signs at new residential developments all across the city, warning future residents nearby schools may already be full.

But amid a push from all levels of government to get shovels in the ground and new homes built faster, the warning messages are raising new questions about whether Toronto’s schools can keep up with the boom of young families, who will turn to vertical communities for housing.

“If you look maybe a generation ago, raising your kids in downtown would be surprising to some,” Naama Blonder told CityNews.

Blonder, who is an architect and urban planner with Smart Density, is raising her young family in a downtown condo and says her daughter has to be bussed out to a further school.

“There aren’t enough schools especially not in the areas in the city that maybe weren’t as anticipated to be as populated especially by families.”

When a new residential development is being built in an area that is served by an over-crowded school, the TDSB has signs posted at the construction site and language inserted into the purchase and sale agreements that explain it can’t always guarantee students will get a spot in their local school.

Toronto’s Catholic District School Board told CityNews it uses similar signs to warn prospective buyers.

But in other areas, some schools are actually underutilized, prompting the TDSB to call on the province to lift the moratorium on consolidation and closures. Blonder says the distribution of schools isn’t in line with the city’s density distribution.

“It’s how we use the land that TDSB already owns,” she said. “Having that ratio of just one school of two storeys and nothing above is just not the best use of land.”

The TDSB has explored unconventional solutions. A high school in midtown includes condo towers and construction is underway to put an elementary school in some of the ground floors of a new condo at the waterfront.

To support the Ford government’s overall goal of building 1.5 million homes by 2031, the education minister says they’re investing more funding to build and expand 60 schools across the province.

“It’s going to, this year alone, fund 27,000 student spaces with Toronto doing very well with respect to the allocation,” Education Minister Stephen Lecce told reporters at Queen’s Park on Monday.

The Ford government says it’s also reforming the way new schools are built to cut construction timelines by nearly 50 per cent to keep pace with Ontario’s growing population.

“We’re going to work with the boards to build,” Lecce said.

TDSB spokesperson Ryan Bird told CityNews he doesn’t know the allocation for the public board yet. But given the nature of its current compliment, which includes 582 schools, “we’re not building a lot of new ones,” he said.

“Currently we have more space for students than we have students, but that said there are definitely areas of the city where we have enrollment pressures and are over stacking buildings.”

In those areas, “we really have to work with the city of Toronto [and] the province to try to look at how we can get more creative in how we can incorporate different elements and schools on the same site.”