Toronto Catholic District School Board - History

History

In 1841, the Legislature of Canada East and Canada West was created. Since about half of the members of the Legislature were French Canadian Catholics, they were quick to enact the first piece of separate school legislation. This was a momentous event for the Catholics of Toronto. With the leadership of John Elmsley, member of a prominent family and recent convert to Catholicism, the Catholics living in St. Paul’s parish went through the legal steps to form the Toronto Roman Catholic Separate School Board. The first separate school, St. Paul’s, opened that same year.

Over the years, more and more Roman Catholic schools opened as a result. Despite the challenges, the Separate School Board in Toronto continued to expand. Prior to receiving royal assent, Catholic education was offered in fifty-five schools, six of which were high schools, with an enrolment of 18,322 pupils. On April 2, 1953, the Separate School Boards in the Metropolitan area of Toronto received royal assent and became incorporated as the Metropolitan Separate School Board.

Catholic education in Metropolitan Toronto was thriving during the 1950s. From the date of incorporation, the Board continued to grow, and 20 more schools were opened.

The 1960s brought a measure of equity to the funding of Catholic education, with the introduction of Foundation Grants to offset the revenue that the Metropolitan Separate School Board would have received through corporate assessment had this been distributed according to the number of pupils served by each of the school boards—public and separate. The next decade The next decade, in 1971 the soon-to-be premier of the province, William Davis, turned down OSSTA’s request for completion of the separate school system.

Undeterred, the Board, under the leadership of Mr. B.E. Nelligan and Archbishop Philip Pocock, decided to continue to open new Catholic high schools until Mr. Davis would see the injustice of his decision. Every year until Davis reversed his decision in 1984, the Board and the Archdiocese opened a new school, for a total of nine new secondary schools. In order to get Ministry approval to build a new school for grade nine and ten, the Board used portables to house the students. When funding was provided for a school, the Board would built the school and then sell them for a very nominal fee to the Archdiocese of Toronto, which in turn housed the students in grades 11 to 13. Everyone sacrificed to make this work: students and their parents paid tuition fees and parishes donated part of their Sunday collections. In 1971 the soon-to-be premier of the province, William Davis, turned down OSSTA’s request for completion of the separate school system.

As an expansion of Catholic school continue to grow, Premier William Davis completed the separate school system in 1984. This historic event, which Catholic School Trustees, Bishops, teachers, parents and students had been fighting for since the 1950s, was a huge boon financially to the Board. Tuition fees were eliminated, secondary school enrolment expanded and Board monies were more readily available for new school programs and services.

At the time of the Premier’s announcement, the Board educated approximately 6,000 secondary school students in portables and projected its enrolment to grow to 18,000 within a few years. MSSB high schools lacked shops and other facilities equipped for special programs. Some high school buildings were also quite old and in need of repair. Through negotiations with the Metropolitan Toronto School Board (now Toronto District School Board, seven public high schools were transferred to MSSB. One of them became a French-language high school, an institution that had been missing since 1968. By 1999 the Board had 41 Catholic high schools.

However, this did not come about immediately after Davis’s announcement. The Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, Ontario Public School Teachers’ Association, and a number of boards of education (including the Metropolitan Toronto School Board) challenged the legislation. Premier David Peterson’s attorney general, Ian Scott (great grandson of Sir Richard W. Scott of the “Scott Act” of 1863) decided to ask the Supreme Court of Ontario for a ruling on the constitutionality of the “Bill 30" legislation, which extended the separate school system. For this Constitutional Reference, submissions were invited. MSSB, along with the Ontario Separate School Trustees’ Association and some other separate school boards each made a submission. On June 25, 1987, the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously upheld MSSB’s argument that separate schools--both elementary and secondary--since their inception, were constitutionally protected with enrolment grew and new schools opened, including a number of secondary schools that were acquired from the public school boards at the end of the decade.

With the introduction of the Fewer School Boards Act, the board was reorganised as the Toronto Catholic District School Board, resulting in the separation of English and French language schools, the latter of which are now part of the Conseil scolaire de district catholique Centre-Sud. The resulting board was named the Toronto Catholic District School Board in 1998. At the same time, the Province also introduced standardized testing, administered by the Education Quality and Accountability Office beginning in 1998. The testing was intended to assess the success of the new curriculum introduced province-wide in the mid-1990s. As the Board focused on meeting the challenges of the new curriculum and the new funding model, changing immigration patterns began to slow the growth of enrolment in Toronto’s Catholic schools. As a result, TCDSB opened four new schools during this decade, including its first ever school for the arts.

On April 2, 2003, the TCDSB celebrated the 50th anniversary of incorporation as the Metropolitan Separate School Board.