Autism and Early Education in Ontario
Community Living Ontario’s Crisis in the Classroom report paints a disturbing picture of students with disabilities being isolated, physically restrained, and excluded from their community schools. The document highlights the ways in which schools are not meeting the needs of children and youth with developmental disabilities: too few educational and support staff, too little training to understand the learning and emotional needs of all students, and no guidance from the province on how to address the out-of-control use of isolation and restraint.
Crisis in the Classroom draws on survey data from parents of 541 students with disabilities, and more than 40% of the students represented have received an autism diagnosis. One is led to wonder about the influence of the Ontario Autism Program waitlist of 60,000 kids, and how this might be affecting the experience of young autistic students in school.
The Ontario Autism Program (OAP) provides funding for children to access occupational and speech therapy, and behavioural and mental health support. It also includes the Entry to School program, which helps to prepare kids for school environments that, put simply, have not been designed for their learning, emotional, and sensory needs.
These programs exist for a reason, and there is a real need here. What does it mean that 20,000 kids are accessing OAP Core Clinical Services, while 60,000 need access but don’t have it?
One striking finding of Crisis in the Classroom is that younger children are more likely to be restrained while in school: one in five children under age 11 in our study had been physically restrained by school staff, compared to one in ten children aged 11 and older. This is likely connected to the fact that (and it feels strange to write this sentence) smaller children are easier to restrain. However, you can’t help also thinking about the link to OAP access, and the daily realities of young children who are (a) not prepared for the school environment, and (b) not able to access needed supports while in school.
The OAP is not the only children’s program with a waitlist. The Financial Accountability Officer of Ontario reported that, in 2022-2023, more than 58,000 children and youth were waiting to access school-based treatment and rehabilitation services, and that they wait an average of 483 days (!) to access those services.
Waitlists are the logical result of financial constraints, and also of government priorities. It is telling that 60,000 children and youth are waiting to access the OAP, 58,000 are waiting to access school-based services (noting that there is probably some overlap here), and 53,000 adults are waiting to access developmental services.
Crisis in the Classroom shows unequivocally that students with disabilities are being marginalized, ignored, and bullied, and that they often feel rejected within the academic and social lives of their communities. Sometimes this can lead to externalizing behaviour, where students react to negative environments by leaving the school without permission, damaging property, or hurting themselves and others.
On the other side of the coin, challenging behavior toward school staff is consistently among the top issues identified year after year by unions representing educational workers. Somehow, these issues have led to a strange reality where schools across the province have designated seclusion rooms, like this one where 16-year-old Landyn Ferris died last year, where students can be locked away without parents even being told.
It remains to be seen how this will be addressed in a school system that is, to put it mildly, in a state of upheaval and crisis. The Ontario Progressive Conservative Party has changed so much about the province – health care, home care, employment services, how autistic children and youth are supported, and developmental services, among others – and is now turning its attention to education.
In response to Crisis in the Classroom, Minister of Education Paul Calandra said that “everybody has the right to the highest quality of education, and parents… have to feel confident that their kids are going to be treated properly, and that they’re going to be safe in the system.” Students with disabilities are a long way from this reality, and we are watching closely to see if the Minister will be able to address the serious problems of exclusion, seclusion, and restraint while overhauling the education system as a whole.
Are we as a province willing to invest what it takes to value all children, provide them the support they need, prepare them to enter school, and create school environments that are better able to welcome and teach them? We will have a definitive answer to these questions in the next six to eight months.
For more information, contact Shawn Pegg, Director of Social Policy and Strategic Initiatives, shawn@communitylivingontario.ca.
