A small grassroots coalition plans to launch a legal challenge against separate school funding in Ontario, hoping it will ignite debate about a topic most politicians would rather avoid.

The group wants to bring the issue to the forefront at a time when school closures are causing havoc in many regions, arguing that taxpayer-funded Catholic schools are no longer fair or affordable in a society of many religions and cultures.

“Why do we only fund Catholic separate schools in 2017 in Ontario, which is a very diverse province?” says Reva Landau of Toronto, who founded One Public Education Now (OPEN), about a year ago and is crowd-funding to help cover legal costs.

“We believe there should be one non-denominational two-language public school system.”

The move comes while the province faces shrinking school enrolment, planned closures of at least 121 schools, and repair backlogs of up to $15 billion for essentials such as repair backlogs to keep school buildings running.

“I think it has to be an election issue,” says Landau, who hopes to launch the case before the 2018 campaign.

Landau, a retired business systems analyst with a law degree, launched a similar challenge five years ago. But she was denied legal standing in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice and was, according to the judge, “not the person to raise these issues.” However, he did not dismiss the merits of her case.

This time around, she’s enlisted two plaintiffs directly affected by the law.

Adrienne Havercroft is Hamilton teacher who says the existence of separate public and Catholic boards hindered her search for full-time work. As a non-Catholic, she was ineligible for the one-third of the publicly-funded teaching jobs in her region available through the separate school board, she says.

Only Catholic teachers are eligible for those positions, even though non-Catholic students can attend the schools and, according to the coalition, property taxes paid by Catholic residents in Hamilton account for only 7 per cent of the board’s funding, with the rest coming from general provincial revenues.

“It’s been such a frustrating situation for many of us,” says Havercroft, who spent five years trying to land a full-time position as a high school teacher after graduating in 2009. She said new Catholic teachers were able to get permanent jobs much more quickly.

Havercroft has a toddler and is currently a supply teacher at the Hamilton Wentworth District School Board.

The second plaintiff, James Sutton of Markham, has two sons who travel by school bus an hour each way to their French public school in Richmond Hill. The only closer French language option, 20 minutes away, is Catholic, he says but they want their children to have a secular education.

The family lives behind their local public and Catholic schools, but when it was time for their eldest son, Cooper, 13, to enroll nine years ago, they were told he would have to be bused to another public school with more space.

That prompted the Suttons, who speak French at home, to opt for a French language school even though the closest non-Catholic option was far away.

Sutton says the flocks of buses he sees every day carrying kids to schools in the four English and French public and Catholic boards makes no sense and ends up fragmenting communities. He believes merging those resources would result in a more streamlined system and more spaces for everyone in neighbourhood schools.

“There’s no reason for us to stay the way we are,” says Sutton, an information technology manager at Harry Rosen. “If it’s difficult politically, seeking a mandate from the Supreme Court may be what (politicians) need to get behind it.”

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A legal case may be the only way to force the issue as long as politicians treat it as “the third rail of public policy,” says Charles Pascal, a professor at University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.

“Maybe that will change the landscape,” says Pascal, a former deputy minister of education who advised former premier Dalton McGuinty on his early years strategy. He calls separate school funding “an anachronism” and says despite being enshrined during Confederation, it no longer has merit in a multicultural province.

Ending separate school funding has been part of the Green Party of Ontario platform. But it was considered the electoral kiss of death for John Tory, who as Conservative leader in 2007, attempted to address the inequity by proposing public funding for all religious schools.

Former Liberal finance minister Greg Sorbara wrote in his 2014 memoir that the time has come to defund separate schools. But that was after he left politics.

The OPEN coalition argues that funding separate school boards violates the Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ guarantee of equality. Supporters include the Canadian Secular Alliance and Civil Rights in Public Education, which has long argued that funding based on religion is discriminatory.

Quebec now has one secular system in two languages, and in 1997 backed out of the Confederation deal with Ontario that guaranteed education to each other’s Protestant and Catholic minorities. Landau says that renders Ontario’s obligation “unenforceable and void.”

But she says it may be the costs of the current system that get people’s attention. She cites a 2012 study by the Federation of Urban Neighbourhoods of Ontario, which found that merging public and Catholic systems would save $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion a year.

The coalition also cites figures obtained through freedom-of-information legislation showing that in the four-year period ending 2014-15, separate schools received about $1,600 more a year per student in operational funding from the province than their public counterparts.

However, Toronto public education advocate Annie Kidder cautions that merging school boards has not saved money in the past.

She launched People for Education in 1996 when many boards were being amalgamated “and the one thing it didn’t do was save money,” says Kidder, whose organization does not take a stand on the issue of separate school funding.

“It didn’t make it cheaper. There are still that many kids, they need that many staff. Just because one building closes, it doesn’t actually save the money we think it’s going to save.”