As signalled earlier this week, the board of directors of Brant Family and Children’s Services resigned en masse Friday over provincial funding cuts, and the agency’s executive director has been ousted.

Andrew Koster, who has spent more than 40 years doing child protection work and beloved by staff, is on leave and has been replaced by a supervisor chosen by the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services, which funds the province’s 50 children’s aid societies.

As executive director, Koster has for several years been vocal about funding changes and, more recently, about an increase in work due to an opioid crisis in the area the Brantford-based agency serves.

Children and youth minister Todd Smith has appointed Bernadette Gallagher, executive director of the Children’s Aid Society of Haldimand and Norfolk, to supervise Brant FACS “during this period of transition,” Smith said in a statement.

“My top priority is to ensure the ministry is taking the necessary steps to avoid any disruption of our services for the children and youth who could have been impacted by the decision of the board,” Smith said.

“Thanks to the dedicated staff at Brant Family and Children’s Services with the support of Dr. Gallagher, we are confident children, youth and families will continue to receive the support they need as usual.”

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Smith said he did not agree with the board’s “assessment” of the level of financial support provided by the ministry, and was “disappointed by the board’s approach, as I believe there was more we could have done together to resolve this situation.”

Brant has been operating with a deficit of about $2 million, and was the subject of a ministry review earlier this year that resulted in 72 recommendations. In June, the board of directors wrote then children and youth minister Lisa MacLeod, saying they would resign unless funding issues were addressed.

The board made its intentions to resign public on Wednesday in a press release, saying provincial underfunding has “put the safety of our community’s vulnerable children at risk.”

Rather than cutting further, the 11 board members — including a doctor, police officer, school board superintendent, educators and a band council representative from the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation — walked away.

“The government has chosen to move forward with the status quo, which left the board in an untenable position,” board president Paul Whittam said in the news release.

“As a result, we are forced to resign from the board of an agency that has been in operation for almost 125 years.”

Whittam, in an email Friday to the Star, confirmed the board member resignations. Staff learned of Koster’s ouster in the morning. There were tears.

The agency, which has an annual budget of around $24 million, said in a press release that its deficit “over the past two years is the direct result of imposed government decisions, directives and underfunding. The model used to determine Brant FACS funding was arbitrarily changed, which further added significant financial stress to an already unbearable situation.”

In response to media queries this week, a spokesperson for the office of child and youth minister Smith sent an emailed statement Wednesday, saying the ministry has been “taking the necessary steps to ensure that the board’s decision has no impact on the safety of children in care.”

Dating back to 2015, there “have been numerous attempts by multiple governments” to “assist Brant FACS to make decisions that are consistent with its mandate,” including regular deficit reporting and reviews of finances, said the statement.

“We are fully committed to supporting the staff at Brant FACS as they continue to deliver valuable services to the community. That is why the government will appoint a supervisor to operate and manage the affairs of Brant FACS so that services are transitioned seamlessly.”

The tipping point that led to the resignations was a recommendation from the ministry that Brant discontinue a community-based model that sees staff placed in satellite offices within the communities it serves the most.

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Children’s aid societies are funded by the province and mandated to protect children by investigating cases of alleged abuse and neglect. The community program in Brant goes beyond protection into prevention, with the goal of supporting parents and children, before resorting to admissions into care.

In response to the statement from the minister’s office, the agency posted a dissection of the statement to its website, and criticized the ministry review, including its conclusion that there was a “lack of evidence” the opioid crises contributed to financial issues. The agency said the review lasted less than a week, and sample sizes of reviewed cases were as low as 3 per cent.

As for the review’s finding that the agency was “funding services outside its mandate,” the agency said: “Everything is interconnected. Prevention work is child protection work . . . The safer we can keep kids in the community through our work, the less likely they will need more intrusive interventions which will cause further costs. It costs more money to keep a child in care than to have them cared for in the community. Period.”

Koster and others have drawn a direct line between funding and the safety of children. “Honestly, I’d rather be running a deficit and not make the cuts than make the cuts and have a child die,” he said this week.

In an open letter posted to the agency’s website, Koster noted that he had worked with the ministry as a project manager during the years Mike Harris was premier and he “too tried to restore fiscal stability. However, at the same time, he also authorized a plan to strengthen child protection agencies by providing additional funding to them.

“He did it to ensure that children at risk did not fall through the cracks and be harmed while he implemented his plan to restructure Ontario’s social service system during a time of fiscal restraint. This approach has not yet appeared to have been adopted by the present government — although there is still time to do so.”

An analysis by the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies found the Ford government is reducing funding to children and youth at risk by $84.5 million annually. Included is a $28-million cut to the $1.5 billion the province gives to children’s aid societies.

This spring, Brant terminated 29 jobs, including 26 layoffs, for an eventual annual savings of $1.7 million.

Will Bouma, the Progressive Conservative MPP for Brantford-Brant, in the Brantford Expositor challenged Koster’s assertion that children are at risk. “Contrary to what was said by the executive director on Wednesday, kids will not die,” he told the paper.

Michael Coteau, Liberal MPP and former minister of children and youth, criticized Bouma’s comment in a press release Friday, saying he was “appalled by this statement and what it suggests.”

“Is merely keeping children alive the new threshold this government is setting?” Coteau, who is vying for the Liberal leadership, said in the release. “The sad reality is that children have died in our protection services. We need to be doing more to protect our most vulnerable children, not less.”

Coteau predicts other children’s aid societies and their boards will be facing funding issues similar to Brant.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said in a phone interview. “I think we’re going to see more CASs go through the same type of challenge.”

Brant FACS workers and members of CUPE held a march and rally in support of the agency in Brantford on Friday. The march was to end outside Bouma’s office, in protest over the funding cuts.