Ontario Autism Program waitlist: 71,263 children waiting for funding

They called it a calm room. Samira was eight. An autistic child, in a program meant to support her. Her parents expected somewhere soothing, when she felt overwhelmed. The school did not tell her parents they were isolating her. They found out when a representative of a local social services agency visited the classroom. The principal then confirmed it. An 8-by-8-foot room. Concrete walls. No window. A desk and a chair, labelled with her name. According to her family’s account in Ontario’s Auditor General report, about 80% of her school day was spent there. In October 2024, after a physical incident, a few days at home became a formal exclusion. One hour of online learning a day. Lessons that did not meet her abilities. She returned in October 2025. A classroom returned. A year did not. Samira is not the only one. The auditors also surveyed teachers at three boards. 39% had seen a student with special education needs removed from school or class, without it being recorded as an exclusion. A third of them said it happened more than five times. Asked why, most named behaviour or safety. 64% also named a lack of support and resources. The ministry drafted a policy on exclusions in 2024. Work on it was paused in January 2025, before the election. At the time of the audit, there were no updates or directions on next steps. 65% of the files the auditors sampled had no written reason for recommending a special education classroom, even though one is required. Separately, as of May 13, 71,263 autistic children and youth were waiting for core clinical funding from the Ontario Autism Program. In July, the Ontario Autism Coalition said a child registering then faced at least a five-year wait. Elsewhere, and in Ontario’s past, this has a history. In 2019, reporters at ProPublica Illinois and the Chicago Tribune found students put alone in school isolation rooms more than 20,000 times, from the 2017-18 school year to December 2018. Most of them had disabilities. In more than a third of the cases with enough detail to tell, staff recorded no safety reason. The day after the story ran, Illinois banned locking students in isolation rooms. And Ontario has its own history. For more than a century, Ontario ran institutions like the Huronia Regional Centre, for people with developmental disabilities, including children. In 2013, the Premier apologized in the Legislature. She said the province “broke faith” with some of its most vulnerable residents. Our read: a school calm room is not an asylum. But we see a pattern. In each case, the child who needed the most ended up apart from everyone else. Some children got a smaller room. Some were sent home. Tens of thousands were left waiting. We think children are being punished for needing help. A year of her education does not come back. Neither does a childhood spent waiting. Read The Concrete Room. Share the record. Ask your MPP what will change.