Teacher absences are on the rise in Ontario, raising concerns about violence, burnout and gaps in learning
Teacher absences in Ontario have increased significantly since the pandemic, raising concerns about violence, burnout, and gaps in student learning. Many educators attribute this rise to worsening classroom conditions and a lack of support. The financial burden of covering these absences has also escalated, surpassing $1 billion in costs for the current school year.
- ▪In the 2023-24 school year, secondary-school teachers took an average of 13.07 sick days, up from 11.05 days in 2018-19.
- ▪Elementary teachers took 15.36 sick days, an increase from 12.79 days in the previous period.
- ▪Educational assistants recorded the highest number of sick days at 22.01, up from 18.19.
- ▪The costs to cover teacher and educational assistant sick days have risen by more than 50 percent, exceeding $1.018 billion.
- ▪The total value of Workplace Safety and Insurance Board claims from Ontario's school boards more than doubled between 2018 and 2025.
The Globe and Mail publishes from Canada and files mainly under world. We currently carry 1,935 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Globe and Mail |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/education/article-teacher-absences-ontario-sick-days-violence-burnout/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 29 May 2026 09:30:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-29T09:34:59.779Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-29T09:34:59.779Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ChO2JRtyEqEn |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Last year, when she ran to the school bathroom crying uncontrollably after months of things in her classroom only getting worse, a Toronto teacher said she knew she couldn’t go back.Soon after, she decided to take a leave of absence for this school year, said the teacher, whom The Globe and Mail is not naming to protect her from reprisals from her employer. A homeroom teacher for 10 years in Toronto, the woman said she had been struggling to deal with a student who had severe ADHD. “There were some weeks when he was okay, and some weeks it was just total chaos,” the teacher said.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Globe and Mail.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from The Globe and Mail
