There is no longer a full-time teacher in the senior classroom at Clarendon Central Public School.
This is the school chapter of a story North Frontenac News Media has been reporting for the better part of a year: a township slowly losing the young families that keep it alive. See "A Main Street Without Homes Is a Warning" (March 2026) and "A Call to Action: If We Lose the Young, We Lose Everything" (August 2025).
That class runs from grade four to grade eight, five grades in one room, and this year it holds 26 students. Two years ago it held 17, and one full-time teacher taught it. The teacher in that room now is funded for 0.71 of a full position, which is roughly three days out of five. At the same time the board cut the teaching time, it pulled the school's remedial reading program. So the senior class at Clarendon Central is teaching half again as many students with about a third less of a teacher, and the support it used to lean on is gone.
Those numbers come from the parent council that runs fundraisers for the school, not from a critic of it. Co-chair Angela Tulie and a fellow co-chair laid them out for North Frontenac council on June 11, and they were careful about what they were not saying. "We don't have any information that the school is closing," one of them told councillors. "It's just the trend that we see of pulling resources from the school." [00:44:52]
That trend is the story, and it is worth understanding plainly, because it is the kind of slow loss that never announces itself. Clarendon Central opened in 1960 in Plevna. It serves North Frontenac, Ompah, Ardoch and Plevna out of two classrooms, a junior room and a senior room. The building can hold 72 students; 33 are enrolled. The Limestone District School Board considers a school well used at about 80 percent capacity. Clarendon Central sits at 46 percent, and the board's own dashboards project that figure dropping to 30 percent within five years. One new kindergarten student started this year, none are registered for next year, and the primary class is down to roughly seven children.
This is the same warning North Frontenac News Media has been reporting from a different angle for the better part of a year. When this newsroom wrote that a main street without homes is a warning, and earlier that if the township loses its young it loses everything, the school was the part of the picture not yet on the page. A shrinking school is what the housing squeeze and the out-migration of young families look like once they reach the youngest residents of all. The empty kindergarten desk is downstream of the empty rental.
A decade of subtraction
The parent council walked council through the arithmetic of the last ten years, and it reads as a series of small subtractions that add up to something larger. In 2014, the board consolidated Clarendon Central from three classrooms to two, which cost the school a full-time teaching position. Educational-assistant support, the in-class help that keeps a teacher's head above water in a room full of mixed grades and varied needs, fell from two full-time positions to half of one over the following five to eight years. Then came 2024, when the senior teaching job dropped below full-time and the Empower reading program ended in the same stroke.
What makes the senior-class cut land harder than a line on a budget is what the room looks like in practice. The half-time educational assistant the school has left spends most of that time in the primary room, where the youngest children need it most. That leaves the senior teacher alone, covering five grades and every subject, for a class that has grown by more than half. The reading help that used to catch the students who were falling behind is no longer there. "It's difficult to teach five grades across all the subjects every day," the delegation told council, describing a teacher carrying more students, more spread of need, and less support than the same room had two years ago. [00:40:30]
The instability shows up in who stands at the front of that room. The senior position turned over four times in five months last school year, the parent council said, and that count does not include the day-to-day substitutes filling the gaps. A part-time teaching job in a remote township is a hard job to keep filled, and the children pay for the churn. "The kids go to school and they don't know how long that teacher's going to be there," the delegation said. [00:41:40]
The children this school serves
The parent council did not argue that Clarendon Central deserves the same staffing as a school in Kingston. It argued for something more specific: that the children it serves can least afford to have supports stripped away.
In five years, not one Clarendon Central student has reached any of the board's enrichment programs, the delegation said: not French immersion, not the gifted program, not the arts-focused stream, not the Atlas program for students with executive-function challenges. The nearest offerings are in the Sydenham area, too far for these children to access. So the school in front of them is, in practice, the whole of what is available.
Then the parent council put the township's own numbers on the record. In North Frontenac, 15 percent of residents hold no certificate, diploma or degree, against 10 percent across Ontario. The township has the lowest median household income in Frontenac County and the highest unemployment rate. The student body, the delegation said, mirrors the community it comes from. The case the parents made is that a school drawing from the poorest, least-credentialed corner of the county is exactly the school where in-class support does the most work, and exactly the school that has been losing it.
The community has been filling gaps with its own money. The parent council has raised about $21,000 over three years for field trips, equipment, a skills-competition team that reached the provincial level in carpentry, and a whiteboard for the senior class. The Lions Club of Land O'Lakes gave $10,000 last year. The township contributes $2,000 a year. None of that touches the staffing decisions made in Kingston, and the parents know it. "The money is greatly appreciated, but in my opinion the backing of the school is way more important at this point," Tulie told council. [00:50:40]
What council did
North Frontenac council did not study the request. It already agreed with it.
When Councillor John Inglis asked whether council should recommend an action, a letter or a visit to the local MPP, Mayor Gerry Lichty cut in. "You're ahead of yourself, because I've already written it out." [00:46:23] Council then amended its motion from simply receiving the presentation to endorsing the parent council's three requests in full: that the Limestone District School Board review the impact of its staffing and educational-assistant decisions at Clarendon Central, that the board restore the senior teaching position from 0.71 back to a full 1.0, and that the unique needs of the school be communicated to MPP John Jordan with a request for support. The motion carried unanimously.
The Mayor told the parents he had already pushed on the provincial side himself. He said Jordan's office had told the parent council "not now, but later," and that when he followed up, the answer was the same: the office would meet with him, but only after the current round of collective bargaining with Ontario teachers concludes. [00:47:30]
Councillor Fred Fowler raised the worry that sits underneath the closure question even though no closure is on the table. "I find it a little scary, the little kids that would have to be bused great distances," he said, "get up really early in the morning and stay on a bus for an hour or whatever it takes. I think that would be pretty dramatic on them." [00:43:45] The 2016 board study the parents cited never named Clarendon Central for closure. It did reassign every Clarendon student to the Sharbot Lake-area school by 2030. For a kindergartener in Ompah or Ardoch, that is the difference Fowler was describing.
What this is, and what it is not
This is not a closure story. The parents said so plainly, and the record backs them. There is no board motion to close Clarendon Central, no public process underway, nothing in the 2016 study that names it for the chopping block. To report otherwise would be to invent an alarm the people closest to the school refused to sound.
What the record does support is narrower and, in its way, harder to dismiss. A rural public school has lost a teacher, most of its educational-assistant time, a remedial reading program and the full-time status of its senior teaching job over roughly a decade, while the senior class grew and enrolment held steadier than the staffing did. The decisions sit with the Limestone District School Board and with a provincial funding formula, not with the township. North Frontenac council has now put its name to the parents' case and sent it up the line.
Whether any of it moves is a question for the board and for Queen's Park, and the answer will not come before the bargaining table clears. North Frontenac News Media will be asking the board and MPP Jordan's office where the staffing request stands, and will report what they say. The desk that decided to fund 0.71 of a teacher for 26 children should be willing to explain it to the community those children come from.
Disclosure: the author, Donald Morton, is the publisher of North Frontenac News Media and a self-declared, not-yet-registered prospective candidate in the 2026 North Frontenac municipal election. North Frontenac News Media does not endorse candidates.