Good morning. Growing concerns from parents are being shared with me about the underfunding of our public schools. Church Street, Nelson Mandela and Lord Dufferin public schools take in students from across the Church Wellesley Village, Bay Cloverhill, Regent Park, Moss Park and other communities in the downtown east of Toronto.

Parents like Ines, Murshida and Shifani are telling me how our schools need more supervisors, education workers, special-needs assistants, guidance counsellors and social workers in schools to provide additional supports for their students.

Speaker, the response to violence in schools is not more police officers. Instead, the Premier should invest in the social determinants of health, which are exactly the same as the social determinants of safety: housing, education, food insecurity, early childhood development.

This government needs to invest in high-quality publicly funded education. This government needs to invest in meeting their own standards by reducing class sizes. This government needs to invest in funding existing schools so that they are well maintained. This government needs to invest in helping students living in poverty and to lifting them out of poverty.

This government needs to do all of that and more, but they need to do this by keeping our children, our teachers and their families safe by investing in education and not in bringing more police officers back to schools.