‘We can’t afford it’: GFESS students walk out to protest OSAP cuts

Baking is her passion, but cuts to OSAP are pricing a Grade 11 student from Bridgeburg out of her dream of attending Niagara College. In response, she organized a second walkout on Thursday and fellow high school students showed up in the same sinking ship.

Zoey Bononno, 16, led a second student demonstration outside Greater Fort Erie Secondary School (GFESS) May 28, pressing the Ford government to reverse OSAP changes that cap grants at 25 per cent of total student aid while pushing at least 75 per cent into loans.

Students from GFESS say the cuts, combined with the province’s decision to lift Ontario’s tuition freeze, will leave working-class graduates in debt for decades.

The protest came one day after a Queen’s Park rally against healthcare privatization, and two days after Fort Erie Healthcare SOS kicked off a series of protests concerning the planned closure of Douglas Memorial in 2028.

Bononno, who lives in a single-parent household in Fort Erie’s Bridgeburg area, told Fort Erie Radio the changes hit families like hers the hardest.

“We don’t have the funds to go to college, university, trade school, and these grants were supposed to help us afford that,” said Bononno. “Since these grants are going down and (loans) are going up, we’re going to be in debt for probably the rest of our lives if this keeps going.”

She had planned to enrol in Niagara College’s Baking and Pastry Arts program, but Bononno has seen her families finances–and she says they are stretched thin between bills, court debt and car repairs on a single income, and OSAP grants were the only thing that made tuition possible.

Before Ford capped grants at 25 per cent, OSAP could cover up to 85 per cent of tuition for low- and middle-income students, with over 210,000 students eligible for free tuition at its peak under the Wynne Liberals in 2017.

“Nowadays, freaking butter is (almost) $10,” said Bononno. “It’s too expensive, and I hope (the Ford government) understands from a student perspective, a high schooler perspective, that we can’t afford it.”

Bononno said her mother is worried about post-secondary costs and wants Fort Erie adults to understand that teenagers on working-class incomes cannot make the numbers work.

“It’s not getting better and the prices are just getting higher,” said Bononno.

Grade 9 and 10 students raised handmade signs outside GFESS reading “Ford Flunked Our Future” and “WTF: Where’s the Funds.”

NDP MPP Wayne Gates showed up to the first GFESS walkout in March during a blizzard, where Bononno and classmates warned that friends were already reconsidering college over cost.

The province has not responded to student demands to reverse the grant cap.

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