Ottawa's school boundary overhaul was cancelled. Check the map.

The map everyone argued about is dead

In March 2025 the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board published a proposed boundary map covering 123 schools. About 11,000 kids would have changed schools this month, up to 5,000 more than in a normal year. Parents protested, the board redrew the maps, and in May 2025 trustees approved the whole package 9 to 3. For the next five months every family conversation I had about a house with kids in it started with that map.

Then the province put the OCDSB under supervision at the end of June 2025, and on October 7 the supervisor, Robert Plamondon, cancelled the trustee-approved changes outright. His letter called them highly disruptive and said the board was not in a position to implement them fairly. The 11,000-student reshuffle never happened.

That should have been the end of it, but it wasn't. I still see listing remarks written off the 2025 map, and I still meet buyers who crossed a street off their list because of a boundary that no longer exists. If you priced a school into an offer last year, in either direction, you priced a rumour.

What actually changed on September 1

The public board started school last Tuesday, and three things are real this year.

Brian Mulroney Elementary School opened at 700 Spring Valley Drive in Orleans. It is a 674-pupil building, JK to Grade 5 now and JK to Grade 6 next September. Its opening redrew the attendance boundaries for Dunning-Foubert, Glen Ogilvie, Henry Larsen, Convent Glen and Emily Carr. If you bought in that part of Orleans this summer on the strength of a school named on the listing, the map moved under you. Younger siblings of kids already at Convent Glen, Dunning-Foubert or Henry Larsen got a one-time option to stay, with busing for up to three years. New buyers get no such clause.

Early French Immersion now has entry points at the start of Grade 1, 2 or 3, at your designated school. Middle French Immersion survived the cancellation but is still being phased out, with the final Grade 4 intake in September 2028. It runs at 33 of the board's 120 elementary schools and covers about 4% of elementary students, and the board says enrolment in it has fallen more than 25% in five years. A listing that sells you on an MFI school is selling you a program with an expiry date.

And the board has started what it calls localized accommodation studies, its own phrase for places where boundaries could still change, beginning with the areas around its four alternative schools: Churchill in Westboro, Lady Evelyn in Old Ottawa East, Riverview in Riverview Park and Regina Street near Britannia. Those four sites took regular junior kindergarten registrations for this school year, which is the board managing overcrowding without moving anyone yet. If you are buying within walking distance of any of them, assume the map is in play.

The Catholic board is moving too

The Ottawa Catholic School Board has a new elementary school scheduled to open in Fisher Glen in September 2027, at 8 Redpine Drive, the old Century Public School site. Its proposed boundary carves territory out of St. Augustine, St. Gregory and St. Rita. The public meeting is tentatively October 8, feedback closes November 13, and trustees decide in late November. Anyone buying in that pocket of Nepean this fall is buying a school assignment that will be settled after they close.

Why the listing cannot be trusted on this

The school names on a listing are typed in by the listing agent. Nobody at either board checks them. Sometimes they are right, sometimes it is the school the seller's kids went to in 2014, and sometimes it is the closest building with a playground.

Your designated school is a function of your address and the program stream your child is in. Same house, different answer for English with Core French versus Early French Immersion. The board publishes a 2026-27 School Locator that takes an address and gives you the answer for each stream. It takes about a minute. Use that, not the remarks.

"Walk to school" deserves the same treatment. The Ottawa Student Transportation Authority buses Grades 1 to 8 only if the home is 1.6 km or more from the school, 0.8 km for kindergarten, 3.2 km for high school. A house 1.4 km from the school is inside the boundary, gets no bus, and puts a six-year-old on a walk of roughly 20 minutes each way in January. That is a very different purchase from the one in the photos.

And the fallback everyone assumes, a cross-boundary transfer, is not a preference form. The OCDSB's criteria are learning needs the home school cannot meet or exceptional personal circumstances. Applications are judged individually, not first come first served, need the receiving principal's approval, and run against a cap each school sets annually. This year's window was January 26 to February 6, with answers by the end of March. The board's own words: no guarantees. Approved transfers get no transportation, and a sibling does not inherit one.

The ten-minute check before you write the offer

Run the address through the OCDSB School Locator for the exact program you want. Do the same on the Catholic board's boundary page, and the French boards if that is your family. Measure the distance to the designated school on a map and compare it to the OSTA thresholds. Check whether the address sits inside an active study area: the Orleans cluster around Brian Mulroney, the four alternative school neighbourhoods, the Fisher Glen consultation. Then put what you found in an email to your agent so it is in the file, not in your memory.

None of that goes in the agreement of purchase and sale. There is no school condition. It goes in the price you are willing to pay, which is the only place it belongs.

You have the time this year

In 2021 you had until 7 p.m. to decide. This September Ottawa is carrying 4.5 months of inventory, the median listing is taking 29 days to sell, and about 1,300 listings quit the market in August without a buyer. The house you are looking at will still be there tomorrow, and the one that failed to sell already will be there next week. There is no excuse for writing an offer on a school you have not verified.

Want me to run the address before you fall for the house? Send it to fil@613realtor.ca or text 613-262-6545 and I will send back the designated school for each stream, the bus distance, and whether the map is moving. It takes me ten minutes and it has saved clients a lot more than that.