Why use this site when the board publishes its own calendar?
Fair question, and worth answering honestly first: if you know your board, you have the right PDF bookmarked, and you only want one date, the board's own page is fine. Use it.
That is not most visits. Here is what this site does that a published PDF cannot.
1. The dates are data, not a picture of a table
A board publishes a calendar drawn for a printer. On a phone that means pinch, zoom, rotate, squint. Here the same dates are ordinary web pages: readable at any width, selectable, findable with your browser's search, and reachable by a screen reader. A file you have to download becomes a page that is simply there.
2. You do not have to work out which calendar is yours
The Toronto District School Board publishes 7 calendars for one school year: elementary, secondary semestered, secondary quadmestered, a five-day cycle, EdVance, Adult Day School, and one modified for a single school. The board hands you a folder of files and leaves you to pick. Here they sit on one page behind a switcher, and the 890 school pages settle it for you: open your child's school and you get the calendar for that school's panel, not the board's default.
3. Answers to "when", not just "what date"
Every calendar counts the days to the first day, to the next thing that happens, and to the last day. Dates that have passed are ticked off. Click any day in the year at a glance and it tells you how far away it is. A printed calendar makes you count on your fingers.
4. It can subscribe to the calendar you already look at
111 calendar feeds carrying 2,175 dates. One click puts every PA day, break and holiday into the calendar on your phone, alongside everything else in your week, and it re-checks on its own. Hardly any board offers this, and it is the strongest single reason to use this site rather than a PDF: you stop having to remember to go and look.
5. Boards can be compared with each other
Two children in two boards. A separated family straddling a public board and a Catholic one. A supply teacher working across three. A family deciding where to move. The calendar index filters 70 boards by province and school year and puts them side by side. No board site can do that, because each one only knows about itself.
6. A printable worth printing
Each calendar gets a clean two-page PDF: the year at a glance, then every key date, sized for the fridge door. The original is often a scanned government form with a legend column running down the side of it.
7. The originals are right here
Every document a board filed is hosted page by page at the bottom of its calendar page, credited and linked back to the board. Nobody is asked to take a transcription on trust. That is the difference between replacing the board and indexing it.
8. The link still works next year
Board sites get rebuilt, and the calendar moves. One address per board per school year, and older addresses keep resolving to it.
9. The school, not just its calendar
Address, grade range, enrolment, EQAO results and the right calendar on one page, rather than the calendar in one corner of a board site and the school profile in another.
What the board still does better
The board is the authority. It publishes revisions first, and it knows about closings this site never will: a snow day, a strike, a PA day at one school.
Which is why every calendar page here links straight back to the board it came from, and why the rule on this site is that where a date here disagrees with your school, your school is right.
More about where the dates come from and how they are checked is on the about page.