How we decide who gets a place
We have more families than places, so somebody has to decide. This page is that decision, written down. It is the scoring system we actually run, with the weights, the safeguards against our own bias, and the part where a human being can overrule it.
The short version
Three things have to be true before anything is scored. The child is between five and ten. The family can get to the arena for the whole camp. The family lives in Toronto.
After that, every application is scored against nine need factors. The highest scores are offered places in order. Roughly one place in ten is held back so a person can say yes to a family the scoring missed. When two applications tie, the earlier one wins, and that is the only tiebreaker there is.
We do not run first come first served, we do not run a lottery, and there is no tryout. Skating ability has no effect on whether a child gets in. It only affects which group they skate with once they are here.
Nine factors, and what each is worth
| Factor | Points | What it means | Why it is weighted here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Household income | 15 | At or below the Low Income Cut-Off scores the full fifteen. Between the cut-off and thirty per cent above it scores eight. Above that scores nothing. | The heaviest weight, because cost is the barrier we exist to remove. |
| Social assistance | 12 | Ontario Works, ODSP, or any other provincial or federal income support. | Scored on top of household income, not instead of it. A family can receive both sets of points. |
| Neighbourhood Improvement Area | 10 | Living in one of the City of Toronto’s thirty-one designated Neighbourhood Improvement Areas, confirmed by postal code. | Additive, never disqualifying. See the safeguards below. |
| High-priority school | 8 | Attending a school in the top fifty of the Toronto District School Board’s Learning Opportunities Index. | The index ranks every TDSB school by external challenge. We use the published ranking, not our own judgement of a neighbourhood. |
| Single-parent or non-two-parent household | 5 | Self-declared on the form. | One of the three variables that loads most heavily in the index we borrow from. |
| Professional or community referral | 5 | A teacher, social worker, settlement worker, coach or community organisation vouching for the family. | The source of the referral does not change the score. See the safeguards below. |
| Identity-based priority | up to 5 | First Nations, Métis or Inuit scores five. Black-identified, newcomer or refugee arrived within the past three years, or a physical or cognitive disability each score three. | Highest applicable value only. These do not stack, and the category is capped at five. |
| First-time applicant | 3 | Never attended an Open Ice camp before. | A place should not become a habit that crowds out a child who has never had one. |
| Sibling or returning family | 2 | A brother or sister already with us, or a returning family. | Small, and mutually exclusive with the first-time points. |
Points are additive, with the identity category capped and the last two factors mutually exclusive. The highest score an application can reach is sixty-three. Nothing about a child’s hockey ability appears anywhere in this table.
Why a school ranking is worth eight points
The Toronto District School Board publishes a Learning Opportunities Index that ranks every one of its schools by the external challenge its students face. It is built from six census variables through principal components analysis, and the first component explains about seventy-eight per cent of the variance between schools, which is unusually clean for a social index.
The three variables that load most heavily are the rate of families receiving social assistance, the low-income measure, and the share of non-two-parent families. That is why our own three heaviest factors are income, social assistance and household structure. We did not choose those weights by instinct. We took them from an index the board publishes and the city already trusts.
Neighbourhood Improvement Area designation comes from the City of Toronto’s Strong Neighbourhoods Strategy. It is the same standard the City, United Way Greater Toronto and the MLSE Foundation use, which means a family that qualifies for us is speaking a language other funders already understand.
What we do to stop the system going wrong
A postal code cannot disqualify anyone
Living in a Neighbourhood Improvement Area is worth ten points. Living outside one costs nothing. A family outside the boundaries can still score highly on income, social assistance, school and identity. We use geography to find need, never to rule it out, because plenty of high-need children live on the wrong side of a line drawn by somebody else.
A family that cannot produce paperwork scores the same as one that can
A family that self-declares low income without a Canada Child Benefit statement receives exactly the same points as a family that provides documentation. Administrative barriers to paperwork fall hardest on the families we most want to reach, and a selection system that rewards documentation is a selection system that rewards stability.
Who referred you does not matter
The type or perceived standing of the referring institution has no effect on the score. Otherwise the algorithm quietly rewards families who already have access to high-status professional networks, which is the opposite of the point.
We audit ourselves after every camp
After each camp we compare the cohort we selected against the full pool of applicants on neighbourhood, income band, identity and age. If a group is systematically under-represented, the weights go back to the leadership for review before the next season.
You will not be shown your score
We publish the rubric. We do not publish or disclose an individual child’s score, and we do not rank families to their faces. Places are allocated in descending score order with a waiting list, and that is what we tell you.
The question at the end of the form
The last field on our application is not scored at all. It reads:
Is your family facing a barrier or circumstance that our form did not capture? If so, please describe it briefly. We read every note.
Up to one place in ten at every camp is held back for the answers to that question. A sudden housing crisis. A family that arrived in the country last month. A child referred by a partner halfway through a cycle. A barrier nobody thought to build a box for. Every one of those placements is written down with the reason, and kept.
No scoring system built by nine people in a room covers every way a family can be struggling. The door is not a wall.
wrong
The honest part
Six applicants to one of our camps could not be assessed at all, because no registration form was ever completed for them. They had come to us through an equipment sheet rather than an application. We did not hold places for them indefinitely and we did not score them, because there was nothing to score. That is a failure of our intake, not of those families.
One applicant turned out to live outside Toronto, in a different school board, which we only found when we went to look up the school. We have no policy yet for families just outside the city, and we need one.
Our internal document also carries a stated maximum score that does not match the sum of its own weights. We caught it while writing this page. The weights on this page are the ones we actually run.
Apply
Applying does not guarantee a place. It costs nothing, it takes about ten minutes, and you do not need to send us a document to be taken seriously.