Counting crisis: data, distrust, and the false choice between safety and inclusion

Across British Columbia, the launch of Surrey DPAC’s Room Clear Tracker has ignited a storm of debate among parents, educators, and disability advocates. Some view it as a necessary step toward transparency; others fear it will reinforce stigma or justify segregation. Beneath the surface of this argument runs a deeper fracture—between those who seek safety and those who seek inclusion—as if the two were mutually exclusive. This essay examines the data controversy in Surrey and the false dichotomies that underlie it, tracing how austerity and administrative paralysis have turned families, teachers, and advocates into reluctant adversaries.

Points raised by Canary Collective

I recently reviewed this post by Canary Collective:

I am reposting this comment from Canary Collective, in its entirety (emphasis mine). On Facebook, The Canary Collective wrote:

The Canary Collective’s warning lands with precision

This passage raises essential truths about power, narrative, and responsibility:

• Accountability must be structural. The Ministry—not parents or unions—holds the duty to track exclusion, restraint, and seclusion. If it can measure literacy and graduation, it can also measure harm.
• Data without context reinforces bias. When collection lacks power analysis, it reproduces ableist stories—casting disabled students as sources of disruption rather than casualties of austerity.
• Representation matters. Families most affected by exclusion are often too exhausted or afraid to participate, leaving the dataset dominated by voices already centred in public discourse.
• Narrative shapes policy. Data collected through systems of privilege risks turning lived suffering into administrative justification. The story told by numbers can entrench inequity as easily as expose it.

The Room Clear Tracker may individualise a structural crisis, but its existence reveals a deeper truth: it should never have fallen to parents or unions to build what the Ministry has abandoned. If the government counted every exclusion, every partial day, and every removal, no one would need to create parallel systems at all.

Inclusion that endangers children is not inclusion; safety that relies on erasure is not safety. Transparency must be structural, not improvised.

Reflecting on our own experiences

The discussion of safety in schools cannot remain abstract. Every policy failure has a human face, every staffing gap a moment of crisis lived in real classrooms. The Canary Collective is right to warn that the Room Clear Tracker may reproduce the dominant story—the one that centres the frustration of non-disabled parents and casts disabled children as the source of chaos rather than the casualties of chronic under-support. The narrative that follows will likely be one of ruined pizza parties and bitten teachers—a story that blames children deemed “not school-ready” for unsettling the comfort of others.

Our story is not that one. It belongs to the parents too frightened to complete the tracker, to the children placed in impossible environments, and to the teachers left to manage the fallout alone. It shows what happens when inclusion is celebrated in rhetoric but abandoned in practice—when systems fail to count the suffering their choices cause.

The false binary of inclusion and safety

In my son’s kindergarten year, we told the school he would need one‑to‑one support. He’d been receiving it in daycare, where he’d experienced abuse, and he would receive an austism diagnosis that year.

The principal chose a wait‑and‑see approach to support. Midway through the year, during a moment of dysregulation, my six‑year‑old lunged at his teacher and tried to strangle her in front of the entire class. It was horrifying for everyone involved— my son, his teacher, his peers, and our family.

Teachers’ fear of violence is real, and parents like me share that fear. I did not want that teacher hurt any more than she wanted to be hurt by my son. I did not want the whole class to be traumatised or to endure the disgusted and suspicious looks of many of the rest of the kindergarten parents that year. I did not want this to be my children’s ‘welcome to kindergarten’ experience. What happened was preventable.

Adequate staffing, consistent regulation strategies, and collaborative planning could have ensured safety for everyone.

Children absorb pain

In sixth grade, my Autistic daughter was hurt repeatedly by a male classmate with ADHD who also needed more support than the school was willing to provide. Staff called it inclusion. They told me that my daughter was being exclusionary for pushing for sanctions against this boy—200 pounds to her 55—who kept hurting her and touching her against her will. I actually asked for more support for him, but they do have selective hearing.

My daughter, who goes into freeze or fawn more often than fight or flight, endured him threatening violent acts and laughing. Sometimes she laughed, because she couldn’t figure out what else to do, to avoid further retaliation.

It was an atrocious situation that required immediate, skilled intervention.

The institutional response was to suppress the truth. The principal’s acted as if my daughter was the barrier to inclusion. When she called the police because staff wouldn’t intervene when she felt unsafe, the principal told them not to come. The message was that she needed to stop calling for help, to stop telling the truth, to accept that being an autistic girl at school meant being touched against her will.

I found myself in the unthinkable position of reaching out to the mother of the boy who was hurting my daughter, begging her to implore him to stop interacting with her. That conversation was as painful as it was futile. We were two mothers, each watching our child break, united by the absence of real support. She would choose not to respond, which I could completely understand and probably would have been how I would’ve felt in the same circumstance.

After that, I personally had to call the police. The school encouraged that action, situating blame squarely on a child who had been failed, not on their own inaction. And legitimately they were probably also afraid of boy, whom they had ‘supported’ since kindergarten.

Both children were failed. Both were placed in an impossible environment and left to absorb the fallout.

The parent who asked for safety

Throughout the years well-meaning parents have gently suggested that I reach out to the Parent Advisory Committee (PAC) for help—because, they insist, that is what PAC is for!

My experiences tell a different story. The PAC I have encountered reflects a particular social order: dominated by parents who see themselves as protectors of the status quo, who treat disability and difference as disruptions rather than realities that demand structural care. They want to plan their pizza parties without the inconvenience of my negativity.

A friend once told me about her time on the Parent Advisory Committee. She was raising two children with anaphylactic allergies. When the group planned meal options for the school’s hot lunch, she proposed that at least one option come from a verified nut-free facility. The room went quiet. Someone sighed that this would be difficult, as though protecting a child’s life were a logistical burden. The moment passed, but the message remained. Even within parent networks, the safety of vulnerable children is framed as inconvenience, their presence treated as a problem to manage rather than a responsibility to honour.

When my daughter was harmed at school and responsibility began to edge toward the principal—the same principal who had once taken the phone from her as she tried to call the police—I looked up how to file a Teacher Regulation Branch complaint. The instructions suggested contacting the Parent Advisory Committee for support. I did.

The person who replied sent a kind, bureaucratic message advising me to speak with the teacher and the principal before taking further steps and inviting me to raise the issue at the next PAC meeting—one she noted the principal would be attending. She reminded me to keep careful notes, as they would be important in deciding the case.

The absurdity was breathtaking. A PAC meant to represent families had become an administrative relay, redirecting grievances back to authority. The message performed care while reinforcing hierarchy—offering sympathy as it steered me toward the very person under scrutiny.

The unsent reply remains in my email drafts folder:

Not to worry, though. I have kept careful notes!!! This website has now passed half a million words—a record of every silence, every procedural loop, every polite dismissal. The Teacher Regulation Branch and Ombudsperson processes, with their forms, follow-ups, and performative courtesies, would also turn out to be make-work rituals designed to exhaust the complainant rather than confront the complaint. However, this site stands as an archive of that complicity—evidence of a culture that cultivates a veneer of accountability while refusing its substance.

Does inclusion necessitate violence?

What happened with my son in kindergarten and to my daughter in 6th grade both underscore: under‑resourced inclusion creates conditions where both children and educators are unsafe. Staff safety concerns are real, rooted in repeated exposure to crisis without support. Parents’ fears are real too—the terror of knowing their child’s distress might one day hurt someone or that their child might be hurt. Or knowing that this lack of support will be used to justify the exclusion of their child. Or knowing that all this drama might make school an impossible place to learn.

These stories sit at the heart of the current debate in Surrey, where staff safety and student inclusion are inseparable, yet the system keeps them at odds. And where the ethics of the PAC and Teacher’s Union are being scrutinised.

To understand how these systemic failures manifest, it helps to begin with the broader framing: the rhetoric of inclusion in education often masks the absence of real safety structures. Policies promise belonging, but underfunding ensures fragility.

True inclusion is safe by design. It requires more adults—adults willing to lean in rather than deflect accountability. It requires preparation, not improvisation. It requires leadership that funds safety and inclusion.

The uneasy alliances shaping Surrey’s inclusion debate

These personal stories echo far beyond one family or one classroom. They illuminate how systemic tensions grow out of shared exhaustion—parents, teachers, and advocates each grasping for stability within a system that keeps them in conflict instead of collaboration.

When disability advocates like Canary Collective express concern about the Room Clear Tracker, they are not wrong to worry. Data about disabled students has too often been weaponised to justify segregation. The fear that such a tool could serve that purpose again is valid and should give every parent pause. Yet the existence of that risk does not erase the legitimacy of what the tracker’s creators are trying to expose: classrooms have become unsafe, for everyone.

Teachers’ unions advocate for reduced classroom violence, while parents fight for meaningful inclusion. These goals are not opposites—they are interdependent. A school where staff fear for their safety cannot nurture belonging, and a classroom where children are physically unsafe is not inclusive. The demand for proper staffing and safe environments serves both groups. The division between them is the product of a government that treats safety as a privilege and inclusion as an aspiration rather than a guarantee.

Comparing the systems of counting

Factor	Government of British Columbia	BCEdAccess Exclusion Tracker	Surrey DPAC Room Clear Tracker
Initiator / Ownership	Ministry of Education	BCEdAccess Society (parent-led)	Surrey DPAC with STA & CUPE 728
Governance model	Ministerial, bureaucratic	Disability-led, parent-centred	Mixed governance: PAC parents and unions
Declared purpose	Track attendance	Document exclusion and discrimination	Measure classroom evacuations and safety risks
Scope / Reach	Province-wide, all public schools	Province-wide, voluntary	Primarily Surrey
Cadence	Daily entry, annual aggregation	Continuous; annual report	Continuous; pilot stage
Data points	Attendance code, days of absence, designation	Date, reason, supports removed, duration	Type of incident, grade, staffing context, number affected
Data ownership	Government	BCEdAccess	Surrey DPAC via Google Forms
Data residency	Canadian government servers	Canadian nonprofit	Google global cloud
Consent / anonymity	None; identifiable	Optional; anonymised	Claimed; partial risk of identification
Validation	Staff-entered	Parent-attested	Reporter-attested
Framing	Attendance as proxy for engagement	Exclusion as rights violation	Crisis as evidence of underfunding
Public reporting	Annual; limited	Annual; transparent	Undetermined
Privacy framework	FOIPPA	Nonprofit ethics	Google privacy policy
Cross-tab with disability	Internal only; unpublished	Central to dataset	Inferred; not explicit
Risks	Data hides cause; lack of proper reporting and correlating attendance to demographics	Low; advocacy-aligned	Moderate; risk of misuse
Longevity	Institutional	2018–present	2025–present (new)
Moral framing	Compliance	Accountability	Prevention?

What the government doesn’t count

The Ministry of Education collects daily attendance for every child in the province. It also tracks which students have disability designations, which classrooms have education assistants, and which schools receive supplementary funding. All the data required to understand who is excluded already exists. Yet the Ministry refuses to connect the dots. It does not cross-reference attendance with designation. It does not distinguish between a child who stays home sick and a child who stays home because school has become unbearable. It publishes glossy claims about inclusion while concealing the evidence that would test those claims.

This refusal is not a technical limitation—it is a political choice. Privacy law does not prevent anonymised analysis. What prevents it is fear: fear of accountability, of moral reckoning, of what the numbers might show. By choosing ignorance, the Ministry protects itself from the responsibility to act.

True inclusion cannot exist in the absence of safety. If a child cannot enter a classroom without harm, or a teacher cannot teach without fear, then inclusion has failed in both spirit and practice. Counting attendance without context is statistical theatre; it performs care while erasing danger.

Toward shared purpose

The warnings from disability advocates carry moral weight. Data can wound when stripped of context, but silence does greater harm. The drive behind the Room Clear Tracker—to make visible what the government refuses to count—springs from the same exhaustion that fuels every parent who fills out an exclusion form or documents a removal. The ethical challenge is to build conditions where these parallel systems are no longer necessary, where transparency and protection coexist.

Real inclusion and safety share the same foundation: adequate staffing, collaboration, and the will to design schools where every student and educator can breathe. A truly inclusive classroom hums with calm and competence. It has adults who understand regulation, time for preparation, and leadership willing to measure what matters. Until that vision becomes reality, families and educators will keep counting the harm themselves—because refusing to count it has never kept anyone safe.

The reckoning ahead

The debate over the Room Clear Tracker is not about forms, surveys, or even data privacy—it is about who holds the power to define harm. For too long, the province has treated safety as a managerial concern and inclusion as a marketing slogan, leaving families and teachers to navigate the wreckage. When a government refuses to provide meaningful data on exclusion, it chooses ignorance over responsibility. When it praises inclusion without funding it, it turns human suffering into policy theatre.

Parents, advocates, and educators are standing within the same collapsing structure, fighting over fragments because the Ministry has failed to build a foundation. The true divide is not between those who seek safety and those who seek inclusion—it is between those who live inside the harm and those who benefit from its invisibility.

Until British Columbia counts what it fears to see, every act of counting will remain both rebellion and memorial—a ledger of what the province refused to learn. Real inclusion begins with the courage to measure, the humility to act, and the will to make safety a universal condition.