Tara Carman tracks absences district by district

CBC’s Tara Carman released another investigation this week, this one examining absence patterns across British Columbia’s largest school districts, finding that excused absences have tripled in Vancouver secondary schools between October 2018 and October 2025, that chronic absence rates have quadrupled in Burnaby, that the numbers climb steadily across Central Okanagan and Surrey despite marginal shifts in enrolment.

The piece includes testimony from one Burnaby mother whose autistic son spent increasingly less time in school—rarely in the classroom, never a full week, arriving after lunch when he arrived at all—despite what she describes as “well-intentioned” supports that failed to address his actual needs, the gap between what schools are “trained in and allowed to do” and what disabled children require exposing the accommodation refusal mechanism that my archive documents in granular detail across sixty districts.

The Vancouver School Board’s associate superintendent offers the predictable administrative reframe: ninety-nine per cent of students attend daily, absences affect less than one per cent, the numbers fail to tell the whole story. This is the denial network operating exactly as designed—transforming systemic exclusion into individual attendance challenges, recoding institutional failure as family pathology, minimising the scale through selective interpretation even while releasing FOI data that demonstrates the opposite.

Carman documents affordability pressures, food insecurity, housing precarity, students working to support household income, the particular barriers facing disabled students who feel like square pegs in round holes when their conditions remain undiagnosed or unsupported. The investigation names structural violence while the institutional response performs its erasure, the pattern holding consistent across every district examined, the data revealing what administrators work vigilantly to obscure.