Sooke School District (SD62) secondary schools: a neurodiversity-informed policy critique

The Sooke School District secondary code of conduct opens with the steady, reassuring cadence of a district reading its own values back to itself: schools are “places for safe, purposeful learning,” conduct is “a shared responsibility of students, staff, parents / guardians and the broader community,” and every member carries an obligation to “support learning,” “promote safety,” “model courtesy, compassion and respect,” and “celebrate diversity.” Read alongside the codes of districts that mention disability nowhere at all, this one looks almost careful. It names the Human Rights Code. It promises to “determine the root causes of behaviour.” It routes disabled students toward an Inclusive Education Services team and an IEP. The care is real, and it is precisely what makes the remaining architecture worth reading closely — because a code that knows the right words, and still defaults to discretion, escalation, and indefinite removal, tells us something a blunter document cannot.

Sara Ahmed‘s account of non-performativity describes the institutional document that produces the appearance of action by naming a commitment — the diversity statement that becomes the diversity work, the policy that stands in for the practice it names. Sooke’s code is a useful place to watch that substitution happen, less because its authors act in bad faith and more because sincere intentions written into a compliance structure inherit the structure’s logic.

Sooke secondary — conduct decision flow

The code presents no formal decision tree, but the sequence of obligations and consequences makes the implicit process clear:

flowchart TD
    A([Behaviour observed]) --> B{Does it breach the listed obligations<br/>or prohibited categories?}
    B -->|Aligns with expectations| C[Ordinary routine continues]
    B -->|Breaches expectations| D[Staff make every effort to support<br/>and determine the root causes of behaviour]

    D --> E{Is the student designated<br/>with a disability?}
    E -->|Yes| F[Inclusive Education Services team involved<br/>Proactive plan developed from the IEP<br/>Case manager, admin, student, parent, counsellor collaborate]
    E -->|No| G[Proceed without a disability-specific process]

    F --> H{Adjust for maturity, grade level,<br/>progressive discipline, and ability<br/>to understand expectations}
    G --> H

    H --> I{Severity of the situation}
    I -->|Minor, resolvable| J[Discussion, mediation, restitution<br/>Interview with principal or vice-principal<br/>Loss of privileges / detention]
    I -->|Safety or others' educational program compromised,<br/>or ongoing failure to meet expectations| K[Range of escalating consequences]

    K --> L[In-school suspension<br/>Restorative processes<br/>Community service<br/>Referral to counselling or support]
    L --> M[Formal suspension from school]
    M --> N[Referral to the Student Review Committee<br/>Indefinite suspension]

    classDef supportive fill:#e7f3ea,stroke:#3f8f5a,color:#14391f;
    classDef neutral fill:#f3f1ef,stroke:#998f86,color:#2c2622;
    classDef severe fill:#f6e2e2,stroke:#b04a4a,color:#4a1717;

    class C,D,F,J supportive;
    class G,H,I,K,L neutral;
    class M,N severe;

The flow carries three quiet features worth naming. The root-cause inquiry is promised and undefined. The disability routing activates after a breach and remains discretionary. No requirement obliges staff to assess unmet needs before the consequence menu opens. And the final rung is open-ended removal.

The Human Rights Code as a rule between children

The code commits to “promote the values expressed in the BC Human Rights Code respecting the rights of individuals, including not engaging in discriminatory conduct based on” the protected grounds, “physical or mental disability” among them. Many codes omit this entirely, and its presence here deserves genuine credit. Then read the grammar. The obligation lands on members of the school community to refrain from discriminating against one another; disability enters as a category of peer prejudice to avoid, the way a student should not mock another student’s religion or ancestry. That commitment matters and belongs in the document. What it leaves unspoken is the Code’s other direction of force.

Public education is a “service” under the Human Rights Code, and the operator of that service owes disabled students a duty to accommodate to the point of undue hardship. The first reading asks children to be kind to each other. The second asks the school to redesign itself. Sooke’s code commits clearly to the first and stays quiet on the second — and the second is the half that governs how a code of conduct may lawfully be applied to a disabled child whose behaviour arises from disability. The Supreme Court settled in Moore v. British Columbia (Education) that withholding meaningful access to education can itself be discrimination. Inside a discipline document, the Code’s weight falls less on what students owe each other than on what the school owes the student before it reaches for a consequence.

Inclusive Education Services: a proactive plan that arrives too late

The code’s strongest sentence reads: “In cases where students have a disability of an intellectual, physical, sensory, emotional or behavioural nature, the school Inclusive Education Services team will be involved in developing a proactive plan based on the student’s Individual Education Plan.” The case manager, principal or vice-principal, student, parent or guardian, and possibly a counsellor “collaborate to develop an appropriate strategy.” This is collaborative, IEP-anchored, and it names the student as a participant rather than a subject. It is the best thing in the document.

It also activates “in cases where” a disabled student has already breached and a consequence is already in motion, and the plan it produces is called “proactive” while arriving downstream of the incident. Proactive design belongs before the morning that overwhelms a child — before the unscaffolded transition, the substitute who reshaped the day without warning, the sensory load that built across three periods — and not in the meeting convened after the room has already been cleared. “Will be involved” leaves the depth, the timing, and the authority of that team undefined: the Inclusive Education team may advise while the principal still holds the suspension. The clause improves on silence. It stops short of a requirement to ask, before any consequence, whether the behaviour communicated an unmet need.

Root causes without a method

“Every effort will be made to support individuals and to determine the root causes of behaviour” — a sentence I would happily see in every code in the province. The difficulty is method. Root cause carries two readings inside a school. One looks outward, at the sensory environment, the missing accommodation, the transition that arrived with no warning, the support that the IEP promised and the timetable withheld. The other looks inward, at the child, and locates the root in a choice, an attitude, a shortfall of effort. The code names the search and supplies no compass, and a search without a compass tends to arrive wherever the searcher already stood. For staff working without explicit training in disability and distress, the inward reading is the path of least resistance, and the autistic student’s overwhelm becomes, once again, a root cause situated in the student.

Behavioural expectations as cognitive demands

The obligations sound like ordinary decency: “model courtesy, compassion and respect,” “celebrate diversity,” refrain from “interfering with the learning and working of others.” Each encodes a cognitive and sensory demand. “Model courtesy” asks for fluent neurotypical social performance — the politeness scripts, the modulated tone, the eye contact a selectively mute, autistic, or dysregulated student may be unable to produce on cue, and whose absence reads as rudeness or defiance. “Interfering with the learning and working of others” is facially neutral and operationally weighted: the student whose stimming, vocalisation, or movement gets read as interference carries the breach, while the environment that offered no movement break and no quiet exit carries none. The expectations describe a regulated, verbal, still, prosocial learner, and then treat every departure from that profile as conduct rather than access.

Indefinite suspension and the Student Review Committee

The consequence menu ends somewhere the other codes in this series rarely name so plainly: “Referral to the Sooke School District Student Review Committee (indefinite suspension).” Sit with the word indefinite. The other rungs have shape — a detention ends, a five-day suspension ends, a restorative conversation closes. Indefinite suspension removes the horizon. For a disabled student whose behaviour the system already reads as disruption or noncompliance, open-ended exclusion is the most severe service reduction a school can administer short of formal expulsion, and it falls hardest on exactly the students whose behaviour is most likely to arise from disability.

Under the Human Rights Code, a service reduction tied to disability is presumed discriminatory unless the school shows it accommodated to the point of undue hardship first. A code that lists indefinite suspension among ordinary “disciplinary action,” with no procedural gate requiring accommodation to be exhausted before that rung is reached, builds the architecture of exclusion into routine practice and trusts discretion to hold it back.

Personal devices: a more generous ban, still gated

Sooke earns real credit here. Personal devices stay stored “for the duration of the school day (with the exception of lunchtime and transition times),” and that allowance is a meaningful improvement over the districts that ban the phone from nine to three with no breathing room — because lunch and transitions are precisely the unstructured, high-load moments when an autistic or anxious student most needs a familiar regulating tool. Then comes the gate. Assistive use is permitted “as informed by the Inclusive Education Teacher,” routing a regulation tool through professional gatekeeping and documentation, and the policy folds “ear buds/headphones” into the same restriction. Noise-cancelling headphones serve a student drowning in cafeteria noise as the accommodation that makes the room survivable, not as a distraction from learning. A device clause that reaches earbuds without naming sensory regulation converts a support into a rule, and the student who reaches for it during an overwhelming transition becomes someone “not following” policy rather than someone coping with it.

Fair notice and the threat assessment shadow

The code closes with Fair Notice of its Violence Threat Risk Assessment protocols. VTRA carries a legitimate purpose. It also carries a documented hazard for autistic and otherwise neurodivergent students, whose flat affect, literal language, scripted speech, or meltdown behaviour an assessment built around neurotypical baselines can misread — so that a sensory crisis or an out-of-context phrase becomes a “threat” entered into a file that follows the child across years and schools. A code that offers parents fair notice of the VTRA process owes the same families fair notice of how that process accounts for disability: how it distinguishes a disabled student’s distress from a credible threat, who at the table understands the difference, and what the IEP contributes before an assessment begins. On that, the code is silent.

Collective punishment: unnamed, unbarred

This site exists for a single principle, and this code, like the others reviewed here, leaves it unwritten. The code nowhere prohibits collective consequences, and its collective framing — shared responsibility, obligations that bind “all members of the school community,” the learning and working “of others” held up as the thing a breach disturbs — leaves the whole-class sanction, the group-level lost privilege, and the quiet pressure that turns peers into enforcers entirely available. Silence is permission. A code that meant to protect disabled students from carrying the blame for a room’s frustration would say so in a single sentence: consequences attach to the individual whose specific behaviour they address, and to no one else.

Summary

Overall rating: ★★☆☆☆

Sooke’s secondary code is, in the honest accounting, one of the better documents reviewed in this series — and its quality is the point. It reaches for the right vocabulary, names disability, promises to look for root causes, and routes disabled students toward a planning team and an IEP. Then it keeps discretion at the centre, leaves the duty to accommodate unspoken, scaffolds none of its restorative promises for neurodivergent participation, and lets the ladder of consequences climb all the way to indefinite removal. The care in the language and the compliance logic in the structure share one document, and where they meet, the structure wins. A disabled student in Sooke depends less on what this code says than on whether the adult reading it that morning chooses the outward reading of root cause or the inward one. That is a great deal to ask of discretion, and a great deal to leave to chance.