Advocacy and resistance

Advocacy, organising and resistance names the work families and communities do to challenge school harm and build collective power. It includes parent-led advocacy, public pressure, evidence-gathering, storytelling, campaigns, coalition work, and the refusal to let institutional narratives define children’s suffering as normal, inevitable, or deserved.

Be pleasant so others won’t get upset

What a twelve-year mortality study measured, and what it accidentally wrote down: the code of conduct every district hands a mother on her way into the room. You learn it in your hands before you learn it anywhere else. At the table you fold them in your lap, you soften your face into the shape…
Too many tongues: how schools turn caregiver testimony into threat

How schools turn caregiver testimony into threat — and why the monstrous advocate is made by the institution that fears her memory.
PEI’s education minister just told you exactly how data suppression works

A motion passed unanimously in the PEI legislature this month, calling on the province to track student absences caused by bullying. Green MLA Karla Bernard brought it forward after years of families reporting that their children are staying home — and the system recording nothing about why. Education Minister Robin Croucher’s response is a masterclass in the…
CBC covers SD8’s elimination of Indigenous Education teachers

Earlier this week we wrote about School District 8’s decision to cut all Indigenous Education teacher positions from its elementary and middle schools, replacing them with support workers — a role with no instructional authority and no capacity to lead the cultural programming these teachers built over years. CBC’s Amber Wang has now published a…
One day, everyone will have always been against this

There is a piece of street art circulating depicting a small child crouched beneath a descending bomb, gathering flowers from the ground, and beneath her the words: one day, everyone will have always been against this. That phrase — “one day, everyone will have always been against this” — comes from Omar El Akkad, reflecting…
The masking tax: how autistic girls absorb bullying invisibly in BC schools

Autistic girls in B.C. schools often develop sophisticated masking or camouflaging strategies to hide their autism in order to fit in and avoid bullying. In the short term this can make them appear “fine” – leading teachers and administrators to assume no support is needed – but the “masking tax” is high. Decades of invisible stress and exclusion build up as girls…
The cost of defending scarcity: moral injury and the exhaustion economy

The BC education system spends extraordinary resources defending scarcity while positioning that defence as fiscal responsibility, generating an exhaustion infrastructure that operates across every population the system touches—teachers, families, disabled children, administrators, support staff—all labouring to maintain stories that protect individual dignity within conditions designed to make moral action impossible. A recent analysis on Fund…
Meltdown monster: how exclusion makes bullying worse

I often think back to the school principal telling me that when kids see my son, they don’t see an autistic child, they just see a child being mean. When a disabled child melts down at school—after sensory overload, social stress, academic pressure, and chronic misattunement—schools rarely ask what led up to the crisis. Instead,…
Bullying of disabled children: a human rights issue requiring accommodation

Bullying emerges when power differentials enable repeated harm, when one child or group systematically targets another through physical aggression, verbal degradation, social exclusion, or digital harassment. BC’s ERASE framework describes bullying as “a persistent pattern of unwelcome or aggressive behaviour intended to harm or humiliate a person”, language that obscures the particular vulnerability of disabled children…
Advocacy is too hard and schools expect too much

The BC Ministry of Education directs families to file complaints through their school district’s K12 system when schools violate policy, deny accommodations, or harm disabled children through exclusionary discipline. The process presents itself as accessible redress, a pathway families can navigate while managing the daily crisis of a child being room cleared, partially scheduled, or…
Exclusion is economically irrational and the hidden costs of refusing accommodation

BC schools spend more money refusing accommodation than providing it. Learn when hiring a lawyer becomes the only fiscally rational choice for your family.
What 8 years of advocacy took from our family

I advocate because I love my children and I want them to be well. Because I know the accommodations they require are entirely tenable, requiring only modest shifts in how adults think and respond. Because it is unbearable to watch them be slowly debilitated by a system that insists their needs are excessive and their…
When one child’s support becomes everyone else’s denial

I bring Robin his meals now. I pour a bath periodically, and coax him in, when too many days have elapsed and a funk has grown pungent from him avoiding the sensory assault or the water on his skin. I manage mess, hygiene, and feeding, even though he is a teenager who should be developing…
When improvement tolerates death: why schools must stop the line

Education systems insist they are engaged in continuous improvement. They invoke cycles, frameworks, data dashboards, and action plans to demonstrate seriousness and care. But children are killing themselves in every district, every year. Disabled children are being excluded, isolated, placed in hallways, sent home early, or left to deteriorate while plans are written. The question…
The business process trap

I’m a business analyst by trade, so I naturally wanted to understand how things work in schools, but resist the temptation to let schools draw you in!!! School districts speak a language designed to obscure accountability, using administrative complexity as armour against obligation, converting urgent need into bureaucratic procedure, and replacing immediate legal duty with…
When advocacy stops being collaboration

You’re dealing with a school district, and a recognition is starting to settle: advocacy will not going to be easy! Meetings feel uncomfortable in ways you cannot yet fully name. Promises dissolve between conversations. Your child’s needs remain unmet despite repeated requests. Decisions appear to be made elsewhere. Something about the process feels designed to…
Navigating school meetings without losing your mind

School meetings occupy a particular kind of hell where institutional power performs collaboration while enacting control, where districts convene parents to discuss their child’s struggles without acknowledging the system produces those struggles through inadequate accommodation, and where the meeting itself functions less as problem-solving forum than as liability management theatre, generating documentation that protects the…
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…
Teacher employment negotiations reach impasse

BC teachers reached an impasse with their employer this week after the province refused to fund improvements to classroom conditions, offering wage increases while withholding the supports that would allow teachers to meet student needs. The union points to counsellor ratios averaging one per 693 students against a North American standard of one per 250,…
Where Surrey’s $6.3 million went

I recently reviewed the provincial budget tables and buried within Table 17 (2024/25 Amended Annual Budgeted Operating Expenditures of Program 1.10 Inclusive Education by Object) and Table 26 (2024/25 Actual Operating Expenses of Program 1.10 Inclusive Education by Object) of British Columbia’s 2024/25 operating budget documents lies evidence of what can only be described as…

Advocacy and resistance

End collective punishment in BC schools