Advocacy and resistance
Campaigns, policy changes, or initiatives aimed at ending collective punishment in schools or similar settings.
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Serpentine Heights Elementary (SD36): a neurodiversity-informed policy critique
Serpentine Heights presents its Code of Conduct as an affirmation of safety, inclusion, and communal care. The opening commitments describe a school that values belonging, co-constructed routines, and dignity for every learner, offering a vision of education rooted in relational safety and shared citizenship (p. 1) . This framing gestures toward a caring culture, one…
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Nobody is going to thank you
Nobody tells you that you can pour every last scrap of yourself into advocacy and still feel your bond with your child begin to strain. There is a familiar story passed among parents—one in which you step in, do a little advocacy, and watch as the pieces fall into place. The children grow, the challenges…
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They keep moving the goalposts while our kids pay the price
It began with a phone call that felt like a lifeline. A new teacher was coming, they said, and maybe this would be the one to understand. We clung to that hope. We paid for another assessment, scheduled more therapy, spent weekends in waiting rooms and weekdays in meetings where the promise of change hovered…
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Our goals are not the same: ableism in bc public school
I want my children supported to grow and learn; schools uphold ableism by demanding they mask compliance or feign helplessness for support.
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Why outspoken mothers face retaliation for advocacy in BC schools
Some of our articles speak in a more academic voice, especially when we are naming systems that silence or harm within BC schools. This is a sister essay to Epistemic silencing of disabled children’s primary caregivers, written as a more accessible entry point for readers who are newer to the topic or looking for clarity…
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The orange shirt I folded
I was folding laundry late one night, brain running on the kind of background grief that rarely quiets, when my hand closed around the orange shirt. I moved to set it aside—automatically, instinctively—because I remembered September was coming, school would be starting, and Orange Shirt Day would follow quickly after. That shirt would be needed…
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A thousand cranes, a thousand truths
When I was a little girl, I folded cranes. Hundreds of tiny, meticulous, brightly patterned creatures, each creased into being by the stubborn, lonely determination of a child who could sense that the world was coming undone and wanted, somehow, to hold it together. I folded them from the paper margins of my workbook, from…
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Procedural policing of pain: what happens if I keen?
Keening—the sad, piercing wails often heard at a funeral for a child—is a human expression, older than the rules we follow or the schools we enter. It is what happens when grief overwhelms language, when memory floods muscle, when there is nothing left but pain. It is not shouting. It is not rage directed at…
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7 signs your child (or you) is being positioned as the problem to preserve the group
When a parent becomes too precise, too prepared, or too emotionally honest, the school system may cast them—or their child—as the problem. This essay outlines seven signs that scapegoating is being used to preserve group harmony at the cost of justice, with particular attention to how this dynamic unfolds in British Columbia public schools.
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The paperwork trap: when doing everything right becomes your downfall
When parents follow every rule, cite every policy, and document every meeting in the British Columbia public school system, they are often framed as adversaries, not allies. This essay explores how procedural knowledge becomes a liability, how the IEP process punishes fluency as threat, and why the most thorough advocates are the ones most likely…
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The compliance economy
In their article Of Sinners and Scapegoats: The Economics of Collective Punishment, J. Shahar Dillbary and Thomas J. Miceli argue that collective punishment emerges not merely as a failure of precision or fairness, but as a deliberate mechanism for preserving internal group cohesion. The scapegoat, must be non-random, visible, and different, and their suffering must be…
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The threat of clarity: women who know too much
Why confident, justice-oriented women are punished in public systems The woman who knew too much She is articulate, principled, professional, and polished—measured in her cadence, practiced in her facilitation , and fully aware of the power her clarity holds. She enters each room equipped with documents, timelines, policies, and annotated proof of harm, accompanied not…
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The goodwill ledger: how schools calculate inclusion allotments
Schools in British Columbia keep an invisible ledger—one that tracks not just budgets, but emotions, tone, and perceived worthiness. Families who ask too clearly, too often, or on behalf of more than one child are quickly marked as overdrawn. This essay continues the meditation from Of Sinners and Scapegoats, tracing how goodwill becomes a currency,…
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Maternal grief, public ritual, and the refusal to behave at the IEP table
I have walked into these rooms again and again—across years, with new principals, new case managers, additional complaints filed, subsequent appeals launched, IEPs dusted off and redrafted in the same language that failed last time. The faces change but the ritual remains. Seven professionals already seated, already laughing, already casually shaking off their last meeting…
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Looking in the mirror is hard: maternal rage and institutional cowardice
I searched for literature that affirms what I know in my body—that maternal rage can be righteous, grounded, and deeply linked to the betrayal of public institutions. But what I found instead was an avalanche of studies examining how maternal anger harms children. The field catalogues the psychological effects of maternal yelling, tracks the correlations…
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Shattered pathways of parent advocacy in BC’s public schools
It’s time to riot in the streets. We have tried everything else and our children are still being hurt. The existing systems of appeal and escalation are ineffective, more focused on preserving the institution than delivering justice. It’s time to end the engineered scarcity in our public education system. The maze of ineffective complaint avenues…
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Her body is still hungry: when growth delay is a response to institutional harm
Jeannie was born four pounds, a premature twin, and although her brother arrived even smaller at three pounds six ounces, he now weighs over 100 pounds. She does not. At nearly fourteen, Jeannie weighs 55 pounds and has been medically assessed as biologically eleven. Her growth has stalled, her energy is low, her development delayed—and…
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How schools plan to fail autistic girls while pretending to support them
In January 2025, my daughter’s school closed her Urgent Intervention Plan with a calm, administrative gesture that belied the violence of what had taken place—not only in the school hallways, but in the documentation itself. It came wrapped in phrases like gradual re-entry, verbal reinforcement, and classroom reintegration, but what it really contained was a careful distortion of…
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Vancouver School Board’s Urgent Intervention Process – purpose, process, and controversy
The Urgent Intervention Process (UIP) – formerly known as the Multi-Interdisciplinary Support Team (MIST) – is a Vancouver School Board (VSB) initiative designed to provide rapid support for schools dealing with students with extremely challenging behaviours or acute needs. The program was expanded in the mid-2010s as part of VSB’s special education support model, with the stated goal…
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My neighbour asked if I wanted to talk to her friend who is a social worker
It was meant as kindness, like she’d mistaken my roaming the neighbourhood bawling as some sort of cry for help instead of just my typical state as I sift through the details of ten years of institutional harm. I weep because I feel pain and I’ve had to trap it inside and I’m fucking done…
