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.
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A war on joy: discipline, obedience, and the disabled body
An examination of how education absorbs military and capitalist values—discipline, endurance, and efficiency—until joy becomes a threat to order. This piece argues that the rationing of joy for disabled students is both an ethical and structural failure, transforming learning into control and endurance into a false measure of worth.
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Record. Transcribe. Protect.
The Canary Collective’s Record. Transcribe. Protect. reminds us that advocacy depends on memory, and memory depends on record-keeping. Their piece describes how recording school meetings transforms fleeting conversation into an accountable record. Parents often leave IEP meetings with blurred recollections and verbal promises that never appear in writing, and the simple act of recording and transcribing…
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What they say when you leave the meeting
Canary Collective’s piece The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree: What’s Said About Parents After They Leave the Room tells what often happens after parents leave a school meeting. The talk shifts away from the child and turns toward the parents. People start guessing what is “wrong” at home instead of asking what the…
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In genocide and the classroom: the routinising of distress
A meditation on how institutions train people to ignore suffering—how desensitisation, scarcity, and forced optimism erode empathy and make harm seem ordinary.
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The architecture of harm, the anatomy of healing
Each year when the light thins and the trees surrender their leaves, we are reminded that systems rot slowly, from the inside out, while pretending to stand tall. The fluorescent hum of classrooms carries through the shorter days, and the rhythm of school life resumes its weary repetition—meetings, promises, half-measures. Parents sit again in plastic…
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The Deetken problem: $335,400 to review programs they have no expertise evaluating
The Ministry paid Deetken Enterprises Inc. $335,400 across four contracts to conduct reviews of: See Ministry of Education and Child Care – Contracts over $10,000 CAD Deetken Insight (the company’s consulting arm) is a Vancouver-based management consulting firm specializing in economic modelling, business transformation, complex procurement, and labour market analysis—areas entirely unrelated to education, adolescent psychology, neurodevelopmental…
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The power of many: solidarity in Alberta schools
Across Alberta this week, hundreds of students left their classrooms, gathered on overpasses, marched to the legislature, and declared in one collective voice: we stand with our educators. CityNews Edmonton+1 In the rich, rhythmic truth of collective action they embodied a simple yet profound principle: when many act in solidarity, a new shape of power emerges. These…
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The cost of partial inclusion in schools
I have returned to writing after a long silence—one imposed less by choice than by survival. The move was necessary, a matter of financial gravity after years of lost income entwined with the harm my children endured within an ableist school system. Leaving our home felt like surrendering a life I had fought to sustain,…
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When righteousness and safety diverge
Every parent who becomes an advocate stands at the threshold between justice and protection. We enter the arena to make things better, yet the fight itself can wound the very children whose pain brought us here. There is always a moment—quiet, terrible—when the pursuit of systemic change begins to scrape against the body of a…
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The long tail of Covid: on disability and school absences
I would like to acknowledge the shared labour of our community, because this interpretation arises from absorbing the stories that circulate within our community, where families describe the daily calculus of parenting, the emotional and physical toll of mornings, and the persistent hope that someone will finally recognise the scale of labour required simply to…
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Incident Ipsum: decoding the bureaucratic poetry of school emails
It began, as so many things do, with a friend forwarding an email she could hardly parse. The first message made little sense; the follow-up from a case manager arrived dense with jargon, couched in performative empathy, and copied unnecessarily to a wider audience. The tone was professional. The effect was punitive. The email accomplished…
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Bearing witness to truth
Every once in a while, a piece of writing crystallises what thousands of parents have been living for years — the quiet collapse of public education as a place of belonging for disabled children. Kim Block, Chair of BCEdAccess, has written such a piece. Her essay, published on October 18, 2025 and reprinted by the…
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Coats, care, and control: microaggressions, ableism, and the moral surveillance of mothers
Every autumn, as the rain returns and hallways fill with dripping boots, an unremarkable genre of school communication re-emerges: the gentle reminder, the kind note, the message of concern about whether a child has a coat. The tone, perfectly calibrated, performs care while enacting surveillance. “I hope your child had a good rain jacket, umbrella,…
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Care and support for children with disabilities within the family
Children thrive when their caregivers thrive. The Special Rapporteur reminds us that the well-being of children with disabilities is bound to the well-being of their families—especially mothers, who carry most of the invisible labour. When schools fail to support families, they create conditions that push children toward exclusion or even institutionalisation. Families are often forced…
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Coerced care, gendered neglect, and the reframing of family collapse
It began with daily incidents that were anything but small. My son repeatedly hugged my daughter against her will, pressing into her space while she pulled away, asking for it to stop. She reported that when she turned to supervision aides for help, they told her it was fine because they were siblings. Staff framed…
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Advocacy in BC schools: a comprehensive guide for parents
When your child experiences harm in a British Columbia public school—when they are excluded, punished unjustly, denied accommodations, or subjected to practices that violate their dignity—you enter a landscape designed to exhaust rather than resolve, to defer rather than repair, to protect institutional reputation rather than protect children. This guide maps that terrain, naming the…
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Side-by-side comparison of the VSB plan and a meaningful accessibility plan
The Vancouver School Board has released an accessibility plan that presents itself as a generous gesture toward inclusion, offering aspirational statements about equity, belonging, and shared responsibility, yet the document carries a softness that obscures the lived gravity of disabled students’ experiences and the profound emotional labour that families expend while navigating systems shaped by…
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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…
