BC Education System
Institutions, policies, funding, Ministry, districts, public education, unions, school boards.
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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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The Fraser Institute discovers poverty is free
The July 2025 commentary by Michael Zwaagstra for the Fraser Institute reveals a worldview that treats education as a commodity, care as inefficiency, and austerity as virtue. It celebrates scarcity as moral discipline and recasts underfunding as evidence of reform. The article opens with an accounting exercise that pretends to be compassion. It translates a…
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Post-COVID rise of blended classrooms in BC elementary schools
In British Columbia’s elementary schools, multi-grade or “blended” classes (where students from different grade levels learn together) have become more prevalent in the post-COVID period. Educators report that shifting enrolment patterns and funding pressures after the pandemic have led schools to organise more combined-grade classes than before www2.gov.bc.ca. The increase in split classes is largely driven…
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How schools weaponise growth against disabled students
In the architecture of public education, few concepts are more universally praised—or more fatally misunderstood—than independence. Cloaked in progressive language about agency, resilience, and growth, the independence mandate is often wielded less as a vision for liberation than as a strategy of withdrawal. For disabled students, particularly those who have learned to endure, mask, or…
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Joy is rationed for disabled kids in school
When disabled children are excluded from field trips, they are being punished for their needs. These joyful, formative experiences become conditional—offered only to those who mask well, follow rules, and cause no disruption. In British Columbia, this widespread practice violates both law and conscience. Inclusion that ends when the bus departs is not inclusion at…
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A billion-dollar empire and children still in portables
The Vancouver School Board owns 223 properties worth more than $9.5 billion—schools, office lots, apartment units, and even a shopping mall (Postmedia, 2025). And yet every year, we are told there is not enough money to hire enough education assistants. Not enough to renovate a broken bathroom. Not enough to build a school where children…
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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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Confident Parents, Thriving Kids—unless you’re autistic
Why school systems should reject behaviourist programs disguised as mental health support. Our daughter was melting down almost every day after school. She would cling to me at drop-off like she was drowning—like she had to hold onto me or she would lose herself, unable to breathe, unable to bear it. She was already telling…
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Field notes from the frontlines of maternal disobedience
This essay charts the intellectual and emotional ground I’ve been covering lately—disability justice, compliance logic, institutional betrayal, and legal clarity. Each section links to a recent piece of writing that names harm, traces its structural origins, and places language around what advocacy does to the body, the mind, and the moral life of a family.
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The afterlife of austerity
When public institutions are forced to survive under prolonged austerity, something deeper than budgets begins to break—something in the connective tissue of trust, of care, of the quiet, ordinary belief that systems exist to serve people. The myth of resilience—the comforting story we tell ourselves about teachers with hearts of gold and staff who always…
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What are we teaching them in gym?
After months of thinking about collective punishment, I was drawn to memories of my own painful experiences in gym in highschool. I reflected on the experience of our PE teacher hitting boys in the head with volleyball balls when they misbehaved. Also, I thought of the time my child was struck with a badminton racket…
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The right amount of agony in BC schools
After watching my children endure eight years of institutional failure, eight years of exclusion disguised as discipline and support withheld under the language of inclusion, I have come to several conclusions. Certain forms of suffering—like being agonised inside—do not draw support because they do not disrupt the adult’s flow, do not demand intervention with noise…
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The history of this website
What began as one mother’s refusal to accept the institutional cruelty of collective punishment has grown into a vast, strategic, and emotionally searing archive—a living infrastructure of truth-telling and resistance, built from grief, fuelled by clarity, and shared in solidarity with every family navigating harm inside a system that punishes children for being disabled.
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Structuring your site when your thoughts feel chaotic
A guide to emotional architecture: building a site that honours your spiralling thoughts and empowers your audience. You don’t need to organise your pain into neat folders to begin.
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A one-day suspension for this?
According to the consent resolution agreement published by the BC Commissioner for Teacher Regulation, secondary school teacher Todd Erin Graham engaged in multiple forms of misconduct over the 2022–23 school year. These included racially and culturally demeaning comments to an Indigenous student, public disparagement of a diverse learner, inappropriate physical contact with female students, unsolicited…
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Don’t wait until the lawsuits
By the time harm becomes legally actionable, it has already become unbearable. If people are still talking to you, they are still hoping you will change. Institutions often ask the wrong question When institutions receive stories of harm—when a parent names systemic exclusion, or a student speaks quietly of despair, or a staff member shares…
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Ego has no place in accessibility
This work requires transformation, not performance. Your legacy is not what you protected. Your legacy is what you changed when you were told it was failing. Leave your laurels at the door Accessibility work is not about legacy preservation. It is not about titles or tenure or whether your department once won an innovation award…
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We must start with an acknowledgement of harm
Before we talk about solutions, or even feelings, we must name what has been done. We begin in the wreckage When an institution convenes a committee to explore accessibility, equity, inclusion, or anything vaguely shaped like justice, it often opens with a bright, empty cheerfulness—a blurb about building community, a land acknowledgement read like punctuation,…
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Poise as pedagogy
There is a cost to composure that institutions never count. When schools reward mothers for staying calm in the face of harm, they turn grace into a gatekeeping tool and punish those who dare to grieve out loud.
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Bound by blood
Maternal embodiment and the unbearable violence of institutional disbelief. We were once one body There is a biological, emotional, and moral reality so fundamental that no policy manual can contain it, and no professional training can domesticate it—my child once lived inside me. His limbs pressed against my ribs before they ever touched the outside…