Educational harm
The emotional, cognitive, and academic consequences of exclusion, burnout, unsupported needs, and systemic discrimination in school settings.
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The barn, not the mother
A version of you existed before all this, and she would have been horrified. She would have watched you zip up that backpack, drive them to school, walk them to the door, and she would have known what you were doing: handing your child directly to the building that will hurt them today. Maybe the…
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On opposite sides of the same door in BC schools
Families and teachers are describing the same failure from two positions inside it. The system survives by keeping them from recognising each other.
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A summer reading list for education leaders
The Canary Collective went upstream this week, and the gloves came off. In “Delay, Distract, and Deny”, Wren takes the old public-health parable about pulling bodies from a river and turns it into an indictment: while families stand waist-deep in the current keeping disabled children afloat, almost no one walks up the bank to ask who…
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I’m a seventh grade failure
Institutional capture refers to the process by which individuals — parents, children, advocates, even dissenting professionals — are absorbed into the operational logic of an institution to the point where they begin reproducing its framework, its language, and its priorities, without necessarily endorsing them or recognising what is happening. It is distinct from agreement. You do…
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Children are not pawns: disability, private schools, and budget cost-containment
Public money should not be subsidising private advantage while public schools are told to make do with less. That is the clean version of the argument. It is intuitive, politically useful, and often true. When governments claim there is not enough money for education assistants, specialist support, safe buildings, accessible classrooms, or meaningful inclusion, it…
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Happy belated PDA Day
I have written about Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) quite a bit over the past year, so for PDA Day / PDA Action Week I thought I would do a small review of the themes I keep returning to. It’s not wilful behaviour, usually Schools often read demand avoidance as refusal, manipulation, defiance, escape, or “not…
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Lies, damned lies, and ABA evidence: a prescription for greed
Imagine being told your child needs a treatment. Then imagine learning that the research used to sell that treatment was written, overwhelmingly, by people who make money from the treatment continuing. Now imagine that most of those researchers said they had no conflict of interest. That is the problem sitting underneath ABA. A new Psychology Today article highlights…
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The compliance trap: why IEP goals fail PDA students
Every IEP written for a PDA student begins with the same quiet betrayal. The team gathers — parents, teacher, learning support, maybe an administrator — and the goals are drafted in language that sounds like care: manage responsibilities with support, self-advocate before becoming overwhelmed, organise materials and meet deadlines. The phrases are familiar because they…
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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,”…
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Exclusion tracker: what 6,783 reports are telling us
The numbers arrived quietly, published in an interim report from the National Exclusion Tracker — five months of data collected since the tracker expanded from a BC-only tool to a national one, capturing the experiences of families across eleven provinces and territories. 6,783 reported incidents of exclusion from K–12 education since September. 68% of them…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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The dishwasher, the hard drive, and what counts as progress when your child survives school
My son unloaded the dishwasher today without being asked. This is the first chore I can remember him doing of his own accord since he was a toddler—before school taught him that compliance means danger, before demand avoidance became the fortress protecting what remained of his autonomy, before each day required such total depletion that…
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Ministry regulations on physical restraint and seclusion in BC schools
Physical restraint and seclusion are permitted in British Columbia schools under the Ministry of Education and Childcare guidelines—despite being widely described as last-resort safety measures. When schools restrain or isolate disabled children, districts often cite the Provincial Guidelines on Physical Restraint and Seclusion in School Settings (2015) to claim compliance. Parents are told the intervention…
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On subjectivity, vicarious belonging, and institutional violence
Winter light, girls singing, a boy listening from the front seat. A mother tries to witness without interpreting what nine months of isolation cost.