Educational harm
The emotional, cognitive, and academic consequences of exclusion, burnout, unsupported needs, and systemic discrimination in school settings.
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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…
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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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Fierce is fair: when institutional tone policing meets legal obligation
There comes a moment when a parent begins to speak in plain terms, with no softening edge, no accommodating smile, no fear of being perceived as uncooperative. It’s when you realise that you won’t be liked, no matter how hard you try, because your advocacy positions you as inherently unlikable by schools with their current…
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Why clarity gets punished
I’ve written about documentation, tone policing, gatekeeping, gaslighting, institutional betrayal, and grievability and legitimacy separately, butsometimes it helps to see those pieces in conversation—because together, they reveal something larger. This post draws together the threads of clarity, competence, and credibility, and asks: why do systems recoil when mothers speak plainly about harm? Why does it…
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What moves you: An invitation to reflect with Sara Ahmed’s Affective Economies
Many Canadians will recognise the Proust Questionnaire, a set of reflective prompts that began as a parlour game, gained literary gravity through Marcel Proust’s poetic answers, and later became a cultural artefact through Bernard Pivot and Vanity Fair. Though Proust did not create the format, his emotionally precise responses gave it an enduring legacy. This…
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We’re exploring remedies for discrimination — and we want your feedback
We know that students with disabilities experience disproportionate harm in BC schools. We know that many families carry stories of exclusion, silence, loss, and survival — stories that have never been formally acknowledged, let alone repaired. We believe that no remedy can be effective unless it begins by listening. We’re considering a larger investigation into…
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15 red flags your child’s school is running the playbook on you
How to spot coercive proceduralism before it drains your energy, your trust, and your child’s future. You may have been advocating for your child for months—attending meetings, responding to emails, following every process they set out—yet the accommodations you discussed never seem to appear in the classroom. You might notice your child’s struggles at school…
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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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Double the love, double the discrimination
Public education systems punish families of multiples by forcing impossible choices between their children—often withholding support until one child reaches visible crisis, while the other’s suffering is quietly disregarded. The statistical reality schools refuse to prepare for Schools are rarely prepared for what families of multiples often bring to the classroom: These families often arrive…
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The collective punishment of delayed care
There is a particular cruelty in delayed care, of watching a child falter for weeks or months while teams gather data, debate thresholds, and cite process. It is the cruelty of waiting for collapse before responding, of constructing intervention around crisis instead of prevention. And when the child finally does break, when their distress spills…
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Debility is not a diagnosis: What Jasbir Puar helps us see about invisible harm in BC schools
There is a category of harm that most institutions do not name, do not track, and do not treat—because doing so would require them to admit that they caused it. This kind of harm accumulates in the body slowly, like sediment, until what once looked like coping becomes collapse. It is the product of chronic…
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Debility versus disability: what the system cannot acknowledge
My son Robin took to bed two weeks before March break. He had been soldiering on through the aftermath of a school transfer the district assured us would help him, though his body told me otherwise from the first day he arrived. I’ve seen that kind of shutdown before—at camp, at birthday parties, in classrooms…
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On masking and self regulation
One of the most surprising and disorienting lessons I’ve learned—through parenting neurodivergent twins, through surviving the school system alongside them, and through slowly unmasking myself—was this: You can’t fake regulation You cannot breathe slowly enough, sit still enough, or smile warmly enough to convince a child you are calm when your nervous system is in…
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Resist the urge: A student’s call to end collective punishment
Sometimes, the clearest truths are spoken by those closest to the harm, and in this compelling public speaking presentation, one student delivers a simple, resonant message with unmistakable clarity: resist the urge to punish everyone for one person’s mistake. Across just eight minutes, this speaker distils the emotional cost, logical failure, and enduring relational harm caused…
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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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Where do the ideas come from?
You already have the material. The moment your brain caught fire after a school meeting, the voice note you whispered in your car, the email thread that hollowed you out—these fragments hold more power than you realise. This post is a guide to naming those moments, structuring them into posts, and recognising that your rage…
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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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Tell the Ministry: end collective punishment in BC schools
BCEdAccess recently reminded us that if families don’t speak up, the system assumes everything is fine. Writing letters to the Ministry of Education and Child Care is one way we can make our children’s experiences count—especially when those experiences involve exclusion, loss of support, or group-based discipline that punishes kids for behaviours linked to unmet…
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When compensation is mistaken for capacity: why I support Dyslexia BC
In every school, there are those children—gifted and hyper-conscientious—who stay behind after the bell has rung, who do the homework even when no one collects it, who chase perfection out of a desperation to stay afloat in a system that offers no life raft for those who do too well to be noticed. These are…
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I only asked for gentleness: on parenting a PDA child in a punishing world
There is a certain kind of child—intuitive, emotionally articulate, wired with a startling perceptiveness about power and tone, about coercion and choice, about the invisible terms of adult authority—whose presence in the classroom becomes, almost immediately, a threat to the institution’s rhythm, a disruption to its hierarchy, a mirror held up to its limitations.
