Educational harm
The emotional, cognitive, and academic consequences of exclusion, burnout, unsupported needs, and systemic discrimination in school settings.
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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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Systemic grooming and the illusion of care
The Canary Collective has written Systemic grooming and the illusion of care, a piece that captures, with devastating precision, what many educators and parents have felt but could rarely name: the way institutional systems cultivate obedience through the slow corrosion of self-trust. It describes how loyalty becomes a leash, how “teamwork” becomes surveillance, and how…
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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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Raised inside the broken home of public education
Every society tells itself that public schools are good homes for children. We picture safety, fairness, and care distributed through the hallways like sunlight. Yet affection without protection becomes a kind of gaslight, and the insistence that everyone inside means well becomes a substitute for justice. We praise the intention instead of confronting the injury.…
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No accidents left to excuse
When I first read the Canary Collective’s Systemic Abuse in Education: Breaking the Cycle and Kim Block’s companion essay Is this Systemic Oppression or Systemic Abuse?, I did not feel revelation so much as recognition. I have called what happens to disabled and neurodivergent children in British Columbia’s schools abuse for years, because the word fits the scale…
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The Ombudsperson and the war of attrition with systems of escalation
This essay is in response to the closure of my complaint by the Office of the Ombudsperson of British Columbia. It documents my family’s experience navigating the education complaint system, the Teacher Regulation Branch, and the Ombudsperson itself. It exists to show how a system meant to protect fairness becomes one that delays, deflects, and…
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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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UIP, the good, the bad, the ugly
We’ve had good and bad experiences with the Urgent Intervention Process. The good ones feel like brief glimpses of the world that could exist if the school meant what it said about inclusion—moments when a skilled worker steps in and the air clears, when everyone remembers the child at the centre of all this. The…
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Homework: discrimination after the bell
The Canary Collective’s new piece, Homework and Harm: How Discrimination Follows Disabled Students Home, captures something families of disabled children know by heart: the school day rarely ends at dismissal. When accommodations fail, the unfinished work is sent home, transforming evenings into a second shift of struggle, supervision, and shame. When access is deferred to after…
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Despair is there in the room, during the IEP
I was not such a bitch before my children were worn down by years of slow, grinding neglect. I became one through exposure. The tone, the edge, the precision that now startle others are the after-effects of advocacy conducted in hostile conditions. I used to be patient. I brought muffins to meetings and printed copies…
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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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North Okanagan-Shuswap (SD83): a neurodiversity-informed policy critique
School District 83’s Policy 310 Student Code of Conduct, amended December 14, 2021, presents itself as a framework for “safe, respectful, and inclusive learning and working environments for all members of its school communities.” The policy commits to restorative approaches, acknowledges that consequences should be “preventative and restorative in nature,” and states explicitly that “appropriate…
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Keeping vigil
I live as though in a vigil, waiting for my child to heal from the slow injuries of school, which for many people represents a place of nurture and discovery, yet for him became an arena of exhaustion where survival eclipsed joy and the aftermath has demanded a long convalescence that feels almost like watching…
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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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Urgent behaviour intervention teams in major BC school districts
Across British Columbia, many school districts have developed internal teams or programs designed to respond to urgent behavioural situations—such as elopement, aggression, or significant dysregulation—particularly when students are perceived as posing a safety risk or disrupting the learning environment. While these interventions are often framed as supportive or inclusive, families report that they can feel…
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The children don’t see autism, they see meanness
How schools weaponise ableism through gendered care expectations. Harm amplified by systemic ableism The principal once told me, almost as an aside, that the children “don’t see autism, they see meanness.” It was meant as an explanation, but to me it landed as an indictment of a school culture—to let that ableist misunderstanding stand unchallenged.…
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Human Rights Tribunal complaints are designed to exhaust
There is a silent calculus embedded in every human rights complaint: how much of your energy, your time, your composure, and your life force are you willing to lose in order to gain a largely symbolic victory. For those of us who have faced institutional harm the question is often whether we can survive the…
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The fallout of regressive discipline: from community trust to mental health
In schools across British Columbia and beyond, discipline often unfolds not as a considered intervention tailored to individual needs, but as a blunt, collective act that seeks to restore order quickly by suspending joy or opportunity for all. The cancellation of recess, the revocation of a field trip, the withholding of an earned privilege—all for…
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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…