Legal and Ethical
School board policies, provincial or national legislation, and human rights rulings.
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New science on punishment and rewards
A growing body of research from 2023–2025 offers a transformative account of how children learn, regulate, and respond to school environments, because these studies converge on a striking and deeply consequential insight: children learn through stability, safety, and relational reward, while punitive systems generate emotional distress, behavioural escalation, and institutional inefficiency, particularly for neurodivergent and disabled students…
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Pacific Heights Elementary School (SD36): a neurodiversity-informed policy critique
The Pacific Heights Elementary Code of Conduct positions the school as a community of “learners (curiosity, humility, engagement, wonder, delight, creativity, collaboration, passion)” and emphasises “care for self, others, and the environment,” framing positive relationships as “foundational to learning.” This aspirational preface signals a relational ethos. Yet the operational sections reveal a blend of restorative…
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North Surrey Secondary (SD36): a neurodiversity-informed policy critique
North Surrey Secondary’s 2024–25 Parent/Student Handbook presents itself as a practical guide to daily school operations, but its conduct code reveals a disciplinary framework anchored in behavioural control, punctuality, and compliance. Its language reflects a pre-neuroscience understanding of student behaviour, one that frames regulation as obedience, distress as misconduct, and support as conditional upon conformity.…
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Why the evolving understanding of childhood terrifies systems built on scarcity
Children now arrive at school shaped by homes that honour physiology over performance, autonomy over obedience, and co-regulation over fear, and this shift grows from a decade of relational neuroscience, trauma literacy, sensory understanding, and disability justice that families have absorbed far more quickly than schools, which leaves discipline ideology standing on crumbling ground because…
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Neural evidence exposes the steep cost of sacrificing vulnerable children to punitive myths
Neural evidence from Altered Neural Responses to Punishment Learning in Conduct Disorder offers a precise account of how punitive school discipline collides with the neurodevelopmental profiles of vulnerable children, because the study shows that punishment learning relies on the anterior insula’s capacity to transform discomfort into behavioural adjustment, and this capacity expresses irregular patterns in the children…
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Punishment is not a good learning tool
In Altered Neural Responses to Punishment Learning in Conduct Disorder, researchers examined how young people learn from punishment and reward using fMRI and computational modelling, and the findings show that punishment-based approaches produce weak and unreliable learning signals in a significant subset of youth. The study followed 174 young people (ages 9–18) who completed a…
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Why disabled kids are missing more school than peers
Tara Carman recently wrote an article about rising absences from school and suggested that the trend may be linked to a growing mental health crisis: Why are so many kids calling in sick for school? That explanation captures part of the reality, yet it overlooks a parallel and far more specific pattern that many families…
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Why I’m tracking exclusions no one else is measuring
I’ve been reading exclusion data that most people will never see. Two BC school districts—New Westminster (SD40) and Southeast Kootenay (SD5)—publicly released their submissions to the BC Ombudsperson’s investigation into student exclusion. SD40 reported 177 formally documented incidents over three years. SD5 reported enough partial-day programming to total approximately 3.4k+ exclusion-days. My children don’t appear…
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Partial exclusion, full harm
The Tribunal’s decision in Student Y by Grandparent S v. Board of Education of School District No. X, 2024 BCHRT 353, with refusing the application to dismiss, affirms that partial school days, repeated over months or years, operate as a sustained pattern of exclusion that shapes a child’s developmental trajectory, erodes educational access, and profoundly alters the…
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SD83 publicly acknowledges Ombudsperson investigation and releases updated exclusion procedure
School District 83 (North Okanagan-Shuswap) has released one of the most transparent updates to date on the BC Ombudsperson’s province-wide investigation into student exclusion. The district’s October 21, 2025 Regular Board Meeting agenda includes a full briefing under the heading Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion — Ombudsperson: Student Exclusion from School, and the details offer an unusually clear picture…
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A data story from Southeast Kootenay District
I lived in Nelson as a child. The racial diversity was low. I know it has increased over time, yet it remains a small community, and when a young child arrives from another country and is visibly a person of colour, that presence remains noticeable across the Kootenays. This context matters when reading district records.…
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District exclusion reasons
A review of exclusion records from New Westminster (SD40) and Southeast Kootenay (SD5) reveals a consistent pattern: the stated reasons for exclusion drift toward biography, circumstance, and administrative decisions rather than the educational factors that legitimately shape access to full-time schooling. The records describe personality traits, incidental details, and complex life contexts, while offering limited…
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The New Westminster submission to the Ombudsperson
Kudos to New West for being the first district I’ve identified to have released their report to the Ombudsperson. The New Westminster submission provides ~three years of exclusion data incidents organised by school, grade, and duration. The tables show concentrated exclusion activity in middle-years grades, consistent reliance on Code of Conduct language, and notable variation…
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How do we get out of this mess?
British Columbia’s education system is breaking, and Surrey’s classroom evacuations—along with the rushed creation of the Classroom Clear Tracker—show how close we stand to systemic failure. Desperate times create desperate actions, and the crisis unfolding in public education pushes people into hurried choices shaped by urgency, fear, and the belief that any action feels better…
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The architecture of responsibility in systems that harm
When a system produces predictable, patterned harm — exclusion, restraint, academic abandonment, institutional gaslighting, attrition framed as “choice,” disability-based discrimination — that harm arises from the structural design of the system itself, because structures generate outcomes with the same reliability that rivers carve their beds, and structures reveal the priorities of the province long before…
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The Cowichan case, land-title hysteria, and the unfinished work of justice in public education
I have been reflecting on the public reaction to the Cowichan case findings, and the deeper I look, the more I notice similar patterns emerging across conversations about reconciliation and disability justice in public schools: the tendency to get stuck in the T part of “Truth and Reconciliation” and to only have the T be…
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Every bureaucracy overvalues secrecy and undervalues the inevitability of exposure
Bureaucracies function through layers of reporting and review, and these layers create an administrative environment where information moves upward in controlled pathways that privilege institutional interests, because officials rely on curated datasets to demonstrate capability, and these curated datasets shape public understanding. The structure rewards leaders who present clean numbers and reassuring summaries, and this…
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What the BC government wants us to see: data and public education
Governments build their authority through the quiet choreography of information, and educational systems refine this practice into a disciplined structure where the presence of data becomes a symbol of competence while the absence of certain measurements becomes a strategy that protects institutional dignity, and across decades of policy and public communication the pattern of what…
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On euphemisms, PDA, and the rebranding of autism
When I look back on the early years of coming to terms with autism in our family, I understand the urge to rebrand it. The word autism lands hard at first. It sounds clinical, final, filled with sadness, injury, bad smells, and bleak prospects. In that first stage of reckoning—when your mind keeps circling what you imagined…
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On children, war, and remembrance
Each November, we are asked to pause—heads bowed, hearts heavy—to remember the lives destroyed by war. Yet remembrance without reckoning becomes ritual, a polished echo of conscience that lets the same moral logic continue unchallenged. Every essay in this series has exposed a fragment of that logic: how endurance became virtue, how obedience replaced empathy,…
