Legal and Ethical
School board policies, provincial or national legislation, and human rights rulings.
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The role of infighting in maintaining scarcity, hierarchies, and exclusion
This piece is unfinished, but it feels necessary. I am still learning how to move through anger toward something that might resemble repair or solidarity. I am not writing a strategy or a manifesto; I am writing what I see, what keeps happening, and how it feels to live inside it. The truth, when spoken…
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The ethics of counting crisis
I have been packing boxes between paragraphs, writing this series while selling my home—a process shaped by exclusion and the loss of stability that followed my children’s experiences in the Vancouver School District. I approach this work from a lifelong love of data and technology, aware that the same tools I value can create harm…
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BCEdAccess on Room Clear Tracker
The BCEdAccess post about the Surrey classroom-clear tracker is a dire and necessary warning. Parents are raising concerns that come from lived experience, not abstract theory. They have seen how data about vulnerable children, even when anonymised, can expose them to harm. Their argument is simple: tools meant to improve safety can easily become tools…
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The architecture of blame
Before my kids were hurt at school and i was left to pick up the pieces, I tried to make things easier for everyone—packing lovely lunches, remembering birthdays, sending notes to teachers, keeping the peace. I thought that being organised and kind could protect us. I thought that if I stayed composed, things would stay…
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Counting the wounded: how complaint systems and data bureaucracies erase harm
The same patterns of attrition described in The Ombudsperson and the war of attrition also define how governments manage harm in military and veterans’ systems. Delays in compensation, endless investigations, and deferrals justified as ‘process’ reveal that administrative time itself functions as an instrument of harm. What appears as prudence operates as quiet abandonment—an institutional strategy that…
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Bootcamp for mothers: how to send your disabled child to school
Each year around Remembrance Day, I find myself thinking about what it means to live inside a culture that trains endurance as its highest virtue. Across this series, I have been writing about how the language of war has infiltrated the spaces that claim to protect children. In genocide and the classroom examined how distress becomes procedural; The…
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Collective punishment in war and school
Every empire writes its morality through the safety of the bodies of children. Whether on the battlefield or in the classroom.
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Counting crisis: data, distrust, and the false choice between safety and inclusion
Across British Columbia, the launch of Surrey DPAC’s Room Clear Tracker has ignited a storm of debate among parents, educators, and disability advocates. Some view it as a necessary step toward transparency; others fear it will reinforce stigma or justify segregation. Beneath the surface of this argument runs a deeper fracture—between those who seek safety…
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The longest deployment: sending my son to school
A reflection on maternal vigilance in a system that demands composure while inflicting harm. This essay follows a mother’s daily act of sending her autistic son into an environment that equates obedience with virtue and endurance with progress. It traces the quiet moral injury of cooperating with institutions that repeatedly harm the children they claim…
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Too afraid to see: why the BC government doesn’t track exclusion
Data is the scaffolding of democratic accountability. Without shared facts, policy becomes theatre and suffering becomes rumour. That is why regimes that fear transparency always tamper with the census, and why bureaucracies that fear criticism cling to privacy as a shield rather than as a right. When governments decline to track exclusion, they are not…
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A war on joy: discipline, obedience, and the disabled body
An examination of how education absorbs military and capitalist values—discipline, endurance, and efficiency—until joy becomes a threat to order. This piece argues that the rationing of joy for disabled students is both an ethical and structural failure, transforming learning into control and endurance into a false measure of worth.
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PTSD and moral injury in war and the classroom
An analysis of how bureaucratic obedience erodes conscience. Drawing on moral injury research from military and healthcare contexts, this essay reframes teacher burnout as institutional betrayal. It shows how educators are trained to suppress empathy and how that suppression mirrors the psychic injuries of combat.
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What they say when you leave the meeting
Canary Collective’s piece The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree: What’s Said About Parents After They Leave the Room tells what often happens after parents leave a school meeting. The talk shifts away from the child and turns toward the parents. People start guessing what is “wrong” at home instead of asking what the…
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In genocide and the classroom: the routinising of distress
A meditation on how institutions train people to ignore suffering—how desensitisation, scarcity, and forced optimism erode empathy and make harm seem ordinary.
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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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A primer on truth for youth
If you’d told me last year that a man would feel emboldened to stand up in the UN and call the UN special rapporteur a witch and accuse her of trying to ‘curse Israel with lies and hatred’ I would have Googled to see if it was fake news! But then with the second presidency…
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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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Protecting the ledger over the learner: operationalising scarcity in BC School Districts
British Columbia’s public schools are mandated to provide inclusive education for all students, but they do so in a context of chronic resource scarcity. Scarcity in education means there are not enough funds, staff, skills, or services to fully meet all student needs. School districts have had to develop strategies to manage and ration what they do…
