Legal and ethical
Includes the laws, policies, complaint routes, records, oversight bodies, and accountability tools families use to challenge exclusion, discrimination, delay, denial of accommodation, and procedural harm in schools.
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When provincial bodies dismiss parental expertise: POPARD, sticker charts, and the refusal of heterogeneity
In the previous essay, I examined neuroimaging research demonstrating that autism and ADHD are not internally homogeneous diagnostic categories but rather contain multiple neurologically distinct subgroups, often with opposite patterns of brain structure alterations relative to controls. The Pecci-Terroba study reveals what categorical intervention logic refuses to accommodate: diagnosis alone cannot determine whether a specific…
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Subgrouping autism and ADHD based on structural MRI population modelling centiles
A June 2025 neuroimaging study examining brain structure patterns across individuals with autism, ADHD, and combined diagnoses, published in Molecular Autism by Pecci-Terroba and colleagues applies population modelling to cluster participants based on centile scores for cortical thickness, surface area, and grey matter volume, using HYDRA—a semi-supervised machine learning algorithm that identifies subgroups based on…
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The material costs of educational harm
My son no longer attends school. He no longer wants anything the education system offers. He has taught himself programming, navigates Linux with expertise that exceeds my own knowledge, learns alone in his room because learning with others became too expensive to survive. The district asks affectionately how he is, suggests I login to their…
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How collective punishment turns provincial funding failure into disabled children’s “behavioural failure”
Many years ago, my kindergarten child Robin went onto an ice field during recess. Robin was seeking sensory input—the visual shimmer, the cracking sound, the tactile feedback their nervous system required. The school had told students to avoid the ice for safety reasons. Robin’s support worker redirected them repeatedly; Robin kept returning. Eventually the principal…
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VSB’s FESL report: the aesthetics of performative accessibility
An analysis of how VSB’s FESL report performs inclusion through language and process while avoiding measurement, accountability, and material change.
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Truth is never negative: on becoming the voice a system tried to silence
I have come to understand that my role in this landscape exists because every public system that touches disabled children in British Columbia carries a quiet, shared expectation: families will smooth the rough edges, soften the evidence, dilute the language, and narrate harm as misunderstanding or miscommunication rather than what it is—the predictable outcome of…
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Lord Beaconsfield Elementary School (SD39 Vancouver): a neurodiversity-informed policy critique
Lord Beaconsfield Elementary School’s Code of Conduct, reviewed June 19, 2024, presents itself as a framework for creating a “safe, inclusive, equitable, welcoming, nurturing, and healthy school environment.” The document employs the language of care, respect, and community while constructing a disciplinary architecture that presumes neurotypical development, rewards compliance, and positions disability as exceptional deviation…
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Surrey FESL report shows why FESL is designed to fail
Surrey School District’s 2025-26 Enhancing Student Learning Report spans 42 pages across two documents, presenting what appears at first glance as a model of comprehensive educational accountability—extensive data visualisations tracking student outcomes across multiple measures, disaggregated by Indigenous identity, English language learner status, and disability designation, accompanied by detailed narrative analysis of gaps, strategic responses,…
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What Arrow Lakes reveals about BC’s FESL
School District 10, Arrow Lakes, is often described, including by itself, as a best‑case scenario for public education in British Columbia. It is small, rural, relational, and values‑driven. It knows its learners. It emphasises inclusion, connection to land, and collaboration. If any district should be able to identify and respond to exclusion quickly, it is…
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Partial-day schooling is quietly undermining inclusive education in Canada
A new study by Gordon L. Porter and Andrea Cameron, The Paradox of Partial Day Schooling: Exclusion in the Era of Inclusive Education (2025), exposes a practice that is increasingly common—and deeply harmful—across Canadian schools. Despite decades of legal and policy commitments to inclusive education, students with disabilities are still being excluded through shortened school days. The…
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Kamloops mother speaks after district ignored daughter’s dyslexia for thirteen years
‘She was failed’: Mother speaks out after Kamloops student’s dyslexia ignored tell the story of Heather Morrison. She spent thirteen years asking teachers and principals to assess her daughter for learning disabilities, watching her child move through kindergarten to graduation while reading at an elementary level, her distress mounting with each deflection, each dismissal, each…
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Alberta’s erasure of disability rights
In November 2025, the Alberta government released the final report of the Aggression and Complexity in Schools Action Team, offering seven recommendations to address what it calls “rising aggression and complexity in classrooms.” The package includes $300 million over three years to hire 1,500 educational assistants, the creation of a Class Size and Complexity Cabinet Committee,…
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Surrey School District is self congratulatory while exclusions continues
Surrey Schools’ International Day of Persons with Disabilities announcement celebrates procedural progress at the very moment families continue pressing for basic transparency around exclusionary practices. On December 3, the district marked the day by releasing a progress report on its three-year accessibility plan. The report highlights achievements including animated videos defining accessibility terms, tools for…
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The equilibrium of refusal: what a decade of legal spending reveals about BC schools
Between 2012 and 2022, British Columbia’s Schools Protection Program spent $4,420,252.58 responding to human rights claims filed against public schools, according to this FOI release. Of that total, $752,525.34 went to indemnity—settlements and compensation paid to claimants. The remaining $3,635,085.21 funded legal defence. The ratio is precise: for every dollar spent remedying harm, the system…
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What BC spends to avoid accountability
The numbers arrived in a single-page response to a freedom of information request. Between January 2022 and February 2024, British Columbia’s Schools Protection Program—the provincial insurance mechanism that shields school districts from liability—spent $1,340,772.33 responding to discrimination claims filed against public schools. Of that sum, $252,000 went to settlements or indemnity payments across sixteen resolved…
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The economics of abandonment
When districts exclude children from school, the funding does not follow the child home. The money remains captured within institutional accounts, redirected toward students who attend, while parents absorb the cost of providing education systems are legally required to deliver. I’ve reduced my income multiple times over the years, rarely being able to work full-time…
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Three contexts, one experience: why autism debates fracture
The fracture happens before anyone finishes speaking. One person describes autism as neurological difference observable through brain imaging and cognitive testing; another person describes autism as diagnostic category that unlocks resources within rationed systems; a third person describes autism as lived experience of navigating a world built around neurotypical assumptions about communication, sensory processing, and…
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The return of functioning labels: How austerity turns advocacy into competition
A parent recently posted about profound autism, describing the experience of having her son’s reality erased when people say that “profound autism” doesn’t exist. Her frustration is legitimate—parents of children with intensive, lifelong support needs face profound institutional abandonment, and “profound autism” names a reality that deserves recognition and resources. But her post also illustrates…
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Why I won’t stop in 2026
The principal used collective punishment against my child almost two years ago, and yet I remain unreconciled to what she did. People suggest moving on, starting fresh, forgiving. Schools are obsessed with ‘fresh starts,’ framing each September as reset opportunity, as though institutional harm dissolves at arbitrary calendar boundaries. My daughter carries what happened in…
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B.C. teacher who pushed elementary school student gets 1-day suspension
“A B.C. teacher who pushed an elementary school student she believed had insulted her mother has agreed to a one-day suspension and remedial education. Jeven Kaur Gill agreed to the punishment in a consent resolution agreement with B.C.’s Commissioner for Teacher Regulation last month, which was published on the commissioner’s website Tuesday.” CTV News The…
