Legal and Ethical
School board policies, provincial or national legislation, and human rights rulings.
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On the impossible grace expected in a district appeal meeting
My daughter Jeannie sat in the school hallway for seven months, refusing to go into the classroom until her support needs were met. I filed an appeal in November, and finally—just after spring break—we were meeting to discuss a potential resolution. She’d been through hell last school year, with a boy picking on her and…
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Collective punishment in schools: How humiliation undermines emotional safety and learning
In classrooms around the world, students are sometimes punished for the misbehavior of others. One student breaks a rule, and the entire class loses a privilege. This practice – known as collective punishment – persists even though it is broadly recognised as unjust. In fact, collective punishment is explicitly banned under Article 33 of the Geneva Conventions…
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The right amount of agony in BC schools
After watching my children endure eight years of institutional failure, eight years of exclusion disguised as discipline and support withheld under the language of inclusion, I have come to several conclusions. Certain forms of suffering—like being agonised inside—do not draw support because they do not disrupt the adult’s flow, do not demand intervention with noise…
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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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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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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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On the tyranny of majoritarian sentiment
in 2021, The Vancouver School Board commissioned a third-party firm, Argyle, to engage students, families, educators, and community organisations in a trauma-informed review of its School Liaison Officer (SLO) program, which placed uniformed police in schools. The study found that while many respondents were unfamiliar with the program or viewed it positively, the research found…
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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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Writing about trauma without exposing yourself
A guide to writing in ways that honour your truth, protect your family, and challenge systems without burning yourself out, with concrete tools for staying safe, understanding defamation law in Canada, and deciding what to name and what to hold close—so your story can live in the world without putting you at risk.
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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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Why we’re tracking collective punishment across Canada
In classrooms across this country, children still lose recess for things they didn’t do. Field trips are cancelled because someone else acted out. Privileges are revoked—en masse—because a teacher felt the group needed a lesson. These are not isolated incidents. They are symptoms of a widespread practice known as collective punishment: the disciplining of a group…
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How I learned to go first
I once worked in a place where we were asked to introduce ourselves using Pecha Kucha—a rapid-fire storytelling format built around images and timed narration, ten minutes of revelation under pressure. Unfortunately, when the team building day arrived, they called on me first, to do my presentation. With no warning, no scaffold, no gentle framing to…
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Introductions are an access issue
Every structure carries weight. And when you ask us to begin with a name and a smile, but offer no container for safety, you are asking us to choose between authenticity and self-preservation. What seems simple is often a site of harm For people whose presence in institutional space is routine and unremarkable—those whose titles…
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Don’t wait until the lawsuits
By the time harm becomes legally actionable, it has already become unbearable. If people are still talking to you, they are still hoping you will change. Institutions often ask the wrong question When institutions receive stories of harm—when a parent names systemic exclusion, or a student speaks quietly of despair, or a staff member shares…
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I am just me: What it costs to show up
If I could have walked away from this institution, I would have—but I couldn’t, and so I came, and the price of showing up was almost everything I had left to give. Showing up is not the beginning—it is the aftermath By the time I appear on your committee call or log into your engagement…
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Ego has no place in accessibility
This work requires transformation, not performance. Your legacy is not what you protected. Your legacy is what you changed when you were told it was failing. Leave your laurels at the door Accessibility work is not about legacy preservation. It is not about titles or tenure or whether your department once won an innovation award…
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We must start with an acknowledgement of harm
Before we talk about solutions, or even feelings, we must name what has been done. We begin in the wreckage When an institution convenes a committee to explore accessibility, equity, inclusion, or anything vaguely shaped like justice, it often opens with a bright, empty cheerfulness—a blurb about building community, a land acknowledgement read like punctuation,…
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Suspending justice: What ethics can (and can’t) teach us about school discipline
In 1993, educator Martha Johnson conducted a simple but telling experiment. During a professional development session for principals and vice-principals in southern Alberta, she handed out a fictional case study: a student, suspended. Participants were asked to reflect on whether the decision was ethical—before and after being introduced to an ethical decision-making framework. What changed wasn’t the facts…
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Why I’m reviewing school codes of conduct
To the student who found this page because you typed something scared or confused or angry into a search bar—something like “are teachers allowed to take away recess?” or “can I be suspended for a meltdown?” or “why did my teacher say I wasn’t trying hard enough when I couldn’t stop crying”—this is for you.…
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Institutional gaslighting of caregivers
You refuse to forget, because forgetting would mean abandoning your child’s reality—and you have already watched too many adults do that with a straight face and a professional tone. You refuse to downplay what has happened, because the harm is not theoretical—it lives in your child’s nervous system, in her school avoidance, in her refusal…
