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News

Updates on policy shifts, school board decisions, and systemic advocacy related to collective punishment and inclusion in BC schools. Follow key developments affecting neurodivergent students, disability rights, and education reform across districts and provinces.

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • Poise as pedagogy

    There is a cost to composure that institutions never count. When schools reward mothers for staying calm in the face of harm, they turn grace into a gatekeeping tool and…

  • The meeting was on their birthday

    It was the twins’ birthday party day and I was meant to be somewhere soft. I was meant to be preparing a cake, or folding small clothes, or breathing in…

  • Bound by blood

    Maternal embodiment and the unbearable violence of institutional disbelief. We were once one body There is a biological, emotional, and moral reality so fundamental that no policy manual can contain…

  • Too competent to help, too angry to believe

    The impossible performance of grace in systems that harm our children. Holding two pieces in tension This essay is written alongside a truth that cannot be softened. A truth that…

  • How do you live with yourself

    Part of my neurodivergence is fatalism; part of it is hyperphantasia; part of it is the inability to look out at a beautiful landscape without imagining loss, rupture, and death,…

  • 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:…

  • I have thought about writing her a letter

    I have thought about writing her a letter—something long and deliberate, something shaped by memory and moral clarity, something that names what occurred and places it in her hands before…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Food, rewards, and collective punishment in the classroom

    It might seem harmless. A teacher stands before a class with a box of lollipops or a bag of Freezies, offering them as a reward for good behaviour. But there’s…

  • Wait and see: a mother’s warning

    Before kindergarten began, we told them—unequivocally, painstakingly, with as much specificity as we could muster—that our son had been harmed in daycare, that he had a long line of diagnoses…

  • We stand with BC teachers

    The BC Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) has launched a new ad campaign ahead of the provincial election to spotlight BC’s worsening teacher shortage and demand urgent government action. The campaign, titled…

  • What replaced the strap in Canadian schools?

    They took the strap away—or at least, they removed the physical instrument, the leather loop of institutional discipline that had once been the sanctioned mechanism of control in classrooms across…

  • The architecture of exclusion: how schools erase, silence, and wear down families

    Schools are supposed to be spaces of inclusion and support—but for many families, especially those raising disabled or neurodivergent children, advocacy is met with a wall of politeness, professionalism, and…

  • Summer school blues: on being excluded from the gifted program

    In the spring of 2018, I applied to the Vancouver School Board’s summer Gifted/Challenge Program for my twins, Jeannie and Robin, who had just finished kindergarten and were, in different…

  • A survival guide for children in schools that don’t keep them safe

    “If no one listens, go to the bathroom and call me. I will always come.” This isn’t just parenting. It’s crisis management. When schools become unsafe—when accommodations are denied, when…

  • She called the police and the principal told them not to come

    They used to be friends—Jeannie and Adam, two children who grew up side by side, navigating the same schoolyards, chaotic birthday parties, playdates, and a sense that their differences were…

  • On free IVF: love and systemic neglect

    BC is funding IVF, but not the care children need once they’re born. Love is enough. The system isn’t. This is betrayal dressed as hope.