After Moore: why winning didn’t fix public education

When the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favour of Jeffrey Moore and his family in 2012, affirming that meaningful access to public education was not a luxury but a legal right for disabled students, it seemed as though the tide had turned. The Court’s decision, rooted in the BC Human Rights Code and later affirmed in Moore v. British Columbia (Education), 2012 SCC 61, declared that supports for disabled learners were not add-ons or extras but the very means by which equality is delivered. Without them, there is no access; without access, there is no education.

It should have changed everything. It did not. As I meditate on my draft Human Rights Tribunal case, I’ve been thinking about the barriers to implementation of true inclusion.

Across British Columbia, more than a decade after that ruling, families of disabled children still spend their days chasing the shadow of rights they are told they already have. They attend meetings where educators nod solemnly at the word “inclusion” while reassigning their children to alternate rooms. They read policy documents affirming belonging while their child sits at home for another day, another week, another month. They are told, in professional tones and carefully chosen language, that support is unavailable, that collaboration is essential, that resources are limited, that their concern is being heard.

And through it all, they are expected to perform gratitude, to remain calm, to speak with the affect of partnership while absorbing the reality of abandonment.

This is not a story of bad individuals or rogue districts. It is a story of cultural and administrative design. Because the problem in BC is not the absence of legal protection. Families in this province are protected by strong laws and powerful precedent. The problem is implementation. The problem is the system’s capacity to evade, delay, and linguistically reframe its failures as compassion. The problem is what happens when civil rights are transformed into procedural requests, and procedural requests are swallowed by the bureaucracy of scarcity.

What follows is an account of five core rights that every child and family holds—not hypothetically, not conditionally, but unequivocally. And alongside each one is an account of how that right is most commonly erased. Not through denial, but through euphemism. Not through illegality, but through exhaustion.

The right to equal access

The foundation of educational justice is equal access. It means that disabled children must be given the same opportunity to learn as their non-disabled peers—not in name, but in practice. That access includes not just physical presence in a building but the supports, adaptations, and environments necessary to participate meaningfully in learning. Access is not about proximity; it is about participation.

Parents often arrive at schools assuming that this principle is understood. But what they encounter instead is a system that treats equal access as a goal rather than a condition. When a student is placed in a classroom without the supports needed to navigate it, the school will still call this inclusion. When a student is pulled from class repeatedly to regulate alone in a separate space, the school will describe this as a “support plan.” When a student is sent home for behaviour triggered by lack of accommodation, the system will call it a safety measure. Access is invoked rhetorically, but denied functionally.

When my child arrived in kindergarten I was 100% transparent about his needs—that he had been receiving one-to-one care in daycare—and school still took a wait and see approach. Eventually he became overwhelmed and started to continually meltdown and school demanded a return to ‘gradual entry’ as if the inevitable consequence of their lack of care was somehow about his readiness. I had already put my child in kindergarten a year late. I was sure he was ready to learn!

The law says he has the right to access education on equal footing. The school says he isn’t ready for that yet. The difference is not semantic. It is the difference between literacy and lifelong struggle.

Schools do not use the word “denial.” They use “tiers of intervention.” They do not say “we won’t help.” They say “we’ll monitor.” The system remains lawful on the surface, while its operational choices undermine the very protections Moore affirmed.

The right to accommodation to the point of undue hardship

The right to accommodation is not discretionary. Schools are legally required to adapt the learning environment to the needs of disabled students—through support staff, instructional modification, assistive technology, and changes to pace, task, or sensory conditions—unless doing so would cause them genuine and demonstrable hardship. And that threshold—undue hardship—is very high. It does not mean inconvenience. It does not mean budget strain. It does not mean discomfort. It means that the accommodation would undermine the school’s ability to function altogether.

But in practice, this right is diluted by an educational culture that treats resource scarcity as moral logic. Staff explain, gently and regretfully, that the EAs are “stretched thin this year,” that the district has “tightened its allocations,” that the student is “on the radar” for support but “just missed the cut.” They use phrases like “maximising existing resources” or “balancing the needs of the whole classroom.” I sat in meetings where these words were spoken aloud after my son had been sent home again. What I never heard was that the school was breaching its legal obligation.

After years of struggle, my son began to stabilise once a seasoned EA was assigned through MIST. He built trust. He showed signs of progress. He began reconnecting with learning. And just as things started working, they warned me she would be removed. I asked why. They said she was needed elsewhere. They said her purpose was only to model strategies. They said we had to wait and see how he managed without her. When I said it was working and asked to keep what was working, their tone changed. Replies became slow and curt. When I brought up the law, they stopped replying at all.

This is how schools test a parent’s capacity to endure ambiguity. Your child will receive support—but only so long as you do not name it as a right. The moment advocacy escalates to legality, the system begins its withdrawal. The EA is reclassified as temporary. Your child’s progress is reinterpreted as proof they no longer need help. Your insistence becomes the problem.

The legal right to accommodation is transformed into a negotiation. It becomes something we must request with perfect cadence, just the right tone, accompanied by documentation, softened by patience, reinforced by emails that remain polite even as we are breaking. And if the school gestures toward support—offers a chart, a strategy, a few minutes of check-in—it can claim it has met its obligation, even if the real need remains untouched.

This is how a right becomes a favour. And how denial becomes indistinguishable from delay.

The right to timely assessment and intervention

Timely identification of a student’s needs is not a luxury—it is a requirement reinforced by the BC Ministry of Education’s Special Education Services Manual and is the legal precondition for every other support. Without assessment, there can be no planning. Without planning, there can be no access. This is why delays in psychoeducational evaluation, occupational therapy, speech-language support, and other diagnostic processes are not merely logistical issues. They are legal breaches.

In BC, the policy language recognises this. But the implementation pathway is designed for delay. Schools refer internally for review. District teams schedule caseloads months in advance. Families are asked to “wait and see.” Meanwhile, the student flounders in the absence of confirmed designation, their access suspended until the system deems their needs quantifiable enough to serve.

When my daughter began having excruciating stomach pain in Grade 3 and missed nearly six weeks of school, we entered a medical saga that ended with the diagnosis of anxiety and ADHD. Her growth fell to the first percentile. She stopped eating due to ARFID. I requested an IEP. They denied it, saying she didn’t qualify for an H designation. I didn’t understand the language—H designations, tiered supports, what any of it meant—but I did understand that my child couldn’t eat, couldn’t attend school, and was inconsolable after school. They told me she was a positive leader in class. They said she smiled a lot. They said they didn’t see the behaviours I described.

I contested their ruling. I asked whether a child who is so anxious she can’t digest food counts as a student with a severe mental health disorder. I described her dysregulation, her inconsolability, her panic. I described the way her body was vanishing. They held their line. She wouldn’t receive a designation until years later, when she was formally diagnosed as autistic. And by then, the school told me they were already meeting her needs and that the designation changed nothing with respect to the support she would receive.

This is how assessment becomes containment. Not the tool for identification it is meant to be, but the gate that prevents it. Schools do not say, “we will not assess her.” They say “we need more time to observe.” They do not say “her distress isn’t real.” They say “it’s too soon to label.” And when the label comes, they say, “we’re already doing what we can.”

This is not a procedural gap. It is a denial of rights through strategic delay.

The right to freedom from retaliation

Advocating for your child is not provocation. Requesting lawful accommodations is not aggression. Asking why supports have been removed is not harassment. These are truths written into the ethical foundation of public education, and they are reflected in protections within the BC Human Rights Code. Yet families who engage in this advocacy often find themselves rebranded—as adversarial, uncooperative, or emotionally disruptive.

I have followed every rule. As discussed in Why outspoken mothers face retaliation for advocacy in BC schools, I have documented meetings, sent summary emails, tracked decisions, and cited policy. I have been respectful, precise, and relentlessly clear. And still, I have watched the tone shift. I have sat in meetings where staff smiled thinly but said little, where my presence was no longer welcomed as collaboration but tolerated as complication. I filed a Freedom of Information request and was told there were more than 20,000 records, nearly all emails I had sent while tracking failures and seeking support. That number became seen an argument against me, not an indictment of their failure to act and a sign of my fierce love for my children.

I’ve been told a more collaborative tone might help move things forward. The I need to trust the school more. I’ve been told I was overwhelming. I’ve seen my clarity recast as aggression. I’ve watched the very fluency that protects my children become the thing that makes me suspect.

This is the paperwork trap. The better you know the process, the more dangerous you become to a system that survives on ambiguity. The more precisely you speak, the more carefully they reframe you. Instead of being praised for care, you are punished for certainty. Instead of your records prompting accountability, they provoke silence. The IEP process invites participation, but only if it does not destabilise the institution’s self-image.

The right to advocate without retaliation is written into law, including protections affirmed by the BC Human Rights Code, but the harm lives in what the law does not name: the tone-shifting, the institutional withdrawal, the closed doors that were once open. The system will not call it punishment. It will call it process. It will cite staffing limitations, evolving team dynamics, and the need for mutual trust. It will say it is recalibrating. And meanwhile, the child waits. And the parent, now rebranded as combative, begins to disappear from the room.

This is how retaliation looks in a system that prides itself on professionalism. It is not loud. It is cold.

The right to dignity in process

Dignity is not listed in most school policies, but it lives in every interaction. It lives in whether parents are called by name or by label. It lives in whether a child is spoken to with presence or managed like a disruption. It lives in the tone of a meeting, in the phrasing of a document, in the difference between being planned for and being endured.

The right to dignity in process means that disabled children and their families should not have to surrender self-worth to access education. It means being met with care, not containment; with partnership, not procedure; with curiosity, not condescension.

One of the saddest things that happened to us was that when my son was not supported appropriately at school, he became profoundly dysregulated and hurt his closest friend. He was playing tag on the playground. He was not supervised. He was overwhelmed. And when he was tagged harder than expected, he lost control. He hit his friend. He knocked him to the ground. He kicked him. His sister tried to intervene and was struck eight times. Staff arrived late. The harm was already done. And though he was asked to stay home, no trauma plan was offered, no debriefing or support put in place, no structure created to help either of them feel safe again.

This was the outcome of under-support. And it was entirely preventable. But because his needs vary from day to day, he is seen as someone who must learn to do without. When we asked why his previous support had been removed, we were told the placement was always temporary.

The meeting that followed this event was deeply disorienting. We were told that space was available in another program. We were told the school was doing everything it could. I began to cry. I asked if my child was still welcome in the classroom. The answer was technically yes, but practically conditional. It felt as though the real question being posed was whether I could behave myself well enough to continue being heard.

Dignity cannot be decoupled from process. It is not a soft word. It is a demand. A demand that harm be recognised. That anger be honoured. That support be offered without emotional penalty. The dignity of our family was stripped in that season. And there was no apology.

A system that honours dignity does not require families to prove their worth. It does not reframe exhaustion as rudeness. It does not treat legal rights as signs of hostility. It recognises that how people are treated in the process is part of the outcome. And that without dignity, there is no real access at all.

The law is intact. The system is not.

British Columbia does not lack the legal infrastructure to protect disabled students. It lacks the political, procedural, and cultural will to obey it. Each of the rights affirmed in the Moore decision—access, accommodation, assessment, protection from retaliation, dignity—remains not only valid but foundational. They are not ambiguous. They are not conditional. They are not aspirational. They are already the law.

What this province has built instead is a structure for avoiding those rights while appearing to honour them. It has built a vocabulary of deferral. It has built an etiquette for denial. It has built a process that appears collaborative but is in fact calibrated to wear families down.

Parents are asked to carry the burden of proof, the weight of civility, and the full exhaustion of navigation. They are treated as difficult for naming what is true. Their children are treated as expensive for needing what is guaranteed. The cost of access is shifted onto the very people whose rights were supposed to remove that burden in the first place.

And yet, families remain. They write. They attend. They refuse disappearance. They teach the law back to the system that forgot it. Their courage is not just admirable—it is evidence that the system is being held together by the very people it was designed to wear down.

Moore was a victory. But the real test of a right is not whether it can be cited. It is whether it can be lived. And until the law is implemented with the urgency, clarity, and fidelity it demands, families will continue to be its last, exhausted line of defence. Until then, this province is accumulating billions of dollars in legal liability for its failure to comply with existing law, and sustaining an educational system that harms the very families it claims to serve.

Learn more

• BCEdAccess “Rights-Based Advocacy in Education” (2025)
• Inclusion BC – Parents’ Handbook on Inclusive Education
• Inclusion BC – Stop Hurting Kids
• Supreme Court of Canada – Moore v. British Columbia (Education), 2012 SCC 61
• BC Ministry of Education’s Special Education Services Manual