District exclusion reasons

A review of exclusion records from New Westminster (SD40) and Southeast Kootenay (SD5) reveals a consistent pattern: the stated reasons for exclusion drift toward biography, circumstance, and administrative decisions rather than the educational factors that legitimately shape access to full-time schooling. The records describe personality traits, incidental details, and complex life contexts, while offering limited evidence of unmet support needs, planning failures, or coordination gaps. This pattern diverges from the purpose of exclusion reporting, which exists to illuminate the structural conditions that prevent a student from participating in the full school day.

Public schools organise several mechanisms to understand student needs, including transition meetings, ongoing communication channels, and annual planning processes for students with complex profiles. These structures recognise that children arrive with varied experiences, such as migration, trauma, language differences, disability-related needs, or giftedness, and that participation depends on relational stability and reliable support. When exclusions accumulate, the data should describe the points where this structure faltered. The submissions from SD40 and SD5 supply very little of this information.

The difficulty in producing accurate exclusion counts from district documents underscores this issue. I’ve spent a couple of hours, trying to noodle out what SD5 meant. For example one schedule was described as:

Oct. 28 – Nov 20 – Attended 8:45 – 11:40 but full days Wednesdays; Nov 21 – Jan 17 – Full days on Tuesdays and Wednesdays; Jan 20 – Feb 20 – Full days on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays; Feb 21 – Present – Full Days on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays

The opaqueness of the actual days of exclusion experienced seems part of the design. That was the only record where I just threw my hands up in the air and guessed 10%. The rest of my analysis followed some rigour, using a table of instructional days per month, with columns for exclusion percentages, so I could highlight the relevant percentages per month to see the total days. I accounted for reporting ending in Feb for current year, though was confused why some notes indicated exclusions after Feb 2025. I counted exclusions as ending in Feb, unless otherwise indicated. Some terms like part time had to be level set at 50%, as I was left to guess the precise amount. If SD5 wishes to clarify the precise exclusion days, I invite that correction and will update this post.

Even with conservative interpretation, the refined volume of 3,402.36 exclusion-days across roughly three years points to systemic drivers that remain largely invisible in the written rationales.

Volume and distribution of exclusion days

The aggregated count shows concentrations in a small set of categories that reflect system-level forces:

Category	Reason	Count
Behaviour and Conduct	Behavioural	1
	Not adhering to Code of Conduct	50
	Respecting the rights of individuals and fighting	1
	Respecting the rights of individuals, swearing at adults supporting him	1
	Sexual harassment	1
	Student engaged in racist behaviour. While investigation and VTRA occurred was asked to remain at home.	1
Behaviour and Conduct Total		55
Biographical/Learner Profile Framing	Complex needs. Consultation with family and experts. Programming is continually re- evaluated.	1
	Special needs	1
	Student moved from [mask country] highly unregulated, school staff wanted to break down time to be able to teach skills and expectations and not overwhelm child.	1
	Student with ASD gradual entry as per success plan	1
Biographical/Learner Profile Framing Total		4
Health and Medical	Health Related	1
	Mental Health	1
	Stamina	1
	Student stamina	1
	Surgery	1
Health and Medical Total		5
Missing or Blank Reason		0
	(none provided)	39
	Not given	6
	Unable to attend full-days (no other explanation)	1
Missing or Blank Reason Total		46
Parent Choice and Consent	Parent and School supported plan for academic and social emotional reasons	1
	Parent Choice	17
Parent Choice and Consent Total		18
Placement and Program	Alternate	1
	On Alternate Program	6
Placement and Program Total		7
Safety Language	2.5 day suspension going to a middle school and threatening younger students and being rude to admin at the middle school	1
	child-driven, displays violent behaviour to go home	1
	no contact order/safety issue	1
	Safety	13
	Safety / weapons	1
	Safety concerns	4
	Staff / student safety	5
	Student safety	9
	Student safety / breach of Code of Conduct	1
	VTRA outcomes	2
Safety Language Total		38
Transition and Entry	Gradual entry program as per student success plan	1
	Gradual return	1
	New school	1
Transition and Entry Total		3

Across these categories, exclusion volumes arise primarily from safety language, parent-framed decisions, documentation gaps, administrative placement issues, and health-related planning challenges.

Structural causes of exclusion

These are the district narratives.
They describe what was said at the moment of exclusion.
What is missing is the actual reason why exclusion occurred.

Across all categories, the same structural forces appear:

Support misidentification

Exclusions follow when distress, communication differences, or dysregulation are interpreted as misconduct or intentional defiance.

• Behaviour entries grow when teams misread need as choice.
• Learner-profile explanations substitute identity for analysis of support.

Unmet support needs

Children lose access to full days when the environment cannot meet their regulatory, academic, or relational needs.

• Health and medical rationales often reflect gaps in planning, pacing, or coordinated care.
• Parent Choice entries reflect families stepping back when supports fall short to avoid children being traumatise or regulate parent burnout or financial strain from repeated pickups.

Staffing instability

Reduced schedules appear when schools cannot maintain consistent adult relationships or predictable safety planning.

• Safety Language inflates when EA coverage fluctuates or when teams operate in crisis mode.
• Missing or blank reasons often accompany chaotic or reactive decision-making.

Program discontinuity

Exclusion increases when placements shift, transitions lack coordination, or alternate programs cannot provide continuous instruction.

• Placement and Program entries reflect unstable learning environments.
• Transition and Entry entries show gradual-entry phases becoming long-term reductions.

Together, these factors explain the exclusions far more coherently than the individual rationales recorded by the districts.

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How district rationales differ from underlying causes

The district explanations tend to fall into four patterns:

Surface behaviour instead of underlying need

Behavioural entries describe what the child did, not the support conditions that shaped their distress.

Safety instead of planning

Safety entries often reflect system strain—staffing shortages, insufficient preparation, or missing relational anchors.

Choice instead of constraint

Parent Choice appears when families feel out of options, burned out, or pressured to accept reduced schedules.

Traits instead of context

Learner-profile explanations describe who the child is rather than what the school did or did not put in place.

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Why this matters

When the rationales are read together rather than individually, a consistent picture emerges:

• Exclusions arise from system capacity, not student characteristics.
• District rationales describe the moment, not the mechanism.
• The structural drivers are visible across categories, even when the reasons supplied suggest otherwise.

This analysis shows a system responding to support strain, staffing fluctuations, planning gaps, and program instability—yet describing those responses through behaviour labels, safety language, and empty fields.

The problem with “rudeness” as an exclusion reason

A small cluster of entries cites rudeness, disrespect, or swearing at adults as the justification for removing a child from school, and these records reveal a deeper institutional truth than the districts likely intended. These explanations describe moments when adult capacity, relational steadiness, or de-escalation skill reached its limit, because a school with stable staffing, predictable support plans, and emotionally grounded adult relationships would absorb verbal friction as a communication of distress rather than a cause for withdrawal. The language of rudeness therefore operates as an inadvertent record of professional strain, capturing the points where a team’s regulatory bandwidth thinned and a child’s frustration carried more weight than the instructional commitments that should anchor their day.

These entries communicate an institutional culture organised around adult comfort rather than student access, because exclusion appears when interactions feel challenging rather than when participation becomes educationally impossible. They show that verbal conflict functions as a pressure signal within the system, rising precisely when planning is fragmented, relationships are newly formed or inconsistently supported, or physical spaces lack the adaptations that help children maintain regulation. They reveal that exclusion is triggered by the absence of sustained, trauma-informed practice that interprets tone, volume, and intensity as information rather than offence.

The pattern clarifies that rudeness-based exclusions emerge when the environment fails to hold space for dysregulation, communication differences, or emotional overload, and each entry therefore documents a professional support gap rather than a student character flaw. These rationales show that the child’s words were never the real issue; the issue was the system’s inability to offer enough stability, relational grounding, or skilled adult presence to help the moment resolve without removal. They illustrate an educational structure that contracts under pressure instead of expanding its capacity, and they make visible the gap between the purpose of public schooling and the lived conditions that shape a child’s school day.

Conduct codes funnel unsupported neurodivergent students into exclusion

The large number of entries framed as Code-of-Conduct breaches sits in sharp contrast to the almost nonexistent documentation of unmet support needs, missing accommodations, or unaddressed sensory and emotional overload. This pattern mirrors what the conduct-code reviews across BC districts already reveal: behavioural expectations are written as if all bodies regulate, communicate, and recover in the same way, while the support structures required to make those expectations meaningful are left undefined or optional.

When a district records “Not adhering to Code of Conduct” fifty times without describing environment, sensory load, relationship stability, or support attempts, what it captures is not defiance but the collision between an inflexible behavioural framework and a child whose regulatory profile requires relational scaffolding the school was unable to deliver. These entries are often interpreted as moral or disciplinary moments, yet they describe the predictable distress that arises when a neurodivergent student is placed in an environment that demands executive functioning, emotional pacing, and communication clarity misaligned to their supported capacity.

Across BC, conduct codes emphasise safety, order, and respect, yet they seldom articulate the accommodations, adult training, or sensory planning required to ensure that neurodivergent students can meet these expectations without being penalised for their neurology. Terms like respect, self-control, and appropriate behaviour are presented as neutral norms, even though they encode specific cultural and neurological assumptions—including silence, stillness, eye contact, emotional containment, and rapid compliance. These norms map cleanly onto the profiles of neurotypical students and create friction for those who communicate distress through movement, tone, pacing, or shutdown.

This friction becomes visible in the exclusion dataset, where conduct breaches cluster precisely in the categories where support misidentification is most acute. Parents know anecdotally that neurodivergent distress is repeatedly reframed as disrespect, non-compliance, or disruption, even when the underlying issue is sensory overload, rapid escalation from chronic stress, relational instability, or exhaustion from prolonged masking. Conduct codes offer vocabulary to name the behavioural surface, while offering little guidance on understanding the regulatory cause.

This dynamic is clearest in the rudeness-based exclusions, where a single moment of tone or frustration becomes the basis for removing a child from school. Neurodivergent communication often shifts under stress—flattened affect, clipped speech, intensity, or abrupt transitions—and without trauma-informed or disability-informed interpretation, these expressions are read as defiance or insolence. Instead of prompting supportive intervention, they trigger disciplinary withdrawal. The result is a conduct system that pathologises difference and operationalises adult discomfort, producing exclusion in precisely the moments when the child requires increased support.

Seen through this lens, the conduct-framed exclusions in SD40 and SD5 serve as data points in a province-wide pattern: neurodivergent students are over-captured by conduct codes and under-supported by the structures that would make full participation possible. Many of the codes should be rewritten. The mismatch between behavioural expectation and support provision is silently built into the policy landscape, and exclusion is the system’s predictable response when the gap becomes too large.

What most people expect to see is that really there

Public conversations about exclusion tend to imagine dramatic incidents: violence, weapons, racism, or severe misconduct. These narratives shape policy assumptions and colour the public’s sense of what exclusion is for. Yet within a dataset of 177 entries, only a handful describe these kinds of situations. A single racist incident, one sexual harassment case, one weapons-related entry, one instance of a student threatening younger peers, and one distress-driven attempt to go home through escalating behaviour form the entirety of what might be broadly called “community-imagined danger.” This represents a fraction so small it scarcely registers in the overall picture.

The findings reveal a profound mismatch between public expectation and institutional reality. Where most people imagine dangerous conduct, the records show capacity strain. Where people assume discipline, the records show discontinuity. Where people expect clear events, the records show missing data. Behaviour labels appear frequently as generic placeholders, offering little explanation and even less educational grounding. They describe the visible moment while omitting the context that shaped it.

This absence is instructive. The missing elements—staffing levels, relationship stability, safety plan implementation, environmental fit, accommodation follow-through, transitions, and coordination—are the true drivers of exclusion. These factors remain largely unspoken in the district narratives, not because they are irrelevant but because acknowledging them would direct accountability upward, toward systems and leadership, rather than downward, toward children and families. The silence shields institutional responsibility.

When the small number of genuine misconduct entries is contrasted with the overwhelming prevalence of safety language, parent-framed decisions, and documentation gaps, the structural story becomes unmistakable. Exclusions arise when environments lack the stability, planning, and capacity required for meaningful access. The public myth of exclusion as a response to dangerous student behaviour does not hold against the evidence. The reality is that exclusion functions as a release valve for systemic stress.

Overall implication for public reporting

The combined analysis shows that district-reported exclusion reasons seldom describe the underlying conditions that produce exclusion. Instead, they document personal details, circumstantial factors, and administrative decisions. Future district reporting can support public understanding by grounding exclusion reasons in structural analysis, describing unmet needs, planning gaps, staffing patterns, and coordination failures rather than biography. This shift would align exclusion records with the purpose of public oversight and support meaningful accountability.