Fierce is fair: when institutional tone policing meets legal obligation

There comes a moment when a parent begins to speak in plain terms, with no softening edge, no accommodating smile, no fear of being perceived as uncooperative. It’s when you realise that you won’t be liked, no matter how hard you try, because your advocacy positions you as inherently unlikable by schools with their current stance. This fierceness is protected in law.

Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario has made it abundantly clear: “fierce advocacy” must not and cannot prevent a school board from fulfilling its duty. [L.B. v. Toronto District School Board, 2015 HRTO 1622]

The law protects your child’s right to accommodation and your right to advocate fiercely. When schools recoil from a parent’s tone, what they are often recoiling from is the recognition of harm.

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Clarity is not conflict

In professional settings, especially those dominated by male-coded norms, clarity is currency. Strategic language, legal references, and firm boundaries are viewed as indicators of intelligence and leadership. But in school advocacy, particularly when voiced by women—especially mothers of disabled children—clarity is often perceived as threatening. The very same attributes that garner respect elsewhere are recoded as aggression. Assertiveness becomes “abrasive.” Specificity becomes “demanding.” Legal citations become “intimidating.”

This is not a misunderstanding. It is a strategy.

By repositioning the parent’s clarity as conflict, the institution distracts from the content of the concern and repositions the school as the victim of tone rather than the agent of exclusion. This is what Sara Ahmed names as an affective economy—a redistribution of emotional value, where those who name harm are framed as causing it.

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Fierceness arises from care

When a parent speaks plainly about harm, they are doing so with knowledge, with urgency, and often with a body marked by years of accumulated dismissal. Fierceness is not the opposite of collaboration—it is its last remaining form when all others have failed. It is a demand for procedural integrity when every quiet suggestion has already been overlooked. It is care, distilled into precision. It is refusal, shaped into justice.

This advocacy may include terms like “pattern of discrimination,” “failure to accommodate,” or “escalation of concern”—and each of those phrases signals a parent who knows what the law requires. That knowledge should be met with action, not avoidance. Yet far too often, it triggers silence, withdrawal, or whispered accusations of being “too intense.”

But intensity is a trauma response, and trauma is often institutional.

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The procedural myth of “collaboration”

Schools often claim to value collaboration, but what they mean is performance of agreeability. Real collaboration includes challenge. It includes dissent. It includes the moments when a parent says, “That plan is insufficient,” or “We have tried that already, and the harm continued.” If collaboration requires silence, it is compliance. And if collaboration excludes critique, it is coercion.

The duty to accommodate, as affirmed in Kim Block’s Part 5 – Duty to Accommodate – Duty to Facilitate, is a shared process, not a one-sided performance. A school that withdraws because it feels “attacked” is engaging in a harmful distortion of its role. No individual’s emotional comfort can override a child’s legal right to access. No staff member’s dislike of a parent’s tone can justify pausing support. See:

• Part 1: Duty to Accommodate – Power of the Human Rights Code 
• Part 2 (A)- Duty to Accommodate – Discrimination Test
• Part 2 (B): Duty to Accommodate – Reasonable Justification
• Part 3 – Duty to Accommodate – Meaningful Inquiry
• Part 4 – Duty to Accommodate – Duty to Consult
• Part 5 – Duty to Accommodate – Duty to Facilitate
• Part 6 – Duty to Accommodate – Pulling it all together

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What the law actually says

The L.B. case is clear: school boards must engage in the accommodation process regardless of how a parent advocates. While the tribunal acknowledged the school’s view that the parent’s conduct was difficult, it held that “difficult behaviour on the part of a parent does not discharge the obligation of a school board to accommodate the needs of a student.”

British Columbia law aligns with this interpretation. The BC Human Rights Code protects against discrimination in services, including education. The Ministry’s Special Education Services Manual of Policies, Procedures and Guidelines affirms that schools must consider the unique strengths and needs of students when planning and implementing accommodations. These duties are not conditional on parental deference.

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What we name, we can resist

When schools engage in tone policing—ghosting parents after critical emails, holding secret meetings without the family, or responding to legal citations with hostility—they are participating in a structure that privileges institutional comfort over human rights. This structure depends on mothers staying quiet. It depends on confusion about the rules. It depends on parents giving up when dismissed.

But many of us will not.

We will write “Third request—urgent” in the subject line. We will copy the superintendent. We will quote tribunal rulings and cite policy directives. We will track every unfulfilled promise and keep our own minutes of every meeting. And we will keep showing up—with clarity, with records, with dignity, with rage—because we know that fierce is fair, and fair is protected.

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Refuse the narrative, reclaim your power

If they say:
“You’re being too aggressive.”
Say:
“I’m showing up for my child. Human rights law protects my advocacy—and it protects their right to be included.”

If they say:
“We need to reset the relationship before we move forward.”
Say:
“Relationship repair cannot be a condition of support. The law requires you to meet my child’s needs regardless of interpersonal dynamics.”

If they say:
“You’re making things harder by being so intense.”
Say:
“I am responding to the harm my child is experiencing. My intensity reflects the urgency of their needs—and your legal obligation to meet them.”

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We are the ones who remember what was said

We are the ones who print the emails, who recall the exact phrasing, who know which policy says what and when it changed. We are the ones who built this advocacy in the fire of betrayal, who learned the law because it was the only way forward, who cry in the parking lot and rally in the next breath. The record will show we asked, clearly and fiercely, for what was right.