How do we get out of this mess?

British Columbia’s education system is breaking, and Surrey’s classroom evacuations—along with the rushed creation of the Classroom Clear Tracker—show how close we stand to systemic failure.

Desperate times create desperate actions, and the crisis unfolding in public education pushes people into hurried choices shaped by urgency, fear, and the belief that any action feels better than continued collapse. We move with the best judgment available to us in the moment, and then we gather fuller truth and feel the pull toward revision. This capacity for adjustment carries a deeply human wisdom: we strengthen our choices when we allow new information to reshape our path.

How we begin repair

We start by believing each other when we describe conditions as intolerable, and we listen with care so that every response strengthens safety and honours lived experience. Shared truth creates the foundation for collective clarity, because it illuminates how crisis moves through the system and how each layer carries its own form of overwhelm.

We live inside an architecture that circulates power upward and distributes accountability downward, creating a world where each level gestures toward another as the source of the problem. Provincial funding formulas constrain districts; district budgets shape what schools can sustain; school structures restrict teachers; teachers absorb these limits in their bodies while families watch their children carry the emotional and physical consequences of systemic scarcity. Bureaucracy merges with ableism, austerity, and political caution until the system behaves like a self-preserving machine that preserves itself through delay, deference, and the diffusion of blame.

The way structures become unquestioned

These systems become reified and then ossified until rules we created feel like natural laws rather than administrative choices. Individuals receive rewards for protecting the system because institutional continuity comforts leadership, and people absorb scapegoating when the structure feels threatened. The architecture continues unchanged while the crisis deepens underneath.

Austerity sets the material boundaries for every decision, because provincial budgets determine staffing ceilings, specialist availability, and classroom capacity. Ableism shapes behaviour expectations and transforms predictable responses to high-pressure environments into moralised narratives about effort and character. Bureaucratic risk-management shapes the emotional culture of schools, because leaders feel obligated to protect institutions from liability and political consequence, which narrows what can be acknowledged and slows every form of response.

How the crisis fragments people

The current government inherited an education system shaped by years of austerity and faces the overwhelming task of unravelling decades of accumulated strain. Every level now carries fragments of responsibility: the Ministry references legislation; districts reference staffing formulas; schools reference timetables and ratios; specialists reference caseloads; teachers reference the emotional freight of many young nervous systems moving through one space; families reference support needs that shape the daily survival of their children.

Each perspective carries truth, yet the architecture prevents these truths from converging. People turn toward one another with frustration rather than toward the structure that shapes their limits. The conversation splinters across roles and identities until the problem looks chaotic rather than coordinated.

The government inside the same architecture

The current government moves through this architecture with its own form of confusion, because it feels the pressure of multiple constituencies while standing inside structures built long before its tenure. Leadership carries loyalty from members who fear a return to earlier eras of austerity, and this loyalty often creates a kind of protective silence that limits honest scrutiny. At the same time, the government faces immense political risk: it must preserve public confidence, satisfy party expectations, and respond to escalating crisis without triggering the criticism that accompanies bold investment.

This tension shapes provincial decisions around education budgets. Leadership feels compelled to appear fiscally cautious, yet this caution arises from a narrow understanding of cost. Under-resourcing education creates strain that travels into healthcare, social services, policing, child protection, and the courts. Every unmet need in a classroom reverberates outward through interlocking systems, each absorbing consequences far more expensive than the staffing and support that would have prevented the crisis upstream.

The path forward grows through conversation, collaboration, and the courage to bring new ideas to government — ideas rooted in lived experience, disability justice, and the understanding that investment in education creates relief across society. This work requires collective pressure and sustained dialogue, because leadership responds most effectively when communities articulate both the urgency of the crisis and the solutions that honour children’s safety and dignity.

The forces that deepen the crisis

Austerity tightens the boundaries of support. Ableism shapes interpretations of distress. Privacy frameworks determine what becomes visible. Risk-management culture guides what becomes sayable. Bureaucratic time stretches delays until paralysis feels ordinary and harm becomes woven into daily life.

This architecture behaves this way because overlapping structures protect themselves more effectively than they protect children. Each layer shields the one above it. Each rule preserves institutional stability rather than classroom safety. Each protocol funnels energy downward, where families and educators carry the consequences of decisions they never authored.

The turn that changes everything

These forces create a gravitational pull that drags us into horizontal conflict while the architecture above remains untouched. The strain moves through families, through classrooms, through staff rooms, through comment threads and late-night messages between exhausted parents and teachers who care deeply yet feel abandoned by the system they serve. Everyone holds a piece of the truth and everyone feels the weight of responsibility without the power to transform the structure.

Once we see this pattern clearly, a different orientation becomes possible. The path forward begins when we shift our gaze away from friction at the bottom of the system and toward the forces that created the crisis in the first place. This shift reveals a deeper map of the problem and opens a way out of the cycle of blame, confusion, and despair.

Look up

Look up beyond districts that strain to stay afloat. Look up beyond teachers who carry conditions authored elsewhere. Look up beyond nostalgia that idealises eras built on exclusion. Look up beyond political categories that flatten families. Look up beyond tools that measure symptoms rather than causes. Look up into the architecture that governs the lives of children.

The crisis flows downward. The harm flows downward. The grief flows downward.

Every argument, every moment of tension, every misaligned conversation occurs at the bottom of a structure built to scatter responsibility.

Parents turn their frustration toward parents. Teachers brace themselves against public pressure. Progressives retreat in fear of backlash. Bigots seize the microphone, calling for segregation.

And the province stays above the fray, describing exclusion as a district issue and treating harm as a local inconvenience.

What becomes clear when we finally look up

Looking up reveals the true location of responsibility. Looking up shows where power lives and where it hides. Looking up illuminates how good people inside harmful structures reproduce harm they never intended to create. Looking up reveals how efficiency cultures overwhelm care cultures and how austerity shapes outcomes more powerfully than virtue.

When we look up, we stop blaming the people who carry the consequences and begin directing pressure toward the people who shape the conditions. This shift creates clarity, and clarity becomes the beginning of repair.