When I asked why my child couldn’t have full-day support—the kind that made the difference between attending school and refusing to enter the classroom—I was told, “He’s not eligible.”
Eligible only for part-time. Eligible only for half-days. Eligible, it turned out, to fall apart quietly in the coatroom, so the system could pretend he was fine.
But that’s not how special education works in British Columbia. And pretending it is? That’s how disabled children get erased.
“Not eligible” is not an educational assessment
The child I’m speaking about is my son, Robin. In the fall of kindergarten, Robin spent more time hiding in a corner than participating in class. The school had already warned us: if he couldn’t regulate, if we couldn’t pick him up, they’d call 911. There was talk of reducing his day to just one or two hours. We were terrified.
And then—for a moment—support arrived. A short-term behaviour specialist was assigned. Robin connected with her. We saw immediate improvement. He called school “2 out of 10 hard” when she was there. That’s how stark the difference was.
But from the beginning, we were told this support was temporary—and worse, that he didn’t qualify for more. That his designation didn’t make him eligible for full-time help. That there was a system of levels, and he simply hadn’t reached the threshold. I Googled and I couldn’t find the documentation of these levels?
It didn’t match what I was hearing from other parents. And it didn’t match what I understood about inclusion, rights, and public education.
So I asked for the policy. I read the regulations. I looked up the School Act.
And what I found was this:
“Services must be provided to any student with special needs—regardless of category—and those services must be based exclusively on what their particular needs are.”
(BC Ministry of Education policy on Special Education)
Designation determines funding. But need determines service. And the school’s obligation to accommodate a disabled student does not disappear just because they’ve already used the funds allocated under a particular code.
There’s no legal basis to say a child is “not eligible” for needed support. There’s only institutional pressure to ration it.
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British Columbia’s public schools are not suffering from a natural shortage—they are operating under a system of manufactured scarcity. This blog explores how austerity, rationing logic, and institutional self-preservation create harm for disabled students and their families. Drawing on thinkers like David Graeber,…
What happens when you know your rights
I didn’t push to be difficult. I pushed because Robin was still melting down daily.
Still hiding in the coatroom while other children were participating.
And I needed to know: was that a staffing shortage, or a refusal to act?
I asked for clarification again and again—politely, carefully, with citations. I explained what the policy actually said. I reminded the team, in writing, that our child had a right to education based on his individual identified needs.
Eventually, the tone shifted. The school began to acknowledge what I’d been saying all along: that support isn’t tied to a diagnosis code. That rights aren’t capped at the point of convenience.
But it took weeks of follow-up. It took legal reading and emotional restraint. It took knowing what I was being told wasn’t the whole story—and being willing to say so, while still trying to build trust.
And I’m one of the lucky ones. I had the time, the literacy, the confidence to keep asking.
How many families don’t?
How many families are told their child “doesn’t qualify,” and accept it? How many children internalise that support is for other kids, not for them? How many teachers are left scrambling because staffing allocations don’t match classroom needs—and no one has dared ask for more?
When schools misrepresent what support students are entitled to, they’re not just bending the truth. They’re undermining the legal foundation of inclusion. They’re weaponising the unknown against parents. They’re hiding behind internal allocation processes and presenting them as unchangeable fact.
And the consequence is this: children suffer. Not because they can’t learn. Not because they’re unteachable. But because we told them they weren’t eligible for what they needed to belong.
Let’s be clear
There is no policy in British Columbia that limits the right to accommodation based on funding formulas. There is no law that says “your child is too expensive.” There is no rule that makes it acceptable to warehouse a child in the coatroom while saying, “We’ve done our part.”
What there is—if you push past the myths—is a legal and moral obligation to educate every child. Including the ones who need full-day support. Including the ones who don’t fit neatly into a designation box. Including the ones who remind us how thin our public system has been stretched.
Afterword
I was impossibly naive at the time I wrote the preceding notes. I truly believed that if I could show the need—if I asked the right questions, cited the right policies, stayed respectful, and persistent—support would follow.
I thought the law would matter.
This wasn’t the last time I had to fight for support. Not even close. It was one of dozens—each one its own exhausting campaign. Each time, I was forced to retell the story of my child’s distress in sharper and more strategic detail, hoping someone would listen. Each time, the support was temporary. Conditional. Fragile.
And each time it started to work, they pulled it away again.
I learned that the promise of inclusion is more performance than practice. That there’s always a delay and during those breaks, the harm that happens rearchitects your child. That the burden of proving need never lifts—not even once it’s been proven. It doesn’t matter if your child has needed relatively one-to-one support for multiple prior years. Every year you will start at zero. And that while the law may say one thing, the system runs on something else entirely: scarcity logic, internal thresholds, the unspoken belief that some children simply ask too much.
So if you’re reading this at the beginning of your own story—if you’re still hoping this will be the time they do the right thing—I want you to know that you’re not imagining the patterns. You’re not asking for too much. You’re not the problem.
But you may need to become the resistance.
Because the law doesn’t enforce itself. And the system doesn’t course-correct. Not until enough of us speak up—not just for our own children, but for all the ones still being told they’re not eligible to belong.
