In May 2025, the Vancouver School Board (VSB) quietly enacted wage cuts that stripped contracted workers—specifically bus drivers and special education attendants—of their living wage top-ups. At the same time, VSB senior leadership quietly accepted significant raises.
This decision will result in a 25% wage reduction, with drivers earning $23/hour and attendants only $20/hour [CTV News, 13 May 2025]. These cuts disproportionately affect the very people responsible for transporting and supporting disabled children—roles that are already difficult to staff and increasingly precarious.
At the same time, VSB senior leadership quietly accepted significant raises. Posters surfaced near schools publicising these figures, sparking community backlash. While the Board claimed staff were facing threats, Vancouver Police later confirmed no such investigation was underway, acknowledging only that posters had been removed at VSB’s request.
For families who have struggled for years to secure even the most basic accommodations for their children, those posters didn’t feel like an act of aggression. They read like a leaderboard of failure—a public index of the people who have repeatedly delayed, denied, or deflected our children’s needs. Not just a list of names, but a summary of everything we’ve endured: indifference, delay, and performative empathy in place of real support.
This juxtaposition—lavish executive compensation and front-line austerity—speaks volumes about the District’s priorities. It reflects a leadership culture that shields itself from scrutiny while offloading harm onto those with the least power.
Instability and its consequences
Inclusion is not merely a policy—it is an ecosystem. It requires stability, trust, and continuity. Over the course of one child’s education, I lost count of how many people had come and gone. At least thirty professionals cycled through as teachers, aides, and direct support staff. My child, who has had an autism designation since grade one, recently dropped out of school in grade seven. Nearly every year, we began the school year with no support in place. We had to fight for services, again and again, just to access what was already promised.
That is a staggering number of disruptions in a short span of time. And I’ve dealt with more than a dozen different administrators along the way. Each new face meant another rupture in routine, another reset in trust, another delay in learning or belonging. This is not a system that forgets children. It is a system that expects them to survive the fallout of its own instability.
People he had formed deep connections with were laid off without warning. At one point, he was moved into a new program with the promise of better fit and support. Within months, he dropped out entirely.
These are not exceptional stories. They are the predictable outcome of a system that sees human support as optional rather than essential. When the people doing the most relationally demanding work are underpaid, expendable, and constantly rotated out, children suffer—not in theory, but in daily life.
What real inclusion requires
For years, families have been told that inclusion is improving—that equity is a goal, that support is available, that the system is learning. But inclusion that disappears when budgets shrink was never real. It was conditional. Performative. Built on optics, not ethics.
When a child cannot attend school because their bus driver’s hours were cut, their support worker was laid off, or their classroom became too chaotic to enter, the system has not simply failed. It has chosen exclusion.
Real inclusion requires more than intention. It requires spending. It requires stability, time, emotional labour, and the enduring presence of skilled, supported staff. The people in those frontline roles matter more than anyone on that flyer. Administrators are replaceable. The adults who show up for kids every day are irreplaceable.
We cannot keep pretending inclusion exists while disabled children are the first to lose services. We cannot tolerate performative language while policies quietly collapse the conditions for access. Real leadership would not accept $60,000 raises while asking others to absorb cuts that destabilise classrooms.
Until disabled children are centred not only in our values, but in our budgets, staffing models, and emergency responses, inclusion is not happening. It is only being marketed.
