Rethinking accessibility leadership, training, and labour in BC public education

In accessibility work, most transformative insights come directly from disabled people. Lived experience is primary data; manuals and metrics are, at best, secondary literature. In schools, teachers are experts in pedagogy, yet few are trained in disability or neurodivergence. That absence is not incidental—it is engineered, and the consequences are everywhere.

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The current failure—and promise—of training

Across Canada, accessibility training for educators remains shallow, inconsistent, and largely optional. A handful of B.Ed. programmes weave inclusive‑education principles into coursework, but most offer cursory survey lectures on “special needs” rather than deep study of neurodivergence, disability justice, or accessible pedagogy. By contrast, in the United Kingdom newly‑qualified teachers must demonstrate competence against the Teachers’ Standards (2012), which explicitly reference special educational needs, and in Australia the Disability Standards for Education mandate annual professional‑development cycles for inclusive practice. Canadian faculties of education could adopt similarly rigorous, compulsory thresholds—yet have not.

Professional‑development deserts

For in‑service staff the landscape is worse: district workshops on inclusion are sporadic, frequently voluntary, and often cancelled when budgets tighten. Administrators, who set culture and allocate resources, are almost never required to complete sustained coursework in disability theory or trauma‑informed leadership. When training appears, it is brief, decontextualised, and quickly overtaken by other priorities.

The result is predictable: autistic shutdowns are treated as defiance; ADHD regulation strategies are mistaken for misbehaviour; parents become adversaries merely for asking basic questions. Harm proliferates—and is pathologised as individual failure rather than systemic illiteracy.

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Stop promoting people who cannot listen

Districts routinely elevate administrators who speak fluent policy but recoil from direct critique. These leaders weaponise procedural vocabulary—“due process,” “best practice,” “tone”—to silence dissent. Inclusion cannot be overseen by people who treat feedback as threat. Accessibility cannot advance under leaders who personalise every flaw that is named. Until hiring panels prioritise humility, critical reflexivity, and the capacity to be changed by evidence, accessibility will remain performative.

Listening to disabled families should not require heroism; it should be ordinary competence. Gatekeepers who tone‑police parents or redact hard truths are not inclusion leaders—they are custodians of institutional harm.

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Appeals are diagnostic gold

Every parent appeal is a live data‑stream, mapping precise failure points that could be repaired. Yet districts frame complaints as liabilities, exhausting families until they withdraw. In 2022 the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario ordered a school board to overhaul its restraint policy after one parent’s relentless advocacy—proving that complaints, when heeded, can seed systemic reform. Imagine if districts internalised that lesson without litigation.

Parents do not want to be experts in law, psychology, and policy. They want to be heard the first time. Appeals exist because every other channel has failed. Treat them as invitations to improve, not intrusions to rebuff.

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Make harm visible: academic rounds for education

Healthcare treats failure as teachable: critical‑incident reviews, root‑cause analyses, morbidity‑and‑mortality rounds are mandatory. Education needs parallel architecture. When a student is excluded, restrained, or traumatised, the incident should trigger a multidisciplinary round: educators, administrators, support staff, and—when consent is given—family members gather to map antecedents, identify systemic drivers, and publish a anonymised, district‑wide learning brief. Restorative‑justice circles can complement, but not replace, this analytical spine. Visibility prevents recurrence; NDAs guarantees it.

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Ask—and pay—the people who do the work

Support staff—SSAs, EAs, noon‑hour supervisors—are the nervous system of inclusion. They de‑escalate meltdowns, interpret communication, and keep classrooms afloat. Provincial wage grids place many starting SSAs at roughly CAD $28–30 per hour, while new teachers start around CAD $47 per hour and administrators far higher. Pay inequity is policy, not inevitability. Underpaying disability support signals that disabled students themselves are a budgetary afterthought.

In my experience, three quarters of the support staff I have met could run district accessibility strategy better than the senior team. They must be moved from the margins to the centre of decision‑making—and compensated as skilled professionals, provided with more training, and not treated as low‑wage caretakers.

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Tangible collaboration: what real partnership looks like

Picture this: a Grade 4 teacher, an autistic student, the classroom EA, and the student’s parent co‑design a sensory‑friendly lesson plan during a protected planning block. The parent explains triggers; the EA suggests regulation tools; the student identifies preferred break signals; the teacher integrates these insights into curriculum. After six weeks the team reviews data—academic progress, incident frequency, student self‑report—and iterates. Such micro‑collaborations cost less than a single behavioural suspension.

Scale the model: allocate paid co‑planning sessions for every family with an IEP; publish anonymised outcomes alongside academic metrics; reward schools that demonstrate reductions in exclusionary discipline.

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The path forward: invest in people, measure what matters

If accessibility is to move from aspiration to daily practice, districts must treat human‑resources policy and professional learning as the engine of reform, not a compliance afterthought. That means:

• Guaranteed learning hours – contractually embed a minimum number of paid release hours each term for every educator and support worker to engage in disability‑centred training and collaborative IEP planning. Professional development sessions run by disabled people and disability experts.
• Competency‑based promotion – tie leadership advancement to demonstrated skill in conflict resolution, trauma‑informed practice, and co‑design with disabled stakeholders—not to years in seat or political favour.
• Transparent appeals dashboards – publish anonymised, disaggregated data on complaints, resolutions, and policy changes so families can track whether the district is learning from harm rather than burying it.
• Living wage for support staff – align EA and SSA pay with the provincial “living wage” index and create a senior specialist pay band to retain expert practitioners.
• Ministry‑level accreditation – require districts to earn and renew an accessibility accreditation, audited every three years by an external body that includes disabled educators and family representatives.

Districts that implement these five levers will move beyond ceremonial committees and enter a cycle of continuous, evidence‑based improvement. The payoff is tangible: fewer exclusions, stronger family partnerships, higher staff retention, and—above all—students who experience school as a place where their access needs are normal, anticipated, and met.

Until we budget for learning, professionalise care work, and make harm data public, every glossy equity brochure will read like theatre. The work is people. Invest accordingly.