Support is a bridge

What happens when schools pretend the bridge is whole.

The appearance of help

“She gets check-ins from the area counsellor once a week.”
“We’ve made sure the classroom teacher is aware of her IEP.”
“We’re doing everything we can within the current resources.”

These are the phrases they recite—softly, professionally, as though reassurance were a substitute for action—when they want parents like me to stop asking questions, to stop requesting more, to stop noticing that what they’re offering isn’t actually holding; as though their words might close the distance between what is needed and what is offered, as though a well-timed email or a procedural nod might fill the gap in the bridge and render it safe to cross.

But a weekly check-in is not a structural beam; a classroom teacher responsible for 26 children is not a suspension cable; and telling a child with disabilities to try harder, to be more tolerant, to hang on just a little longer, is not support—it’s a decision to send them across a crumbling span, unaccompanied and unprotected, and then to blame them when they fall.

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When support actually worked

In grade five, when my daughter Jeannie had shared EA support in the classroom, she was there—every single day—alert and curious, asking questions, following through, learning in the way she always has, which is to say: relationally, energetically, through dialogue and repetition and connection, with someone nearby to name the next foothold and steady the path beneath her feet; she thrived in a way that made it undeniably clear that this wasn’t a bonus or an extra or a kindness—it was her bridge.

Then it was withdrawn.

No explanation, no conversation, no invitation to prepare or adapt or grieve—just a new school year and a silent, administrative reversal, made somewhere far above us and passed down without accountability, and with that decision, the structure beneath her gave way.

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What happens when the bridge gives out

Since then, Jeannie has been placed in classrooms where her distress is ignored, where her sensory needs and learning disabilities are treated not as features to accommodate but as behavioural problems to curtail—classrooms where other students scream obscenities and touch her without consent and call her names related to her body, where the adults insist that “nothing can be done” because the school “doesn’t have the resources,” and where the trauma compounds daily while no one adjusts the plan, because the plan was never built to hold her in the first place.

She stopped going into the classroom—not because she didn’t want to learn, not because she wasn’t motivated, but because she could not keep dragging herself over a gap no one else was willing to acknowledge.

At home, we do everything—brushing her teeth, coaxing her to eat, helping her find her way back to the surface after a day of hypervigilance and collapse—and we remind her that she isn’t broken, that her body is responding to something real and intolerable, even if the adults around her have decided to normalize that harm as a necessary cost of underfunding.

Every time we send her back into that environment, every time she’s told to wait just a little longer, to be patient, to try again without the conditions that made learning possible in the first place, she loses a little more trust that school is a place meant for her—and we are told, somehow, to be grateful for the crutches.

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This isn’t radical—it’s repair

But what she had before wasn’t indulgent, and what we’re asking for now isn’t extravagant; I am not trying to control pedagogy or dictate the terms of curriculum—I am simply naming what has already worked, what allowed her to participate, what allowed her to belong.

Jeannie doesn’t need a whiteboard filled with inspirational quotes or a “universal design” philosophy that collapses on contact with reality; she doesn’t need to be left alone in the hallway while staff troubleshoot crisis after crisis in a classroom that no longer functions for her—she needs someone in the room, every day, whose job is to see her, to check in with her, to track her capacity and adjust the demands accordingly, to answer her questions and help her find a foothold before the floor disappears beneath her again.

She learns in conversation—not in silence—and she needs space to pause, to clarify, to speak and be spoken with, not swept along in a room where most of the energy is spent managing disruption or mitigating crisis or performing normalcy.

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You can’t ask her to be someone else

This isn’t about personality, or preference, or parenting style; this is her essence—how she processes, how she engages, how she survives—and to ask her to be otherwise is to ask her to stop being herself.

You cannot meet the needs of disabled children using strategies designed for neurotypical compliance; you cannot call a ramp accessible if it stops halfway across the gap; and you cannot keep telling families that “building tolerance” is an acceptable educational goal when what our children are being asked to tolerate is pain.

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The support she needs, and the one we all deserve

Support must be timely, sufficient, and grounded in relationship—it must come from the right person, in the right rhythm, with enough continuity to rebuild trust, because children like Jeannie don’t need to be fixed, they need to be held—by a school system willing to meet them where they are, not abandon them where it’s convenient.

When she had that, she loved school.

She showed up, she laughed, she took pride in her progress; she felt safe enough to take risks, to connect with others, to learn.

It is not too late to rebuild what was taken—but she will not walk back into a system that has already shown her the door, and she should not be asked to.

If schools truly want inclusion, they need to stop pretending the bridge is intact when it is missing entire sections, and stop handing out scraps of scaffolding to children who cannot cross on faith alone—and instead start listening, deeply and structurally, to the people who already know how to rebuild what has been broken.