When public institutions are forced to survive under prolonged austerity, something deeper than budgets begins to break—something in the connective tissue of trust, of care, of the quiet, ordinary belief that systems exist to serve people. The myth of resilience—the comforting story we tell ourselves about teachers with hearts of gold and staff who always find a way—can carry a system through the early years of crisis. But over time, that myth becomes dangerous. Because while it is true that BC’s public education system stayed standing during the worst of Christy Clark’s cuts, it did so by leaning heavily on personal sacrifice, moral labour, and unsustainable adaptations that have left lasting scars.
For years, districts in BC tried in earnest to uphold accessibility and inclusion—but as public funding dried up, those commitments became liabilities. Families who asked for support were met not with collaboration, but with stonewalling. Appeals were seen as threats. Parents were told to try harder, be patient, wait their turn, accept less, or walk away. And while the lowest-paid workers—the education assistants and support staff tasked with including vulnerable children—struggled to survive on wages near the poverty line, executive salaries quietly climbed. It was a culture shift that rewired the very soul of public education: from care to control, from obligation to optics, from mutual responsibility to managed liability.
Inclusion became a resource drain in the new logic of schooling
Across BC, school districts began behaving less like public institutions and more like reluctant service providers—calculating risk, controlling cost, and measuring inclusion not by outcomes, but by optics. The result has been a silent but seismic shift in how children with disabilities are treated in public schools. Their support needs are no longer understood as a shared duty rooted in rights, but as a discretionary service to be rationed or withdrawn based on budget, staffing, or school climate.
This rationing logic has bred a particular cruelty: one that isolates individual children, blames families for systemic failure, and punishes vulnerability with exclusion. Children who require more—more time, more support, more predictability, more grace—are instead given less. They are offered sticker charts instead of regulation, compliance plans instead of accommodations, and shortened school days instead of meaningful access. And when they fail to meet impossible expectations, they are treated as disruptions, as burdens, as proof that inclusion does not work.
This is what collective punishment looks like in its modern, bureaucratic form. A neurodivergent child melts down and the class loses gym. An autistic student is repeatedly sent home early for “safety reasons,” and the entire school is told that this was necessary “for everyone’s well-being.” A few students struggle with transitions, and the teacher announces that no one will be allowed outside until they demonstrate that “we can all follow the rules.” Punishment is framed as protection. Denial of access is framed as support. And exclusion is framed as a regrettable but necessary consequence of scarce resources and limited options.
Budget cuts taught school leaders to treat need as misbehaviour
This institutional logic—that unmet needs justify denial—did not emerge spontaneously. It was cultivated. It was taught through years of budget workshops, leadership retreats, policy memos, and risk assessments. Under Clark, and later reinforced by inertia, school districts were trained to see supports as costs, to view accommodations as exceptions, and to manage inclusion by attrition.
We are now seeing the fruits of that approach. Children are being excluded without formal documentation, sent home without a plan, denied access without alternatives. Families are exhausted, staff are demoralised, and a generation of students has learned that their access to school depends on how quietly they suffer. When a system trains its leaders to fear cost more than harm, this is the outcome: exclusion disguised as management, abandonment disguised as professionalism.
And when punishment becomes systemic—when one student’s dysregulation leads to restrictions for the whole class, when the presence of disability becomes a reason to remove or deny rather than accommodate—we are no longer speaking only of resource constraints. We are speaking of discrimination. We are speaking of policies that target the most vulnerable students in our schools and teach their peers to resent them.
Even recovery is shaped by the habits of denial
Even now, with increased funding, the habits of austerity remain. Some school districts still speak the language of efficiency, still budget by scarcity, still treat inclusion as a competing interest rather than a core mandate. Many of the people who led during the cuts are still in power—unwilling or unable to imagine a different way. And the cost is being paid by children who are excluded, families who are gaslit, and staff who are burning out trying to do what’s right inside systems built for denial.
Recovery will take more than restoring funding. It will take truth-telling. It will take a new kind of leadership—one rooted in justice, not just policy; in human rights, not just risk management. It will require that we name what happened under Clark for what it was: not just unfortunate, but a breach of public trust. A betrayal of children. A political project that rewarded compliance and punished care.
It will require cultural change at every level. School boards must stop managing public perception and start defending public purpose. Administrators must stop blaming children for the failures of policy. And the Ministry of Education must stop deferring to local discretion when that discretion is being used to exclude, delay, and deny.
There is no inclusive education without ending punishment
To those who say inclusion has gone too far, that supporting “those kids” disrupts the rest, we offer this: exclusion is the disruption. Denying support does not foster belonging. Teaching peers to resent disability does not build social skills. Calling a classroom calm when the most distressed children have been removed is not success. It is a lie.
Real inclusion cannot coexist with collective punishment. It cannot flourish in a system that withholds recess because someone tipped their chair, or sends home a six-year-old for being “too much.” Inclusion means redesigning the system so that no child is punished for needing support. It means understanding behaviour as communication, and support as a duty—not a favour, not a reward, not a bargaining chip. It means recognising that the most meaningful lessons about justice, empathy, and community are taught not in health class, but in how a school responds when a child struggles.
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What would it really cost to fix the problem?
We talk so much about the cost of inclusion—as if it’s indulgent, optional, something that must be justified—but we rarely talk about the cost of exclusion. And those costs are everywhere: in emergency rooms, in overburdened case files, in classrooms where distress goes…
We must rebuild from truth, not from the ruins of denial
Institutions do not heal on their own. People do that. Parents, teachers, trustees, support workers, neighbours, students—we do that. We change policies. We resist cruelty. We show up when a child is sent home and say: this is wrong. We make phone calls, file appeals, build websites. We remember.
Let us end collective punishment in all its forms. Let us stop pretending that budget decisions are neutral. Let us commit—not just financially, but morally—to building schools that are worthy of our children’s trust.
Read more: Reversing the decline of inclusion in BC’s schools
