The bait and switch: What inclusion really looks like at the VSB

Every September, I walk into school meetings with the same cautious hope. We’ve done everything right. The diagnoses are up to date. The IEP is in place. The reports are filed — more than thirty of them over the years, from audiologists, psychiatrists, speech-language pathologists, behaviour consultants, and occupational therapists. You’d think that would mean we could finally stop fighting.

But inclusion, in the Vancouver School Board, is too often a bait and switch.

From the outside, our child’s file looks comprehensive — a paper trail that stretches back to preschool. From the inside, it’s a story of withdrawal, exclusion, and institutional forgetfulness.

Because every time we’ve secured support, it’s been temporary. Until he stopped going.

Every year, the baseline resets. Every plan dissolves into a new staff team. Even when there’s a written concrete plan agreed to by the Associated Superintendent.

And every absence — often due to unsafe conditions at school — becomes another quiet data point blamed on the child.

Over 30 documents

According to the official student record, our family began formal planning in April 2017, with early childhood outreach and transition meetings. By fall, we had behaviour support plans, consultant reports, psychiatric input, and a SNAP-IV rating scale. The first IEP was finalised by November 1, 2017.

Since then, we’ve documented:

• At least nine separate IEPs
• Multiple designations for ministry-recognised disabilities
• Formal behaviour plans, sensory scans, and de-escalation protocols
• External assessments from CBI Consultants, POPARD, VCH, and others
• Meeting minutes spanning six years, including from School-Based Teams, District Learning Support, and Urgent Intervention processes

Every new year has come with new meetings. Every withdrawal of support — and there have been many — has required us to restart the advocacy cycle. It’s an exhausting treadmill designed to exhaust participants. And the reality is, none of this has guaranteed consistent, meaningful, or timely support.

Absences

In Kindergarten, my child was officially absent for 64.5 days. But even that number is misleading. It doesn’t capture the dozens of times we were called mid-day to take him home early — those half-days weren’t consistently marked.

Grade 1: 25 days.
Grade 2: 24 days.
Grade 3: 21 days.

None of those figures are accurate, because VSB has no consistent mechanism to record partial exclusions. When a child is unofficially sent home, it doesn’t show up in the data. But parents know. Our employers know. Our children feel it.

The official story is “absenteeism.” The truth is exclusion — prompted not by illness or avoidance, but by a school system that cannot, or will not, accommodate its own students.

Promises made, then quietly withdrawn

By the time we reached Grade 5, we were in crisis again. Supports had been pulled mid-year. The new teacher hadn’t received the promised training. Dysregulation returned — not because our child had changed, but because the environment had. We asked for help, documented the risks, and explained, again, that our children were hurting.

In our appeal submissions, we warned that the district kept “changing the goal posts.” We weren’t exaggerating. The IEP hadn’t meaningfully changed in five years. Despite the paperwork, despite the plans, we were seeing the same patterns repeat. Only this time, the consequences were worse — not just for our son, but for his sister, who shared the classroom and bore witness to his suffering.

The district’s written decision confirmed it: the support we had finally secured would be removed — but we could appeal that decision in writing. Within ten days. On our own time. With no guarantee of change.

This is what families are up against.

What the bait and switch looks like

The phrase “inclusive education” gets repeated often in board meetings and media statements. But here’s how it plays out in practice:

1. The board promises inclusion.
2. Families invest years into assessment, planning, and collaboration.
3. Supports are provided briefly — often after advocacy escalates.
4. Those supports are withdrawn or disrupted.
5. Families must re-justify everything from scratch.
6. Staff endlessly find new tasks for advocates to complete before their kids are supported
7. Children miss school.
8. Staff note the absences, not the cause.
9. The cycle repeats.

This is the bait and switch. The promise of inclusion is used to neutralise criticism. But what’s delivered is procedural complexity, inconsistent implementation, and an unrecorded culture of exclusion — all while legal bills soar and “surpluses” from unused inclusion funds remain unspent.

We are not isolated cases

I know we’re not the only ones. Across the district, parents are reporting similar stories — patchwork supports, systemic denial, the emotional toll of constant vigilance. The illusion of access. The punishment of persistence.

If inclusion were real, we wouldn’t have to fight this hard every year. The record — both our personal one and the public one — tells a different story.

It’s time to stop pretending this is working.