In Urgent behaviour intervention teams in major BC school districts I shared research which identified the intervention teams in many of the larger districts in BC, describing their processes and roles, mostly in the language that they describe their services. This essay attempts to analyse those systems through a disability-justice lens, revealing how roles, processes, and structures across Vancouver, Surrey, Burnaby, Richmond, Coquitlam, North Vancouver, and Victoria reproduce the same behaviourist spine under different administrative skins.
Across British Columbia, urgent-behaviour intervention programs circulate through district documents with a calm surface and a reassuring vocabulary, shaping a vision of support that promises safety and collaboration while preserving a regulatory infrastructure rooted in the behavioural sciences, where observable action becomes the central diagnostic category and crisis becomes a behaviour that can be corrected rather than a communication that deserves relational understanding and environmental change.
Families often feel the soft edges of these systems long before they see their hard geometry; a child melts down, elopes, or shuts down, and a team materialises offering the district’s most polished version of help, which in practice mirrors the essential logic of Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) and Positive Behaviour Interventions and Supports (PBIS), regardless of how gently the rhetoric tries to frame it.
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Urgent behaviour intervention teams in major BC school districts
Across British Columbia, many school districts have developed internal teams or programs designed to respond to urgent behavioural situations—such as elopement, aggression, or significant dysregulation—particularly when students are perceived as posing a safety risk or disrupting the learning environment. While these interventions are often framed as supportive or inclusive, families report that they can feel […]
Vancouver: a formalised mechanism for behavioural triage
Vancouver’s Urgent Intervention Process (UIP) functions as the most explicit articulation of ABA/PBIS logic, with behaviour analysts and crisis-trained specialists arriving as a mobile unit tasked with stabilising the child through data-driven assessment, reinforcement structures, token systems, and the careful teaching of replacement behaviours.
The UIP builds its authority through procedural formality: referrals from School-Based Teams, district-level approvals, rapid planning meetings, and structured timelines that shape behaviour as a problem to be managed. Parental involvement appears as an extraction, after the system has already been activated, reinforcing a hierarchy where families witness intervention rather than direct it.
This creates a crisis response that frames dysregulation as something to extinguish rather than something to understand, and in doing so, preserves the system’s functioning at the child’s expense.
Surrey: behaviour intervention embedded into inclusion
Surrey’s District Behaviour Specialists (DBS) enact the same theoretical foundations without naming them, supporting schools through functional behaviour assessments, reinforcement regimes, structured behaviour plans, and safety protocols that mirror PBIS Tier 3 design.
The district emphasises collaboration, yet centres its model on behavioural modification and risk management, viewing distress through the behavioural lens and constructing plans to sculpt observable compliance. The result is an architecture where students become objects of intervention rather than subjects of care.
Burnaby: a hybrid of behavioural logic and disciplinary governance
Burnaby’s Safe & Caring Schools structure pairs behaviourist support with formal conduct review, coordinating district staff, counsellors, and police-adjacent roles in a process that merges behavioural expectations with administrative judgement.
Behaviours become entries in an institutional ledger, triggering meetings, contracts, and return-to-school conditions that combine PBIS philosophy with disciplinary procedure, creating a climate where student distress produces administrative consequences rather than relational repair. The language remains gentle, yet the system shapes children into compliant subjects through layers of structured oversight.
Richmond: PBIS as climate rather than crisis
Richmond grounds its approach in PBIS, building a district-wide culture of behaviour teaching, reinforcement, acknowledgement systems, and structured behavioural expectations, with Area Counsellors stepping in during crises using the same philosophical foundation.
This model aims for prevention, yet still reduces complex emotional realities to behaviour to be taught and shaped, encouraging compliance through recognition routines and reward structures. The climate feels warm, however the mechanics preserve the behaviourist worldview that reinforces the system rather than liberating the child.
Coquitlam: the most scaled behaviourist structure in the province
Coquitlam’s Inclusion Support Team stands as the strongest example of behaviourist saturation, a large multi-role unit supporting more than 500 referrals each year through data-driven observation, reinforcement systems, functional assessments, in-class modelling, environmental modifications, and consolidated behaviour-autism expertise.
By merging autism support with behaviour intervention, the district reinforces a long-standing ABA assumption: autistic traits represent behavioural deficits rather than sensory, relational, or systemic experiences. The program’s scale demonstrates how behaviourist intervention becomes the default response when school environments cannot accommodate neurodivergent embodiment.
North Vancouver: decentralised behaviourism embedded in inclusive rhetoric
North Vancouver employs behaviour support workers, functional behaviour assessments, structured safety plans, and Choices rooms that offer behavioural containment within an inclusive frame.
The decentralisation gives an impression of flexibility, yet the underlying logic remains identical: behaviour is coded as risk, risk triggers intervention, intervention reinforces compliance, and the system remains structurally unchanged. The warm rhetoric of inclusion overlays a persistent commitment to behavioural correction.
Greater Victoria: behaviour analysis wrapped in a wraparound frame
Victoria’s District Learning Support Team includes a formal Behaviour Analyst responsible for functional assessments, reinforcement schedules, behaviour programs, and the full suite of ABA tools, framed within a broader mental-health and family-support model.
By pairing clinical behaviourism with counselling and youth-family support, Victoria creates a multidisciplinary surface over a behaviourist core. Crisis interventions still pivot toward compliance, safety, and behavioural stabilisation, maintaining the system’s reliance on techniques that condition rather than care.
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There’s no such thing as unexpected behaviour
This piece was hard to write. It holds my grief. It documents not only what happened to my child, but how systems made it worse by pretending to be surprised. I share it because too many families are made to carry this alone. Every time I see the phrase unexpected behaviour in a school document, a safety […]
Cross-district analysis: many banners, one philosophy
Across all seven districts, this file shows a remarkable ideological convergence:
ABA and PBIS shape the conceptual architecture of urgency
Every district employs functional assessment, reinforcement logic, behavioural plan design, and safety-driven compliance frameworks.
Families participate in validation rather than partnership
Parent involvement appears after referral, often functioning as consent-affirming rather than co-designing.
Distress becomes behaviour rather than communication.
Students’ sensory overload, trauma responses, or unmet access needs are reframed as behaviours to be corrected.
Compliance becomes the measure of success.
Across districts, intervention aims to stabilise behaviour rather than transform conditions that produce distress.
Behaviourist expertise becomes centralised power.
Whether named as analysts, specialists, counsellors, or itinerants, district officers become authorities in interpreting and reshaping the child.
This unified logic operates as a provincial spine: gentle in language, forceful in structure, comprehensive in reach.
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Non-coercive, trauma-informed alternatives to PBS/ABA in BC schools
Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) and Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) are behaviourist approaches widely used in schools to manage student behaviour. However, a growing chorus of neurodivergent advocates, educators, and researchers highlight that these methods often prioritise compliance and “normalising” behaviour over student well-being rcpsych.ac.uk. By focusing on making neurodivergent children appear neurotypical (meeting neuronormative standards), traditional PBS/ABA can […]
Toward a disability-justice vision beyond behaviour
The systems described in your document construct urgency through a behaviourist lens, shaping children’s lives through data, reinforcement, and structured correction rather than relational presence, sensory understanding, or collective responsibility for inclusion. The province speaks with many voices, yet every voice emerges from the same theoretical lineage, revealing a deep cultural investment in behaviour modification as the foundation of school safety.
A disability-justice future demands something more expansive: environments that honour neurodivergent bodies, relational accountability that attends to distress rather than extinguishing it, and school cultures that treat children as full subjects rather than behavioural objects.
This essay stands as an invitation to re-imagine urgency through care rather than control, and through access rather than compliance.
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Compliance discourse vs. disability justice in BC’s education system
Official VSB documents reveal an emphasis on student compliance and disciplinary consequences, with little mention of disability accommodations. For example, the VSB’s District Code of Conduct underscores “a fair and consistent range of consequences, including suspension and change in educational programming, for student misconduct” media.vsb.bc.ca. The Code enumerates expected student behaviours and infractions (e.g. attending regularly, […]
