Every few months, another glowing feature appears about a private school that has “redefined education.” This time, the subject is Kenneth Gordon Maplewood School in North Vancouver, described as a haven for neurodiverse learners. The article reads like an advertisement for a better world—a place where every child is understood, supported, and seen. It describes co-teaching models, Orton-Gillingham tutoring, small classes, on-site therapists, and a campus surrounded by nature. It paints a portrait of inclusion perfected.
And yet, the moment the story ends, the nausea begins. Because for the vast majority of families in British Columbia—families who cannot pay 30k+ in tuition—this “inclusive” model exists only as spectacle. It is inclusion for sale. It is the dream of public education outsourced, branded, and commodified. Wouldn’t we sacrifice anything for our children? Would I live in a tent to afford that tuition? Maybe…
The language of transformation used in these profiles hides the structure of exclusion that made such schools necessary in the first place. Kenneth Gordon Maplewood’s existence proves that individualised, relationship-based education works; it also proves that the public system has been deliberately starved of the resources required to deliver it. The provincial government subsidises these independent schools through grants and tax deductions while public schools ration education assistants, collapse multi-grade classrooms, and ask teachers to manage complex crises alone.
This arrangement is not an accident. It is policy. It ensures that innovation occurs only where profit or prestige can follow. It allows the state to appear generous while redirecting public funds into private ecosystems that serve the few. Every time a government cheque supports a private institution under the banner of “choice,” it drains capacity from the collective project of education itself.
Families who cannot pay for escape remain in systems that treat difference as disruption rather than as design. Their children become data points in the austerity ledger—proof, in the bureaucratic imagination, that inclusion is expensive and therefore impossible. Meanwhile, private schools are celebrated for doing precisely what the public system should have been funded to do all along: build community around care.
Public education has a purpose beyond efficiency. It is meant to bind the social fabric, to teach interdependence, to equalise opportunity through shared investment. When governments reward withdrawal into private enclaves, they teach children that equity is optional and belonging is something you purchase.
The stories of small classes and abundant specialists at Kenneth Gordon Maplewood should inspire action, not admiration. They should serve as blueprints for what every public school deserves to become. Instead, they have become marketing collateral in a moral economy that confuses privilege with progress.
True inclusion does not depend on tuition. It depends on political will, public courage, and a refusal to abandon the ideal of universal education. The promise of schooling in a democracy is that every child learns in a place that honours their difference and safeguards their dignity. Anything less is segregation.
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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…
