UIP, the good, the bad, the ugly

We’ve had good and bad experiences with the Urgent Intervention Process. The good ones feel like brief glimpses of the world that could exist if the school meant what it said about inclusion—moments when a skilled worker steps in and the air clears, when everyone remembers the child at the centre of all this. The bad ones feel like punishment for hoping—experts arriving only to affirm the harm already done, reports written to prove the school was right all along. The good ones whisper wouldn’t that be nice; the bad ones say we told you so. Both leave you suspended between exhaustion and disbelief, realising that even the language of rescue has been absorbed into the machinery of harm.

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The promise of expertise

When your child first struggles in school, you imagine expertise as safety. The specialists have training, the teachers have teams, and the word intervention sounds like arrival—something decisive, something kind. You gather reports and emails, sign forms, and imagine the cavalry coming. You believe escalation is a form of care. You learn, slowly and painfully, that expertise inside an austerity system functions less as knowledge and more as justification. What you thought would expose the harm instead explains it away. What was once called a team became a process, a rebrand that traded human presence for workflow.

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The sanctioning ritual

The expert arrives, confident and cordial, and listens just long enough to prepare the report that will bless the school’s existing practice. Their conclusions echo what you have already heard: that your child’s distress is behavioural, that staff responses were appropriate, that consistency is key. You realise the report is not meant to intervene in the situation; it is meant to validate it. The act of escalation becomes a ceremony of absolution, the expert serving as witness that everything harmful was actually reasonable.

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The recursive cruelty of procedure

You think perhaps you can appeal, that truth will eventually rise through the layers of process. Instead, you find yourself inside a recursive loop: each new expert citing the last, each new report layering vocabulary over pain until the record grows thick and the meaning thin. You are told to bring your own assessments, to seek outside opinions, to keep trusting in the process that is breaking you. Every step consumes time, money, and trust. Every attempt at resolution strengthens the institution’s claim to diligence. The harm is continuous, but so is the paperwork. The only tangible product of the process is its own documentation.

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Suffering logic

You learn, over time, what it means to be watched through a behavioural lens. Every observation, every meeting, every recorded “stretch” becomes part of a calculus designed to produce silence. Adults sit together, earnest and professional, and discuss how to increase “positive reinforcement” so that your child can learn to endure distress without protest. They describe her avoidance as a behaviour to be extinguished, never as a signal of pain. They design plans that reward compliance with proximity and call it progress.

It feels like watching empathy dissolve into strategy. You can almost see the human impulse to comfort being translated into a programmatic logic—if she stays longer, praise her; if she leaves, remove the reward. The vocabulary is calm and rational, the sentences precise, but the meaning is violence delivered in therapeutic tone. What they call support feels like rehearsal for subjugation: training a child to smile through the violation of her boundaries, to stay where her body screams to leave.

You read their report hollowed out by civility. They talk about “desirable, low-demand activities,” about “consistency across adults,” about “gradual re-entry.” You hear, instead, that your child will be rewarded for stillness and ignored for truth. You hear that her comfort will be engineered out of reach, that relief will come only through compliance. It feels like a betrayal written in the language of care.

When a group of adults spends hours designing how to make suffering tolerable rather than unnecessary, you begin to understand the quiet cruelty of systems built on behavioural logic. The work is always to reshape the child, never the environment. The goal is endurance, not ease. And somewhere between the praise and the progress chart, a child learns that peace comes from obedience rather than safety.

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The cost of delay

Time becomes the medium of cruelty. The months between meetings stretch long enough for children to lose skills, confidence, or faith in adults. You mark progress in half-measures—maybe the school has promised a sensory break or an extra check-in—but the real shift never comes. Delay functions as erasure; it teaches despair. The process calls itself urgent, but urgency dissolves inside procedure. What looks like care is really endurance design, an infrastructure of waiting that drains the will to fight.

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The good ones, again

Amid all this, there are bright, human moments. The interventionist who genuinely helped your child. The teacher who listens and softens. The worker who looks at your child and says, I see how hard this is. These moments make you ache with gratitude and grief at once. They show that care is possible but unsustainable. The good ones become the system’s defence: evidence that harm is not systemic because kindness exists inside it. The miracle of their goodness is used to justify the machinery that exhausts them.

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The gendered demand for composure

Each meeting requires you to arrive calm, polite, ready to translate rage into strategy. You prepare like for trial, because you understand that tone is evidence. The system rewards women who perform serenity under pressure, who phrase devastation as inquiry. The feminist in me recognises this as social choreography: the expectation that mothers carry the emotional weight of the institution, keeping everyone else comfortable while describing their child’s pain. Anger is treated as pathology; composure as proof of credibility. Parents are called partners but positioned as guests, expected to perform gratitude while seated outside decision-making. It is a form of violence so ordinary it becomes invisible.

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The moral economy of harm

The Urgent Intervention Process operates on belief—the belief that process equals progress, that documentation equals justice, that expertise equals truth. The disability advocate in me sees it clearly: a system built to validate itself cannot create safety. It can only redistribute harm. The 2022 VEAES template describes the UIP as a district-led problem-solving process—a workflow without new funding, staff, or authority. Every “team approach” becomes a closed loop of professionals referencing one another, insulating the institution from critique. Families become data points in reports that will later be cited as evidence of due diligence.

This is violence through procedure, refined by empathy.

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The aftermath

Years later, you look back and measure the time by teachers. One extraordinary. One steady. One kind but tired. The rest a blur of polite indifference. Dozens of professionals have crossed your child’s path, each promising help, each leaving behind another document. A few good faces in a sea of weary ones do not form a safety net; they form a memory of what safety could have been.

The good ones say, wouldn’t that be nice.
The bad ones say, we told you so.
And both fade into the same quiet machinery—one that was designed for exhaustion, perfected through process, and still calls itself care.

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Based on the Vancouver School Board’s 2022 Urgent Intervention Process template, which outlines a district-led “problem-solving process” rather than a funded program. The language of help remains; the structure of harm endures.