I took my daughter for a manicure this week. She’s graduating from grade 7. A milestone. A moment that felt almost ordinary—slideshow, applause, plastic chairs, nervous grins—and yet there was nothing ordinary about what it took to get there.
Vocabulary for what happened
- Manufactured scarcity: When systems deliberately limit access to necessary supports—not due to actual lack, but due to design—forcing people into competition.
- Adversarial design: When institutions are structured in ways that pit individuals or groups against each other, especially those who should be allies.
- Zero-sum logic: The belief that one person’s inclusion or support necessarily comes at the cost of another’s.
- Scapegoating under austerity: When blame is shifted onto individuals—often students, parents, or teachers—rather than confronting systemic underfunding and failure.
- Intragroup conflict under oppression: When marginalised individuals or groups are forced into conflict with each other due to the pressures of an unjust system.
- Benevolent exclusion: When harmful decisions are justified through emotional or sympathetic language that obscures accountability.
Class change
She spent seven months of this school year outside the classroom, refusing to return until the support and accommodation she needed were in place; she stated her needs clearly to every adult, held that line in a meeting with the district inclusion principal, and the institution moved only when it had no other choice.
Eventually, they agreed to a classroom change. Possible only because her brother—my son—had dropped out. The same class size and composition rules were at play, but with one less student…. The system that pushed one child out made space for the other. That trade—one child home, the other permitted to participate—was the price of inclusion.
Staff treated her return as a favour, reframing seven months of exclusion as a matter of preference or fit, as if their friendliness could undo what had happened; but we knew what it cost—my son no longer in school, my daughter holding joy in one hand and displacement in the other.
This experience is not unusual. It is structural. In one experimental study, teachers were far less likely to challenge the exclusion of a disabled student when it was framed in “benevolent” terms—concern, sympathy, limitations—than when it was openly hostile. When exclusion is justified as care, no one intervenes (Pellert et al., 2022).
The missing child
My son was not at graduation. He hasn’t been out of bed since March. He says he never wants to set foot in a school again, and I understand. Being in that building for the ceremony—knowing it would be the last time—felt like relief.
His father requested that his baby pictures be included in the slideshow; there he was—bright-eyed and beaming—followed by later images showing the impact of years in a system that refused to accommodate him, his openness replaced by withdrawal, the harm made visible and then erased.
No one mentioned him otherwise; a few photos, a kind of sad tokenism, and a belated offer to attend, long after the damage had already been done.
This is what benevolent exclusion looks like. It frames institutional abandonment as care. It justifies harm through emotional language and logistical hand-wringing. It keeps things calm. It stops staff from questioning each other. It lets everyone believe they did their best.
Our perceptions of each other
The principal teared up several times during the event. I assume it was about her transfer. At one point, she tried to make eye contact. I looked away.
I saw something shift in the way people looked at me. They seemed surprised that I was human. A mother. Someone with a mother. Maybe they’d believed another story—about a difficult parent and child who could be helped if her mother would get out of the way. But there was a different story surfacing now. I told the resource teacher my son is likely never coming back. She looked wounded physically.
And in that moment, I also remembered what I’d almost forgotten: how relentlessly hard school staff work. How much they care. How many of them have devoted their entire lives to children, only to be trapped in systems that ask them to choose between compassion and compliance, joy and containment, presence and paperwork. I saw it briefly—the grief not just of witnessing harm, but of having been part of it, and of knowing that care alone was never going to be enough.
Bodies won’t collude
While other parents were jubilant—crying, laughing, snapping photos—I felt sick to my stomach. My body was in fight or flight. Time stretched out until it felt like the ceremony lasted thirty hours. Each polite exchange, each thank you or small smile, felt like it cost me years off my life. My body refused to mask the trauma that being there exposed. I was tortured by not even getting to enjoy my daughter’s graduation because that part of my brain could not function.
Adversarial design
We shouldn’t be enemies. Families and educators are on the same sinking ship, trying to build something safe from inside a system built on manufactured scarcity and adversarial design—a system that turns solidarity into risk, and makes enemies out of natural allies. What I want—what I have always wanted—is for us to stop choosing between loyalty to our children and loyalty to each other. I think they want that too.
And in that moment, I also remembered what I’d almost forgotten: how relentlessly hard they work. How much they care. How many of them have devoted their entire lives to children, only to be trapped in systems that ask them to choose between compassion and compliance, joy and containment, presence and paperwork. I saw it briefly—the grief not just of witnessing harm, but of having been part of it, and of knowing that care alone was never going to be enough.
This is what happens when schools build narratives to justify exclusion. Those stories protect staff from guilt, insulate institutions from accountability, and isolate families. They allow trauma to be framed as personal failing instead of systemic injury. They make a child’s disappearance look like a choice.
A story of future prospects
The stories told at the ceremony were polished. Growth. Resilience. Progress. They had a positive arch–these are the children who will be saved. But no one said what it took for my daughter to be there. They said “watch out world” in relation to my daughter—maybe because old ways of thinking will need to be destroyed for her to survive? No one named who was missing. No one acknowledged that exclusion is not an exception—it is a pattern.
Disability justice asks different questions. It centres lived experience and names structural harm. It shifts the lens from “what’s wrong with this child?” to “what happened to this child—and why?” In one teacher education program in Cyprus, 59 teachers learned to recognise oppressive materials, reflect critically on their own assumptions, and create anti-oppressive lesson plans. Their practices changed. Their frameworks changed. What they saw changed. Phtiaka et al., 2024
This is her reality
My daughter built relationships, found joy, and made friends at school, while also being excluded again and again by a system sustained even by those who tried to help her—a contradiction that remains with us. And that reality—the one where sitting in a hallway for seven months is considered acceptable, where refusing to be harmed further is seen as oppositional—has shaped what she believes is possible. The rules of this system have entered her bones. She has learned to expect punishment for her needs. She has learned that her refusal is costly. And I see now how deeply the logic of this institution has narrowed her horizon—not just what she thinks she’s allowed to ask for, but what she can even imagine. And she’s loved many of these people: they have been her teachers, mentors, and friends. Her story is not an exception; it is shaped by a broader institutional pattern.
A former teacher, now writing from outside the profession, reflected on his own role in that pattern. He entered the field with the hope of changing it and left recognizing the many ways he had upheld it—punishing children for being themselves, reinforcing compliance over care. His experience echoed what we lived: a system designed to control, not to nourish. He now argues that schools should be remade in the image of mental health clinics, where wellbeing comes first and learning grows from that foundation—not as an ideal, but as a necessity for disabled children to survive (Reddit, 2023).
The conclusion, but not the end
I feel wounded by the principal’s choices and the years of complicity she embodied—not only her own, but the institution’s, channelled and enforced through her authority. Her actions were not singular; they were systemic, and they had consequences that will not be easily erased.
And still, I carry sorrow—for everyone caught in this landscape of scarcity and harm: educators trying to do right with too little, families trying to survive an impossible calculus, children absorbing the story that their presence is too costly. We shouldn’t be enemies. We are caught in roles we did not choose, forced into conflict when what we need most is alliance. This system rewards compliance and punishes truth-telling; it isolates those who ask too much or refuse too little. It weaponizes love. It turns care into liability.
This ceremony was not closure. It was testimony. One child stood on a stage. One was absent. The story of that contrast is now part of the public record.
I will keep telling it. This is just the beginning.
