When delay becomes policy: British Columbia’s strategic abandonment of disabled students

In 2018, an independent panel reviewed how British Columbia funds kindergarten through grade twelve education and recommended a prevalence model for special education funding, a shift that would allocate resources based on statistical prevalence of disability within the general student population rather than on individual diagnostic designation. The proposal threatened to expose what the existing system carefully obscures: that disability occurs at predictable rates across populations, that the resources required to support disabled students constitute foreseeable educational costs rather than exceptional expenditure, that the designation apparatus exists to ration inadequate funding by positioning each disabled child’s need as individual burden requiring justification rather than as expected feature of human variation requiring systemic capacity. Five years later, the province continues studying what families already know, consultation operating as policy choice to maintain systematic exclusion while disabled children absorb the costs of delay.

The British Columbia Teachers’ Federation launched immediate opposition, warning that prevalence funding would disconnect resources from actual student needs, that it would amount to guesswork rather than responsive support, that districts would face reduced incentive to assess and designate students who might then become invisible within the system. BCTF President Glen Hansman argued that students with special needs deserve support tailored to their actual disabilities and specific needs rather than statistical prevalence, that designation provides necessary documentation linking individual children to the services they require, that prevalence funding would sever the connection between documented need and allocated resources. These concerns carried legitimate weight—implementing prevalence funding without substantially increasing total investment would have simply redistributed inadequate resources through different mechanisms, potentially creating new forms of harm while leaving systemic underfunding intact.

The BCTF consistently advocates for abandoning austerity and increasing educational funding to meet real, identified needs, for aligning special education funding with identified needs rather than prevalence formulas, demanding resources adequate to support disabled students rather than defending scarcity as acceptable. Their opposition to prevalence funding stems from commitment to ensuring that individual children’s documented disabilities generate corresponding support, from concern that statistical models implemented during austerity would further distance funding from the specific accommodations each child requires. This represents principled advocacy grounded in understanding that funding formulas matter less than total investment, that no model adequately supports disabled students when operated within constraints that position education as discretionary expenditure vulnerable to budget pressures rather than as fundamental entitlement requiring resources scaled to actual population needs.

Yet the designation system the union defends—however superior in theory to prevalence models implemented without adequate funding—operates in practice through mechanisms that betray its stated purpose: families fight for years navigating assessment waitlists or paying thousands for private evaluations, translating their children’s suffering into clinical documentation, securing diagnostic reports that districts require before acknowledging need, only to discover that designation funding flows into general pools that administrators redistribute based on crisis rather than following the individual child whose diagnosis generated the resources. The system promises individualised support tailored to specific disabilities while delivering triage that privileges disruption over chronic suffering, that treats each family’s hard-won designation as discretionary resource available for redistribution rather than as documented entitlement attached to particular children requiring particular accommodations.

The designation process operates as extended gatekeeping—parents wait years through public assessment systems or exhaust savings on private evaluations, provide documentation to schools, schools apply to districts, districts grant or deny designations through bureaucratic processes that position each disabled child’s need as requiring justification rather than as expected feature of inclusive classrooms, and throughout this extended timeline children attend school without the support the designation theoretically unlocks, falling further behind academically while experiencing psychological harm that compounds with each month of educational neglect. Once designation finally arrives, districts exercise discretion about how to deploy the associated funding, often directing resources toward whoever currently disrupts institutional functioning rather than toward the child whose documented disability generated the allocation. The system extracts enormous labour from families while delivering uncertain outcomes, operating as expensive, traumatic, time-consuming apparatus that still fails to guarantee individualised support even after families successfully navigate every bureaucratic barrier.

A prevalence model implemented with adequate funding would deliver resources immediately based on predictable disability rates rather than requiring each family to prove their individual child’s need through years of assessment and documentation, would recognise that autism prevalence, ADHD prevalence, learning disability prevalence follow statistical patterns that make resource requirements foreseeable rather than exceptional. Yet prevalence funding implemented during austerity—redistributing inadequate resources through statistical formulas rather than through designation bureaucracy—risks creating new mechanisms for rationing scarcity while eliminating the limited documentation that currently allows families to argue their children merit support. The BCTF’s opposition recognises this danger, defending designation through recognition that prevalence alternatives threaten to worsen outcomes for disabled students when implemented without commitment to adequate total investment. The union’s position reveals the impossible choice austerity creates: defend a broken system that at least maintains some documentation linking children to resources, or accept reforms that might eliminate even that tenuous connection while failing to address the underlying inadequacy of funding that renders any formula insufficient to meet documented need.

By February 2020, the government shelved the prevalence model entirely, and BCTF President Teri Mooring praised this capitulation as evidence that the Ministry had listened to teacher advocacy, that it had chosen a measured and purposeful path forward through continued stakeholder consultation. The prevalence model’s threat had complicated contract negotiations, Mooring noted, and seeing it abandoned brought relief—a curious framing that reveals how thoroughly the existing system serves institutional interests even while failing the children it claims to support, how teacher advocacy organisations can position themselves as defending disabled students while actually defending the designation infrastructure that rations support through scarcity logic.

When healthcare gatekeeping feeds educational abandonment

The designation system depends on healthcare infrastructure that rations access to diagnosis through mechanisms ensuring that only some disabled children ever receive the formal documentation schools require before acknowledging need. Families seeking autism assessment for their children confront years-long waitlists at publicly funded centres like Sunny Hill Health Centre, facilities that somehow fail to automatically screen siblings of diagnosed children despite autism’s well-documented hereditary patterns, that position assessment as scarce resource requiring extended waiting rather than as urgent intervention enabling earlier support when neuroplasticity offers greatest benefit. These waitlists operate as first gate limiting how many children acquire the diagnostic documentation that schools demand before providing accommodation, containing costs by ensuring that need remains invisible until families successfully navigate healthcare bureaucracy willing to confirm what parents and teachers already observe in classroom and home.

Families who possess financial resources bypass public healthcare gatekeeping by paying four thousand dollars or more for private assessment, purchasing diagnosis that unlocks school designation and theoretically corresponding support, while families without such resources wait years watching their children struggle without accommodation, falling further behind academically while experiencing social isolation and psychological harm that compounds throughout the assessment queue. This creates profound inequity where wealthy families secure diagnoses enabling school support within months while poor families wait years for public system assessment, their children attending school throughout this period without the accommodations that designation supposedly guarantees, experiencing educational neglect rationalised through absence of formal diagnosis even as their observable difficulties mirror those of privately-assessed peers receiving support. The healthcare system’s resource scarcity thus determines which children schools recognise as disabled, which families can advocate effectively for accommodation, which students receive support versus which experience abandonment justified through lack of documentation that healthcare infrastructure refuses to provide at pace matching actual need.

These interlocking scarcities compound to ration support through two-stage gatekeeping: first families must secure diagnosis through years of public waitlists or thousands in private fees, then navigate school bureaucracy persuading districts to apply for designation while their children attend without support, and even after clearing both gates the designation funding flows into pools that districts redistribute based on crisis rather than following the individual child whose diagnosis generated the allocation. Each system deflects responsibility—schools require formal diagnosis, healthcare claims limited resources prevent faster assessment, districts deploy funding toward greatest need—while disabled children absorb all costs of this mutual evasion, attending school for years without accommodation because healthcare refuses to assess fast enough to generate the documentation that schools demand before acknowledging what parents and teachers already witness.

If Sunny Hill assessed every child presenting with autism indicators, if public healthcare automatically screened siblings of diagnosed children, if assessment arrived within weeks rather than years, if private evaluation were unnecessary for families seeking timely diagnosis, designation numbers would surge beyond even the 192% increase in autism categories that current data documents. The province would confront impossible choice: fund designation adequately as numbers climb toward true prevalence, or admit that the designation system struggles to deliver individualised support when implemented at scale matching actual population need. Healthcare gatekeeping prevents this reckoning by ensuring diagnosis remains artificially scarce, that only children whose families successfully navigate years-long waitlists or afford thousands in private fees ever acquire the formal documentation positioning them as legitimately disabled rather than as merely struggling, that schools can maintain the fiction that they support all identified students when identification itself operates as rationing mechanism limiting which children the system recognises as meriting accommodation.

What the prevalence model actually threatened

The designation system functions as rationing apparatus, requiring families to navigate assessment waiting lists, to secure diagnostic reports, to translate their children’s distress into bureaucratic categories that render need legible to funding streams while simultaneously positioning that need as individual pathology rather than as systemic failure to provide accessible learning environments. Families perform this diagnostic labour under the promise that designation unlocks support—that once their child receives an official category, once the paperwork flows through district offices, once the Ministry recognises their child’s disability through proper bureaucratic channels, resources will arrive tailored to that specific child’s documented needs.

The system operates through systematic misdirection: districts encourage families to pursue designations, framing assessment as pathway to support, positioning diagnostic categories as keys unlocking funding directed toward individual children, yet the money never follows the child. Is it any mystery that designations have gone up 192%, when schools refused to meet a child’s needs without a designation? Designation funding flows into general district pools that administrators redistribute based on crisis rather than on documented need, directing resources toward whoever is currently most disruptive while quietly abandoning designated students whose disabilities manifest as withdrawal rather than as behaviour that disturbs institutional functioning. Autistic children who score well on cognitive assessments discover that their designation purchases nothing—their intelligence becomes evidence that they should manage without support, that their documented disability matters less than their capacity to suffer quietly, that the system considers them smart enough to survive abandonment even as they experience chronic overwhelm, academic decline, social isolation, and psychological harm that registers as less urgent than the meltdowns of students whose distress becomes visible to adults invested in maintaining classroom order.

This redistribution operates as structural gaslighting: families fight for years to secure designations, enduring assessment waitlists and diagnostic expenses and bureaucratic appeals, performing the emotional labour of translating their intimate knowledge of their children into clinical language legible to funding formulas, only to learn that designation guarantees nothing, that the funding supposedly attached to their child’s specific disability category becomes discretionary resource available to districts seeking to contain whoever currently threatens institutional stability. The designation system promises individualised support while delivering triage that privileges crisis over chronic need, that positions disruptive behaviour as more deserving than quiet suffering, that treats intelligence as disqualifying factor rather than as trait that coexists with disability requiring accommodation. Bright autistic children attend school without adequate support because districts decide their cognitive capacity should compensate for their disability, because their ability to academically perform while emotionally disintegrating gets interpreted as evidence they require less rather than as testament to the psychological cost of surviving inaccessible environments without the support their designation theoretically secured.

A prevalence model implemented with adequate funding would expose what the Ministry’s own data already confirms: that disability prevalence grows dramatically faster than overall student population, that between 2015–16 and 2024–25 autism designations alone surged 192% while total enrolment increased only 11.6%, that the resources required to support disabled students constitute rapidly escalating costs that the current funding formula struggles to absorb, that the designation system exists to limit rather than to distribute support even as the population requiring support expands at historic velocity. More critically, prevalence funding would expose that districts currently maintain discretion to redistribute designation resources away from the children whose diagnoses generated the funding, that the promise of individualised support operates as fiction masking triage systems that prioritise institutional stability over disabled children’s documented needs, that families secure designations that purchase nothing except confirmation that their children’s disabilities count for less than other children’s crises.

The BCTF’s opposition reveals institutional investment in maintaining diagnostic gatekeeping—if funding arrived based on prevalence rather than on individual designation, the fiction that some classrooms contain disabled students while others remain unmarked by disability would collapse, the pretence that inclusion represents additional accommodation rather than baseline accessibility would become unsustainable, the entire ideological architecture positioning disabled children as burdensome exceptions rather than as inherent features of every classroom would require reconstruction. The prevalence model threatened to make visible that schools systematically underfund disability support even as disability prevalence climbs at rates the existing funding formula was never designed to accommodate, that they ration support through designation systems that blame families for requiring resources the province refuses to provide at levels matching documented need, that the barrier lies in the province’s deliberate failure to scale funding in proportion to the demographic transformation reshaping every classroom across the province rather than in disabled children’s excessive requirements.

The Ministry’s decision to shelve the prevalence model represents policy choice to maintain the status quo—to preserve designation as gatekeeping mechanism even as the gate confronts unprecedented pressure from surging numbers, to continue positioning disability as individual pathology requiring specialised intervention rather than as demographic reality requiring systemic capacity expansion, to sustain the fiction that adequate funding would arrive if only the right formula could be identified when the actual barrier remains political unwillingness to invest in education at levels proportionate to the 192% increase in autism designations, the 46.6% increase in overall inclusive education designations, the transformed complexity that the Ministry’s own Estimates Notes acknowledge while refusing to fund.

Consultation as containment strategy

The Ministry’s commitment to further stakeholder engagement operates as temporal violence, each year spent consulting representing another cohort of disabled children moving through schools that exclude them, another generation of families performing unpaid advocacy labour to secure supports already guaranteed in law, another cycle of institutional harm dressed in the aesthetics of collaborative process. Inclusion BC participated in Ministry working groups throughout 2019, reporting many unanswered questions, pressing for transparent economic modelling that would demonstrate exactly how resources would flow to districts and demographics, calling for clear transition plans and pilot testing and timelines ensuring that children would be protected during any funding system transition—reasonable demands that nevertheless position consultation as legitimate precursor to change rather than as mechanism for indefinitely deferring material action.

The Ministry chose to pause rather than to implement, framing this delay as prudent caution, as evidence of listening to stakeholder concerns, as measured and purposeful progress toward inclusive education funding. This rhetoric treats inaction as deliberation rather than as abandonment, positions consultation as democratic process rather than as containment strategy designed to diffuse pressure from advocates while forestalling change that would threaten existing distributions of resources and institutional power. The designation system continues rationing support through diagnostic gatekeeping throughout this extended consultation period, each year of delay representing concrete harm to disabled students forced to attend schools that position their presence as disruption requiring management rather than as expectation requiring accommodation.

Stakeholders demanded more analysis before implementation, as though comprehensive research might reveal some formula that would deliver equitable education without requiring increased investment, as though the Ministry lacked knowledge about what disabled students require when decades of advocacy, scholarship, tribunal decisions, and parental testimony have already documented with precision the supports schools refuse to provide. The consultation apparatus operates as delay tactic, simulating democratic engagement while ensuring that each committee meeting postpones material change that would require redistributing resources toward disabled students positioned by the existing system as burdensome exceptions rather than as children entitled to education.

The costs of incremental reform

While the prevalence model remained shelved, the Ministry proceeded with targeted improvements—supplemental grants for children and youth in care, expanded priority funding for students with mental health needs and those from low-income families, initiatives that Education Minister Rob Fleming framed as putting student success and wellbeing first while ensuring equity in funding. These incremental changes operate as pressure release valves, directing resources toward specific vulnerable populations while leaving intact the underlying scarcity logic that requires all students to compete for inadequate support, that positions equity as redistribution of limited resources rather than as adequate investment in education infrastructure capable of supporting all learners without requiring families to perform advocacy labour as precondition for accessing baseline services.

The Ministry also launched reviews of programs serving students positioned at opposite ends of ability hierarchies—conducting inclusive education policy work examining how to better support students with diverse disabilities while simultaneously reviewing the University Transition Program, a selective academic acceleration initiative serving gifted students. The UTP review followed parental complaints about the program’s intense academic environment and concerns about student mental health, prompting the Ministry to pause admissions during 2024 while consultants examined whether the program adequately balanced academic challenge against psychological wellbeing—a demonstration of provincial concern about student distress suddenly emerging in relation to academically accelerated teens even as disabled students experience systematic exclusion without triggering equivalent ministerial attention.

Yet this framing obscures what produces educational crisis across the entire spectrum of student need: the Vancouver School Board treats giftedness as disability category precisely because the system provides inadequate programming for the actual diversity present in every classroom, because scarcity forces teachers into impossible positions where they spend the majority of their time managing immediate crises while students with other needs—whether gifted students requiring intellectual challenge, autistic students requiring sensory accommodation, students with learning disabilities requiring specialised instruction—receive whatever attention remains after triage. Teachers lack the capacity to meet the needs of such dramatically diverse groups without adequate staff, without specialist support, without resources calibrated to the reality that classrooms contain students whose learning requirements diverge in multiple simultaneous directions, many of them neurodivergent students whose giftedness coexists with ADHD, autism, anxiety, learning disabilities requiring support even as their cognitive capacity renders them invisible to systems that position high achievement as evidence of thriving rather than as camouflage masking profound struggle.

These students experience educational abandonment through both inadequate intellectual challenge and inadequate disability support, their giftedness and their neurodivergence each positioned as separate problems requiring separate remedies when both stem from identical systemic failure to fund schools capable of teaching actual children rather than imagined averages. The twice-exceptional student who is both gifted and autistic discovers that neither designation purchases adequate support—their intelligence disqualifies them from autism accommodations while their autism excludes them from enrichment programming, leaving them abandoned at the intersection of categories that compound invisibility within systems that struggle to imagine supporting students who diverge from expectations in multiple simultaneous directions.

The point centres on how scarcity produces systematic failure across all categories of student need rather than on whether any particular group suffers more than others—teachers stretched beyond sustainable capacity lack the means to differentiate instruction, to provide individualised support, to create learning environments accessible to the diversity actually present in their classrooms, their inability stemming from structural impossibility of meeting such varied needs without adequate staffing, specialist support, and resources designed for heterogeneity rather than for the fiction of standard students requiring standard instruction.

Scarcity compounds existing inequities: families with educational resources and professional flexibility can perform the advocacy labour that sometimes extracts temporary support from districts forced to ration—accommodations that arrive after months of escalation only to disappear the following year, each school year beginning with renewed battles to secure supports theoretically guaranteed by designations that should render annual re-litigation unnecessary. Meanwhile, families working multiple jobs or navigating language barriers or lacking familiarity with educational bureaucracy watch their children’s needs go unmet entirely, unable to access even these temporary wins because the system requires expertise and persistence and emotional reserves that exhaustion and systemic marginalisation make impossible. Race operates as additional sorting mechanism within these dynamics—racialised children more readily positioned as behavioural problems rather than as neurodivergent students requiring accommodation, their distress interpreted through deficit framings that justify exclusion rather than through disability frameworks that would mandate support, their families’ advocacy dismissed or pathologised in ways that white middle-class families escape even when making identical requests.

The Ministry’s differential attention nevertheless reveals which populations trigger institutional response: gifted students’ documented distress within an accelerated program prompts immediate review and consultation about whether the province adequately supports their wellbeing, while disabled students subjected to isolation rooms, physical restraint, partial attendance schedules, and chronic exclusion from learning remain positioned as individual behaviour problems rather than as evidence of systemic failure requiring equivalent ministerial intervention. The province pauses admissions to review gifted program structure while disabled children attend schools that respond to their distress with containment rather than accommodation, that implement safety plans framing their presence as requiring management rather than recognising inaccessible environments as producing the crises that schools then punish.

This becomes visible as differential institutional response rather than as hierarchy of suffering: the province contracts consultants to evaluate whether gifted programming adequately supports student mental health while maintaining no parallel urgency about whether disabled students’ partial school days constitute educational neglect, whether exclusion produces psychological harm, whether the practices advocacy organisations document represent systemic patterns requiring immediate correction rather than isolated incidents addressed through individual complaints. The scarcity that produces crisis for gifted students—teachers unable to differentiate instruction across vast ranges of need—produces the same impossibility for disabled students, yet only one population’s institutional abandonment triggers ministerial concern sufficient to pause programs and commission reviews, while the other population’s abandonment continues as operational reality that families must challenge through individual advocacy rather than receiving as automatic provincial response to documented patterns of harm.

Privatisation infrastructure

Deetken Enterprises appears throughout these initiatives as behind-the-scenes player, contracted to support inclusive education policy work in 2021, to evaluate career education and dual credit programs in 2024, to design funding models for early childhood education, to provide expertise in data analysis and financial modelling across multiple Ministry projects. The firm’s repeated selection for government contracts reveals the infrastructure of neoliberal governance, where policy design becomes revenue stream for private consultants rather than public good developed through institutional capacity, where the province deliberately erodes its own expertise ensuring that knowledge about education funding remains proprietary rather than democratically accessible, where the same consulting logic that engineered austerity in healthcare migrates seamlessly to engineer scarcity in education.

Deetken brings technical know-how to these projects, capacity in economic modelling and program evaluation that the Ministry apparently lacks despite decades of operating public education systems, despite employing thousands of educators intimately familiar with how funding inadequacy manifests in overcrowded classrooms and insufficient specialist support and students forced to attend school for truncated hours because districts claim they lack adequate staffing. The Ministry’s reliance on external consultants to design funding models positions education policy as technical problem requiring specialised expertise rather than as political question about how much the province chooses to invest in supporting disabled children, about whether schools exist to educate all learners or to sort children into hierarchies of deservingness, about what kind of province British Columbia aspires to become.

Freedom of Information records confirm that Deetken was selected through competitive bidding processes, language positioning privatisation as neutral procurement rather than as ideological choice to fragment public education infrastructure, to ensure that expertise about how schools could adequately support disabled students remains consultant-mediated rather than institutionally embedded, to transform what should constitute democratic deliberation about education funding into proprietary analysis generating recommendations the public struggles to access or challenge. The consulting contracts operate as institutional architecture ensuring that knowledge about alternatives to the existing designation system remains controlled by firms whose revenue depends on continued government contracts rather than becoming public resource available to families and advocates demanding that schools provide the support already guaranteed to disabled students in law!

Legacy obligations and the architecture of automatic funding

The Education and Childcare Estimates Notes reveal that the Classroom Enhancement Fund consumes nearly $800 million annually, almost a tenth of the entire kindergarten through grade twelve budget, resources committed to restoring class size and composition language following Supreme Court litigation that vindicated teachers’ collective bargaining rights. This court-ordered remedy benefits all students including disabled children—class composition limits prevent districts from concentrating too many students with intensive needs in single classrooms, smaller classes create conditions where teachers might actually provide individualised attention, restored language protects against the overcrowding that made inclusive education functionally impossible—yet the significance centres on how the province structures its obligations, which commitments receive automatic renewal versus which remain perpetually subject to consultation and deferral rather than on whether this funding serves legitimate purpose.

The province funds this legal requirement with mechanical regularity, year after year, the $800 million flowing automatically as remedy for historical wrong against organised labour, as recognition that class size violations harmed students and teachers alike, as acknowledgment that some obligations merit permanent structural correction rather than annual reconsideration. The Classroom Enhancement Fund represents what automatic, proportionate, guaranteed funding looks like—resources scaling to need without requiring families to advocate, without subjecting expenditure to stakeholder working groups, without treating legitimate requirements as discretionary spending vulnerable to budget constraints and political calculation.

The Ministry offers nothing parallel for responding to disability prevalence that climbs far faster than overall enrolment—the 192% increase in autism designations, the 46.6% rise in inclusive education categories, the demographic transformation that occurs at velocity demanding funding responses calibrated to match documented surge rather than consultation processes generating recommendations for further study. Disabled students require both the class composition protections the Classroom Enhancement Fund provides and the direct disability supports the existing funding model systematically rations: adequate educational assistant hours, specialist staffing, accessible learning materials, environments designed for neurodivergent bodies and minds rather than retrofitted through accommodations positioned as exceptional burden. The province chose to make class size funding automatic following judicial intervention while maintaining discretionary structures for inclusive education funding, positioning one category of need as non-negotiable legal obligation while treating rising disability prevalence as problem requiring perpetual consultation about whether and how much to invest.

This funding architecture reveals political choices about which obligations merit structural permanence versus which remain vulnerable to delay, about whether remedy for past wrongs commands swifter response than prevention of ongoing harm, about how the province allocates resources when different legitimate needs compete for limited budgets. The $800 million flows automatically toward class composition while inclusive education funding advances through working groups and stakeholder consultations and prevalence model proposals that remain shelved for years while disability designations surge. Both funding streams serve disabled students—one through classroom conditions enabling inclusion, another through direct supports making inclusion materially possible—yet the Ministry treats them with categorically different urgency, one requiring no annual justification while the other remains perpetually subject to questions about adequacy, distribution, whether the province can afford to fund disability at rates matching disability’s documented growth.

This constitutes collective punishment operating through budgetary logic: every student, every teacher, every family navigating public education absorbs the costs of the province’s refusal to fund schools adequately for the demographic transformation that has occurred since the system was starved under previous governments. The $800 million committed to the Classroom Enhancement Fund represents repair for damage already inflicted, resources dedicated to returning to conditions that existed before unconstitutional class size and composition violations, yet the system requires moving forward to accommodate the 192% surge in autism designations, the 46.6% increase in inclusive education categories, the reality that classrooms now contain student populations requiring support at levels the funding formula was never designed to provide. Instead, the province maintains austerity measures ensuring that teachers lack capacity to support diverse learners, that disabled students experience exclusion through room clears and partial schedules, that families perform endless advocacy labour, that everyone suffers the consequences of government choices to prioritise balanced budgets over educational adequacy—collective punishment enacted against an entire generation for political decisions that position disabled children’s documented needs as excessive burden rather than as foreseeable feature of inclusive education requiring proportionate investment.

The violence of prudent delay

Five years have passed since the Ministry shelved the prevalence model, five years during which the designation system continued rationing support through diagnostic gatekeeping, during which families performed unpaid labour navigating assessment waiting lists and translating their children’s suffering into bureaucratic categories and advocating for accommodations schools should provide automatically, during which disabled students attended schools that positioned their presence as disruption requiring management rather than as expectation requiring accessible design. Five years during which consultants collected fees for documenting problems comprehensively known to every family navigating the designation system, during which working groups met and stakeholder submissions accumulated and Ministry officials praised the measured and purposeful approach they were taking toward inclusive education funding reform.

Each year of delay represents concrete harm—autistic children subjected to room clears that traumatise them because schools claim they lack resources for adequate support, students with learning disabilities falling years behind grade level because districts position remedial instruction as exceptional accommodation rather than as baseline service, families depleting their financial and emotional reserves performing advocacy labour that should be unnecessary if schools provided the support disabled students require by legal entitlement rather than by exhausting parental persistence. The Ministry’s cautious approach translates into my son laying in be after chronic abandonment of his needs, into my daughter navigating peer sexual harassment and staff misconduct because inclusive education apparently requires disabled girls to tolerate environments that endanger them rather than requiring schools to provide safe learning conditions.

The designation system continues operating as violence infrastructure throughout this extended consultation period, requiring families to secure diagnostic reports positioning their children as pathologically disordered in order to access supports that human rights law already guarantees, forcing parents to translate their intimate knowledge of their children’s needs into bureaucratic categories that render disability legible to funding streams while erasing the actual complexity of how each child learns and communicates and navigates environments designed for neurotypical bodies and minds. The Ministry’s commitment to thorough research and pilot testing and consensus-driven planning operates as abandonment dressed in procedural aesthetics, each committee meeting representing another week during which disabled students attend schools that exclude them, each stakeholder consultation representing another month during which families perform unpaid advocacy labour the province should render unnecessary.

What the province already possesses

British Columbia possesses comprehensive knowledge about what disabled students require—decades of advocacy documenting the supports schools refuse to provide, scholarship analysing how designation systems ration resources through diagnostic gatekeeping, tribunal decisions ordering districts to deliver accommodations they claim they struggle to afford, Ombudsperson investigations revealing patterns of institutional harm that schools dismiss as isolated incidents rather than as systemic features of education infrastructure designed around scarcity logic. The Ministry possesses detailed data about designation rates and specialist staffing levels and accommodation requests, about how many disabled students receive partial attendance schedules because districts position their presence as requiring exceptional resources rather than as predictable feature of inclusive classrooms, about the correlation between inadequate funding and exclusionary discipline practices that disproportionately target disabled students positioned as behavioural problems rather than as children communicating about inaccessible environments.

The province possesses resources adequate to fund education at levels that would support all learners—British Columbia maintains among the lowest education spending as percentage of gross domestic product across Canadian provinces, choosing to invest public revenue in corporate tax reductions and fossil fuel subsidies rather than in education infrastructure, choosing to maintain class sizes that ensure teachers lack the capacity to adequately support diverse learners rather than hiring sufficient educators and specialists, choosing to contract consultants to study funding models rather than directing those consulting fees toward the educational assistants and resource teachers that schools claim they struggle to afford. The barriers to equitable education funding remain political rather than technical, questions about what kind of province British Columbia chooses to become rather than mysteries requiring further consultant analysis.

The choice to study and consult and defer represents policy decision to maintain exclusion as organising principle of public education, to preserve designation as rationing mechanism ensuring that disabled students receive inadequate support while the province positions this inadequacy as unfortunate resource constraint rather than as deliberate underinvestment, to sustain ideological architecture positioning disability as individual pathology requiring specialised intervention rather than as human variation requiring accessible design that would benefit all learners. Each year the Ministry spends consulting about inclusive education funding represents a year during which it chooses to maintain the existing system, during which it enacts harm against disabled children through the violence of inaction dressed in procedural aesthetics.

Five years have passed, and the prevalence model remains shelved, and Deetken continues collecting consulting fees, and disabled students continue attending schools that exclude them (or they are laying at home with no education or have moved onto private education if their families have means), and families continue performing unpaid advocacy labour translating their children’s suffering into bureaucratic categories, and the Ministry continues praising its own measured and purposeful approach toward reform that never arrives. This constitutes abandonment operating through the aesthetics of collaborative process, violence enacted through the rhetoric of prudent caution, provincial choice to maintain systematic exclusion of disabled children dressed in the language of stakeholder consultation and evidence-based policy development.

British Columbia already possesses everything required to fund equitable education, that the choice to study rather than to act represents policy decision to maintain exclusion, that consultation operates as abandonment dressed in procedural aesthetics, that each year of delay enacts concrete harm against disabled students and their families, that the province owes these children education accessible to them now rather than promising reform contingent on further analysis. The prevalence model remains shelved because implementing it would require admitting that the designation system exists to ration support rather than to deliver it, that schools underfund all students while blaming families for requiring resources the province refuses to provide, that the barrier to inclusive education remains political unwillingness to invest adequately rather than technical uncertainty about optimal funding formulas.

“Each year of delay represents concrete harm—autistic children subjected to room clears that traumatise them, students falling years behind grade level, families depleting their reserves performing advocacy labour that should be unnecessary.”

Just a parent

The demand is immediate and unambiguous: fund inclusive education now, at levels proportionate to documented need, without requiring further consultation about problems comprehensively understood, without deferring material support while working groups deliberate, without subjecting disabled children to additional years of educational abandonment while the province praises its own measured approach. Fund now.

Five years have passed. How many more years will British Columbia require disabled children to wait while consultants document what families already know, while working groups deliberate about problems comprehensively understood, while the Ministry praises its own measured approach toward reform that never materialises? How many more cohorts of disabled students will move through schools that exclude them before the province chooses to provide the support it already owes them? These questions possess answers: as many years as families permit, as many cohorts as advocates tolerate, as long as the province can maintain the fiction that consultation represents progress rather than abandonment, that delay constitutes prudence rather than policy choice to sustain systematic exclusion of disabled children from public education infrastructure built around their absence rather than designed for their presence.