Canary Collective
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No accidents left to excuse
When I first read the Canary Collective’s Systemic Abuse in Education: Breaking the Cycle and Kim Block’s companion essay Is this Systemic Oppression or Systemic Abuse?, I did not feel revelation so much as recognition. I have called what happens to disabled and neurodivergent children in British Columbia’s schools abuse for years, because the word fits the scale…
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Homework: discrimination after the bell
The Canary Collective’s new piece, Homework and Harm: How Discrimination Follows Disabled Students Home, captures something families of disabled children know by heart: the school day rarely ends at dismissal. When accommodations fail, the unfinished work is sent home, transforming evenings into a second shift of struggle, supervision, and shame. When access is deferred to after…
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Coats, care, and control: microaggressions, ableism, and the moral surveillance of mothers
Every autumn, as the rain returns and hallways fill with dripping boots, an unremarkable genre of school communication re-emerges: the gentle reminder, the kind note, the message of concern about whether a child has a coat. The tone, perfectly calibrated, performs care while enacting surveillance. “I hope your child had a good rain jacket, umbrella,…
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Fuck your independence dogma
How schools use ‘self-reliance’ to justify abandoning disabled kids. They told me my daughter needed to build her tolerance for the classroom without support. They waxed endlessly about how she wouldn’t want support in high school—ignoring that my daughter had been very clear that she does, in fact, want support. They said it with that…
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Safety plans, billion-dollar scripts, and the harm they keep in place
When a parent hears the words safety plan, there is often a breath held in the chest — a brief hope that the school has recognised the reality of the child’s distress, that they have stepped back to consider what would truly help, that they are inviting the parent to build something together that will let…
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How do school staff survive while upholding systems that cause harm?
Freyd’s betrayal trauma theory (1996) starts with the idea that trauma is more psychologically destabilising when it comes from someone—or some system—you are dependent on and trust. Abuse by a stranger wounds, but abuse by a parent, partner, or caregiver fractures the psyche at a deeper level because it requires a split: I must ignore what…
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Why families feel betrayed when they finally reach the school board
An editorial reflection and response to The Canary Collective’s July 29 post When families reach the end of their rope with a school—when they’ve tried everything they can think of and their child is still suffering—the next instinct is often to go higher. In British Columbia, that usually means the Board of Education. The assumption, deeply…
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On toxic positivity, rationed support, and the betrayal of collaboration
“At the head of the table is almost always the school principal. Not a neutral facilitator, but a gatekeeper balancing limited resources, district priorities, and political pressures.” That sentence from Canary Collective landed in my body like a gavel. It captured what years of documentation, grief, strategic disillusionment, and moral injury have etched into my…
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Meditating on Canary Collective’s “Filed and Forgotten”
When Canary Collective named the truth about incident reports, they articulated something already deeply known—something felt in the gut, carried in the silences of meetings, and confirmed by the absence of a child’s voice in the official version of events. Their words moved slowly and powerfully, affirming what many parents have experienced but been denied…
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I only asked for gentleness: on parenting a PDA child in a punishing world
There is a certain kind of child—intuitive, emotionally articulate, wired with a startling perceptiveness about power and tone, about coercion and choice, about the invisible terms of adult authority—whose presence in the classroom becomes, almost immediately, a threat to the institution’s rhythm, a disruption to its hierarchy, a mirror held up to its limitations.
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The poison of silence: on complicity, healing, and speaking the truth
I had so much pain stuck in my chest and throat. Cancelled screams. Unsaid truths. Every meeting where I stayed quiet, every time I swallowed my words to seem reasonable, every time I hoped that portraying myself a certain way might stop my children from being harmed—those moments didn’t disappear. They got stuck. I stopped…
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Engineered famine in public education
In British Columbia schools today, we are not facing a behaviour crisis—we are facing a famine of care. This essay weaves together personal memory, systemic critique, and deep empathy for teachers and families alike to ask why our schools are starving the very relationships that children need to learn and thrive. It calls for an…
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Teacher speaks out on exclusion
An experienced teacher alleges that her school punished her for exposing how it pushes vulnerable students out of class. She claims administrators send students with disabilities home early, force them onto reduced schedules, and isolate them without formal suspension or notifying families. She says that when she reported those illegal, unethical practices, administrators investigated her,…
