Compliance over care
When school responses prioritise a child’s outward compliance instead of their well-being. A family’s concern about distress is reframed as disruptive to classroom order.
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PBIS and oh, the places you’ll go
Remember that Dr. Seuss book promising unlimited potential? Oh, the places you’ll go! Well, PBIS has places to take your kid too. And you’re not going to like where this journey ends. It started with good intentions (it always does) Schools adopted Positive Behavioural Interventions and Supports to reduce suspensions. To build better communities. To…
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Partial-day schooling as systemic violation: new research confirms what parents already know
The Journal of Inclusion and Disability published research this month documenting what families living through exclusion have been saying for years: partial-day schooling operates as institutional marginalisation, transforming policy failure into individual deficit while schools claim to serve students they are systematically denying education. Gordon Porter and Andrea Cameron’s article examines partial-day schooling across Canadian…
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Collective punishment at Vancouver School Board: when one disabled child’s behaviour closes the playground
On December 20, 2017, my kindergarten child Robin went onto an ice field during recess at his school in Vancouver. Robin loved ice—the sensory experience, the visual shimmer, the way it cracked and moved under small feet. The school had asked all students to stay away from the ice for safety reasons throughout the morning,…
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The optimal funding model for inclusive education
Inclusive education does not fail because children are too complex. It fails because funding systems reward denial, privatise enforcement, and treat disability as an exceptional cost rather than a predictable feature of human populations. A functional model already exists. It is not radical. It is aligned with what inclusive education actually requires, rather than with…
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Solving school concerns in BC: what districts tell you and what you need to know
The Vancouver School Board presents its conflict resolution process as a fair, accessible pathway for parents and students to address concerns that significantly affect a student’s education, health, or safety. According to policy materials, the process: This framing positions the district as collaborative and responsive, suggests most issues resolve through goodwill and dialogue, and casts…
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The question they refused to ask: adequate funding and the architecture of denial in BC schools
Between 2017 and 2020, BC reviewed education funding. The question asked: designation or prevalence? The question refused: what would adequate funding cost?
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When evidence changes nothing: what 2,842 families reveal about institutional refusal
The International Council of Multiple Birth Organisations published a study in 2020 examining school placement decisions for twins and higher-order multiples across eighteen countries, surveying 2,842 families whose children had attended school for at least one year. The findings confirm what families of multiples already know from lived experience: schools operate placement policies that prioritise…
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A school advocacy vocabulary
What families experience in schools is often described as a series of unfortunate incidents: a meltdown here, a missed accommodation there, a relationship breakdown framed as “complex family dynamics.” But these events are not random, isolated, or accidental. They are patterned. They recur across schools, districts, and provinces. They follow recognisable logics, deploy familiar language,…
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The good twin, the bad twin, and the system that needed both
Before school taught them roles, they played tea party—taking turns serving and being served. Seven years later, I can’t say with certainty whether one would fetch the fire extinguisher if the other caught flame.
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The internet has spoken: collective punishment in schools is wrong
When teachers punish entire classrooms for the actions of one student—when recess disappears because someone talked, when rewards vanish because someone forgot homework, when privileges evaporate because one child disrupted the lesson—students recognise the injustice immediately, and they name it with precision that educators often lack. Across TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit, students, parents, and teachers…
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Loss of recess impact on chronic stress levels in elementary children
The Impact of Recess on Chronic Stress Levels in Elementary School Children illuminates the profound violence embedded in recess cancellation as punishment, revealing how schools manufacture chronic physiological harm under the guise of behaviour management. The findings demonstrate that children receiving forty-five minutes of daily recess exhibited hair cortisol concentrations significantly below both pre-pandemic normative…
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POPARD’s PDA doublespeak
I noticed that POPARD is advertising another workshop on Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA) in April 2026, titled Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA): What We Know & What We Are Learning. The description is familiar: PDA is framed as a “growing topic of interest,” something “some clinicians and researchers describe” as an autism profile. The language is cautious,…
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The material costs of educational harm
My son no longer attends school. He no longer wants anything the education system offers. He has taught himself programming, navigates Linux with expertise that exceeds my own knowledge, learns alone in his room because learning with others became too expensive to survive. The district asks affectionately how he is, suggests I login to their…
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How collective punishment turns provincial funding failure into disabled children’s “behavioural failure”
Many years ago, my kindergarten child Robin went onto an ice field during recess. Robin was seeking sensory input—the visual shimmer, the cracking sound, the tactile feedback their nervous system required. The school had told students to avoid the ice for safety reasons. Robin’s support worker redirected them repeatedly; Robin kept returning. Eventually the principal…
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VSB’s FESL report: the aesthetics of performative accessibility
An analysis of how VSB’s FESL report performs inclusion through language and process while avoiding measurement, accountability, and material change.
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Lord Beaconsfield Elementary School (SD39 Vancouver): a neurodiversity-informed policy critique
Lord Beaconsfield Elementary School’s Code of Conduct, reviewed June 19, 2024, presents itself as a framework for creating a “safe, inclusive, equitable, welcoming, nurturing, and healthy school environment.” The document employs the language of care, respect, and community while constructing a disciplinary architecture that presumes neurotypical development, rewards compliance, and positions disability as exceptional deviation…
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Surrey FESL report shows why FESL is designed to fail
Surrey School District’s 2025-26 Enhancing Student Learning Report spans 42 pages across two documents, presenting what appears at first glance as a model of comprehensive educational accountability—extensive data visualisations tracking student outcomes across multiple measures, disaggregated by Indigenous identity, English language learner status, and disability designation, accompanied by detailed narrative analysis of gaps, strategic responses,…
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What Arrow Lakes reveals about BC’s FESL
School District 10, Arrow Lakes, is often described, including by itself, as a best‑case scenario for public education in British Columbia. It is small, rural, relational, and values‑driven. It knows its learners. It emphasises inclusion, connection to land, and collaboration. If any district should be able to identify and respond to exclusion quickly, it is…
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Partial-day schooling is quietly undermining inclusive education in Canada
A new study by Gordon L. Porter and Andrea Cameron, The Paradox of Partial Day Schooling: Exclusion in the Era of Inclusive Education (2025), exposes a practice that is increasingly common—and deeply harmful—across Canadian schools. Despite decades of legal and policy commitments to inclusive education, students with disabilities are still being excluded through shortened school days. The…
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Surrey School District is self congratulatory while exclusions continues
Surrey Schools’ International Day of Persons with Disabilities announcement celebrates procedural progress at the very moment families continue pressing for basic transparency around exclusionary practices. On December 3, the district marked the day by releasing a progress report on its three-year accessibility plan. The report highlights achievements including animated videos defining accessibility terms, tools for…