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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Too afraid to see: why the BC government doesn’t track exclusion
Data is the scaffolding of democratic accountability. Without shared facts, policy becomes theatre and suffering becomes rumour. That is why regimes that fear transparency always tamper with the census, and why bureaucracies that fear criticism cling to privacy as a shield rather than as a right. When governments decline to track exclusion, they are not…
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What they say when you leave the meeting
Canary Collective’s piece The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree: What’s Said About Parents After They Leave the Room tells what often happens after parents leave a school meeting. The talk shifts away from the child and turns toward the parents. People start guessing what is “wrong” at home instead of asking what the…
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In genocide and the classroom: the routinising of distress
A meditation on how institutions train people to ignore suffering—how desensitisation, scarcity, and forced optimism erode empathy and make harm seem ordinary.
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Surrey parents launch classroom crisis tracking tool
In Surrey, British Columbia, a new parent-led initiative is bringing long-needed visibility to a silent crisis in public education: classroom evacuations when a student experiences distress. The Surrey District Parents Advisory Council (DPAC), in partnership with the Surrey Teachers’ Association and CUPE 728, has launched a tool to track these classroom clearings, documenting how often…
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Systemic grooming and the illusion of care
The Canary Collective has written Systemic grooming and the illusion of care, a piece that captures, with devastating precision, what many educators and parents have felt but could rarely name: the way institutional systems cultivate obedience through the slow corrosion of self-trust. It describes how loyalty becomes a leash, how “teamwork” becomes surveillance, and how…
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A primer on truth for youth
If you’d told me last year that a man would feel emboldened to stand up in the UN and call the UN special rapporteur a witch and accuse her of trying to ‘curse Israel with lies and hatred’ I would have Googled to see if it was fake news! But then with the second presidency…
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UIP and the business of education
Vancouver’s Urgent Intervention Process—once called the Multi-Disciplinary Intervention Support Team, or MIST—was designed to respond when schools reached the limits of their capacity to support a child in crisis. The name once suggested a circle of professionals surrounding a child with care. As the system evolved, it became the Urgent Intervention Program, still implying at least a budget, a…
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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…
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North Okanagan-Shuswap (SD83): a neurodiversity-informed policy critique
School District 83’s Policy 310 Student Code of Conduct, amended December 14, 2021, presents itself as a framework for “safe, respectful, and inclusive learning and working environments for all members of its school communities.” The policy commits to restorative approaches, acknowledges that consequences should be “preventative and restorative in nature,” and states explicitly that “appropriate…
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Institutional responses to complaint
I have been reading Sara Ahmed’s Complaint! and it almost feels as though I have been working backwards. I wish I had the insights in this book before my children entered kindergarten. Perhaps, I would have been spared years of confusion, exhaustion, and grief, and perhaps my children would have been spared some of the deepest harms…
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Serpentine Heights Elementary (SD36): a neurodiversity-informed policy critique
Serpentine Heights presents its Code of Conduct as an affirmation of safety, inclusion, and communal care. The opening commitments describe a school that values belonging, co-constructed routines, and dignity for every learner, offering a vision of education rooted in relational safety and shared citizenship (p. 1) . This framing gestures toward a caring culture, one…
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Urgent behaviour intervention teams in major BC school districts
Across British Columbia, many school districts have developed internal teams or programs designed to respond to urgent behavioural situations—such as elopement, aggression, or significant dysregulation—particularly when students are perceived as posing a safety risk or disrupting the learning environment. While these interventions are often framed as supportive or inclusive, families report that they can feel…
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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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This isn’t a unique case, is it?
My children’s father said in a meeting: “Surely you’ve dealt with this before and you have a solution? This isn’t a unique case, is it?” The question hung in the air, simple and devastating, exposing in one breath the entire pretence on which school leadership rests. The question matters because it cuts through bureaucratic delay…
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They keep moving the goalposts while our kids pay the price
It began with a phone call that felt like a lifeline. A new teacher was coming, they said, and maybe this would be the one to understand. We clung to that hope. We paid for another assessment, scheduled more therapy, spent weekends in waiting rooms and weekdays in meetings where the promise of change hovered…
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Our goals are not the same: ableism in bc public school
I want my children supported to grow and learn; schools uphold ableism by demanding they mask compliance or feign helplessness for support.
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Why do teachers punish the whole class for one student?
Collective punishment is when a group is made to face the same consequence because of the actions of one person or a small number of people. In school, this can mean the entire class loses recess, an activity is cancelled, or privileges are taken away because of something one student did. The rules are applied…
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When the bell rings but the doors stay shut: why withholding recess is a breach of children’s rights
Few topics ignite as much debate as the cancellation of recess. Threads often begin with a frustrated parent describing how an entire class lost recess because of one student’s behaviour, or a teacher recounting the expectation to withhold outdoor play for incomplete work. Commenters share stories of children sitting silently at their desks while watching…
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Flourishing as an ethical imperative
Like many of you, I caught CBC’s Ideas episode the other day, where philosopher Angie Hobbs spoke about the ancient Greek concept of eudaimonia—a term sometimes translated as happiness or welfare, but more richly understood as human flourishing. In a world flooded by crisis, it may seem indulgent or impractical to contemplate the good life,…
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Procedural policing of pain: what happens if I keen?
Keening—the sad, piercing wails often heard at a funeral for a child—is a human expression, older than the rules we follow or the schools we enter. It is what happens when grief overwhelms language, when memory floods muscle, when there is nothing left but pain. It is not shouting. It is not rage directed at…