Data
As a data architect, I hold a reverence for structure—the elegance of systems that gather, connect, and reveal patterns across complexity. Yet my work within the disability community continually unsettles that faith. Numbers can illuminate injustice, but they can also obscure it; they can quantify harm while concealing its origin. Data promises clarity, but often it trades away the texture of lived experience for legibility. This tension shapes how I write about education, surveillance, and inclusion. I remain devoted to precision and transparency, while learning from those who remind me that information is never neutral—it carries the imprint of power, perspective, and care. The disability community teaches that knowledge without relationship becomes extraction; true accessibility requires that data be returned to those from whom it is drawn, interpreted with humility, and used to build systems that heal rather than categorise.
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Why I’m tracking exclusions no one else is measuring
I’ve been reading exclusion data that most people will never see. Two BC school districts—New Westminster (SD40) and Southeast Kootenay (SD5)—publicly released their submissions to the BC Ombudsperson’s investigation into student exclusion. SD40 reported 177 formally documented incidents over three years. SD5 reported enough partial-day programming to total approximately 3.4k+ exclusion-days. My children don’t appear…
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Partial exclusion, full harm
The Tribunal’s decision in Student Y by Grandparent S v. Board of Education of School District No. X, 2024 BCHRT 353, with refusing the application to dismiss, affirms that partial school days, repeated over months or years, operate as a sustained pattern of exclusion that shapes a child’s developmental trajectory, erodes educational access, and profoundly alters the…
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SD83 publicly acknowledges Ombudsperson investigation and releases updated exclusion procedure
School District 83 (North Okanagan-Shuswap) has released one of the most transparent updates to date on the BC Ombudsperson’s province-wide investigation into student exclusion. The district’s October 21, 2025 Regular Board Meeting agenda includes a full briefing under the heading Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion — Ombudsperson: Student Exclusion from School, and the details offer an unusually clear picture…
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A data story from Southeast Kootenay District
I lived in Nelson as a child. The racial diversity was low. I know it has increased over time, yet it remains a small community, and when a young child arrives from another country and is visibly a person of colour, that presence remains noticeable across the Kootenays. This context matters when reading district records.…
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District exclusion reasons
A review of exclusion records from New Westminster (SD40) and Southeast Kootenay (SD5) reveals a consistent pattern: the stated reasons for exclusion drift toward biography, circumstance, and administrative decisions rather than the educational factors that legitimately shape access to full-time schooling. The records describe personality traits, incidental details, and complex life contexts, while offering limited…
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The New Westminster submission to the Ombudsperson
Kudos to New West for being the first district I’ve identified to have released their report to the Ombudsperson. The New Westminster submission provides ~three years of exclusion data incidents organised by school, grade, and duration. The tables show concentrated exclusion activity in middle-years grades, consistent reliance on Code of Conduct language, and notable variation…
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How do we get out of this mess?
British Columbia’s education system is breaking, and Surrey’s classroom evacuations—along with the rushed creation of the Classroom Clear Tracker—show how close we stand to systemic failure. Desperate times create desperate actions, and the crisis unfolding in public education pushes people into hurried choices shaped by urgency, fear, and the belief that any action feels better…
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The architecture of responsibility in systems that harm
When a system produces predictable, patterned harm — exclusion, restraint, academic abandonment, institutional gaslighting, attrition framed as “choice,” disability-based discrimination — that harm arises from the structural design of the system itself, because structures generate outcomes with the same reliability that rivers carve their beds, and structures reveal the priorities of the province long before…
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Every bureaucracy overvalues secrecy and undervalues the inevitability of exposure
Bureaucracies function through layers of reporting and review, and these layers create an administrative environment where information moves upward in controlled pathways that privilege institutional interests, because officials rely on curated datasets to demonstrate capability, and these curated datasets shape public understanding. The structure rewards leaders who present clean numbers and reassuring summaries, and this…
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What the BC government wants us to see: data and public education
Governments build their authority through the quiet choreography of information, and educational systems refine this practice into a disciplined structure where the presence of data becomes a symbol of competence while the absence of certain measurements becomes a strategy that protects institutional dignity, and across decades of policy and public communication the pattern of what…
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The ethics of counting crisis
I have been packing boxes between paragraphs, writing this series while selling my home—a process shaped by exclusion and the loss of stability that followed my children’s experiences in the Vancouver School District. I approach this work from a lifelong love of data and technology, aware that the same tools I value can create harm…
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BCEdAccess on Room Clear Tracker
The BCEdAccess post about the Surrey classroom-clear tracker is a dire and necessary warning. Parents are raising concerns that come from lived experience, not abstract theory. They have seen how data about vulnerable children, even when anonymised, can expose them to harm. Their argument is simple: tools meant to improve safety can easily become tools…
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Counting the wounded: how complaint systems and data bureaucracies erase harm
The same patterns of attrition described in The Ombudsperson and the war of attrition also define how governments manage harm in military and veterans’ systems. Delays in compensation, endless investigations, and deferrals justified as ‘process’ reveal that administrative time itself functions as an instrument of harm. What appears as prudence operates as quiet abandonment—an institutional strategy that…
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Counting crisis: data, distrust, and the false choice between safety and inclusion
Across British Columbia, the launch of Surrey DPAC’s Room Clear Tracker has ignited a storm of debate among parents, educators, and disability advocates. Some view it as a necessary step toward transparency; others fear it will reinforce stigma or justify segregation. Beneath the surface of this argument runs a deeper fracture—between those who seek safety…
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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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Controversy over Room Clear Tracker
When we first shared the launch of Surrey’s Room Clear Tracker, we saw it as a potential step toward long-overdue transparency. For many families, including my own, the absence of data about classroom evacuations has preserved the illusion of safety while concealing the scale of harm. The idea that someone, finally, was counting felt like…
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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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Data tracking in the residential school system
The Canadian Residential School system (circa 1870s–1990s) was a network of church-run boarding schools funded by the government to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children. In theory, such a large system might have been guided by careful data collection – tracking student health, education outcomes, and well-being. In reality, government officials prioritized ideological goals and cost-saving “optics” over…
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Calling the exclusion line
Every morning, when we dial the school’s sick line, we enact a ritual that ought to acknowledge more than a fever or a stomach ache. In theory, this system exists to safeguard children who cannot attend school due to illness. In practice, it masks the institutional harms that shape our decisions, erasing critical context from…