Disability Justice
A movement that centres disabled people—especially those who are Black, Indigenous, racialised, queer, and/or poor—in fighting ableism. Focuses on collective liberation, not assimilation.
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Try harder, try different
On the pedagogy of “people are not supports,” the research it misreads, and what happens when an idea is transplanted into a starved system.
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Be pleasant so others won’t get upset
What a twelve-year mortality study measured, and what it accidentally wrote down: the code of conduct every district hands a mother on her way into the room. You learn it in your hands before you learn it anywhere else. At the table you fold them in your lap, you soften your face into the shape…
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I’m a seventh grade failure
Institutional capture refers to the process by which individuals — parents, children, advocates, even dissenting professionals — are absorbed into the operational logic of an institution to the point where they begin reproducing its framework, its language, and its priorities, without necessarily endorsing them or recognising what is happening. It is distinct from agreement. You do…
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The compliance trap: why IEP goals fail PDA students
Every IEP written for a PDA student begins with the same quiet betrayal. The team gathers — parents, teacher, learning support, maybe an administrator — and the goals are drafted in language that sounds like care: manage responsibilities with support, self-advocate before becoming overwhelmed, organise materials and meet deadlines. The phrases are familiar because they…
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My Ollie is missing a lot of school
My Ollie has barely left his room since he came home exhausted from school one day last spring. He slept twenty-three hours a day for months. He barely spoke for months and had difficulty with basic hygiene. School chronically withdrew the supports he needed and pushed him to mask and comply until his nervous system…
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BC schools are failing disabled students: an absence analysis
This analysis is based on a provincial FOI request to the BC Ministry of Education, file ECC-2025-52461, which was shared recently, bc BCEdAccess. The data covers absence rates, absence reasons, enrolment, and mid-year exits for BC public school students, broken down by inclusive education designation, across the 2022/23 and 2023/24 school years. This analysis focuses on…
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An initial look at new provincial absence data
A new dataset on student absences in BC public schools has recently been released by BCEdAccess, based on a provincial FOI request. It brings together absence rates, reasons, and enrolment across the 2022/23 and 2023/24 school years, broken down by inclusive education designation. We plan to examine this data in more detail. For now, we…
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10 unhinged things I did to try to keep my disabled child in school
For every woman who has stayed up until two in the morning reading the Human Rights Code with a highlighter, looking for the sentence that will save her child. For every mother who has rehearsed her opening in the shower, workshopped her tone in the car, changed her shirt three times, taken half a beta…
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Your accommodations, too
You arrive at the IEP meeting already tired. You have been awake since five, rehearsing the three sentences you practised last night; you put on something other than sweatpants, to look the part; you have swallowed the coffee that makes the morning bearable at the cost of the indigestion and tremor in your hands, which…
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The system we navigate is a one-way ticket to involuntary care
You think you are attending meetings. You think you are asking for support. You think you are building a case for your child. You are building a case. Just not the one you think. You enter as a credible narrator You arrive with timelines, with emails, with documentation so meticulous it could pass peer review…
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The masking tax: how autistic girls absorb bullying invisibly in BC schools
Autistic girls in B.C. schools often develop sophisticated masking or camouflaging strategies to hide their autism in order to fit in and avoid bullying. In the short term this can make them appear “fine” – leading teachers and administrators to assume no support is needed – but the “masking tax” is high. Decades of invisible stress and exclusion build up as girls…
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Bullying of disabled children: a human rights issue requiring accommodation
Bullying emerges when power differentials enable repeated harm, when one child or group systematically targets another through physical aggression, verbal degradation, social exclusion, or digital harassment. BC’s ERASE framework describes bullying as “a persistent pattern of unwelcome or aggressive behaviour intended to harm or humiliate a person”, language that obscures the particular vulnerability of disabled children…
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Exclusion is economically irrational and the hidden costs of refusing accommodation
BC schools spend more money refusing accommodation than providing it. Learn when hiring a lawyer becomes the only fiscally rational choice for your family.
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What 8 years of advocacy took from our family
I advocate because I love my children and I want them to be well. Because I know the accommodations they require are entirely tenable, requiring only modest shifts in how adults think and respond. Because it is unbearable to watch them be slowly debilitated by a system that insists their needs are excessive and their…
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When improvement tolerates death: why schools must stop the line
Education systems insist they are engaged in continuous improvement. They invoke cycles, frameworks, data dashboards, and action plans to demonstrate seriousness and care. But children are killing themselves in every district, every year. Disabled children are being excluded, isolated, placed in hallways, sent home early, or left to deteriorate while plans are written. The question…
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The business process trap
I’m a business analyst by trade, so I naturally wanted to understand how things work in schools, but resist the temptation to let schools draw you in!!! School districts speak a language designed to obscure accountability, using administrative complexity as armour against obligation, converting urgent need into bureaucratic procedure, and replacing immediate legal duty with…
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Manufacturing acceptable loss: why parents must resist education’s factory logic
Districts describe their work using the language of continuous improvement, capacity building, resource optimisation, and evidence-based allocation—borrowing terminology from industrial production systems designed to manufacture widgets efficiently, to minimise waste, to maximise throughput, to tolerate predictable defect rates within acceptable margins. This vocabulary reveals the underlying logic: education systems increasingly operate as though children are…
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Teacher employment negotiations reach impasse
BC teachers reached an impasse with their employer this week after the province refused to fund improvements to classroom conditions, offering wage increases while withholding the supports that would allow teachers to meet student needs. The union points to counsellor ratios averaging one per 693 students against a North American standard of one per 250,…
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Where Surrey’s $6.3 million went
I recently reviewed the provincial budget tables and buried within Table 17 (2024/25 Amended Annual Budgeted Operating Expenditures of Program 1.10 Inclusive Education by Object) and Table 26 (2024/25 Actual Operating Expenses of Program 1.10 Inclusive Education by Object) of British Columbia’s 2024/25 operating budget documents lies evidence of what can only be described as…
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Champlain Heights Annex School (VSB SD39): a neurodiversity-informed conduct critique
Champlain Heights Annex School’s Code of Conduct promises a safe, inclusive, equitable, welcoming, nurturing, and healthy school environment. The document aligns explicitly with Vancouver School Board’s District Student Code of Conduct (AP 350), affirms the BC Human Rights Code, and structures behavioural expectations through a three-level consequence framework extending from classroom redirection to formal suspension.…