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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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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On children, war, and remembrance
Each November, we are asked to pause—heads bowed, hearts heavy—to remember the lives destroyed by war. Yet remembrance without reckoning becomes ritual, a polished echo of conscience that lets the same moral logic continue unchallenged. Every essay in this series has exposed a fragment of that logic: how endurance became virtue, how obedience replaced empathy,…
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The role of infighting in maintaining scarcity, hierarchies, and exclusion
This piece is unfinished, but it feels necessary. I am still learning how to move through anger toward something that might resemble repair or solidarity. I am not writing a strategy or a manifesto; I am writing what I see, what keeps happening, and how it feels to live inside it. The truth, when spoken…
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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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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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A war on joy: discipline, obedience, and the disabled body
An examination of how education absorbs military and capitalist values—discipline, endurance, and efficiency—until joy becomes a threat to order. This piece argues that the rationing of joy for disabled students is both an ethical and structural failure, transforming learning into control and endurance into a false measure of worth.
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Record. Transcribe. Protect.
The Canary Collective’s Record. Transcribe. Protect. reminds us that advocacy depends on memory, and memory depends on record-keeping. Their piece describes how recording school meetings transforms fleeting conversation into an accountable record. Parents often leave IEP meetings with blurred recollections and verbal promises that never appear in writing, and the simple act of recording and transcribing…
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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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The architecture of harm, the anatomy of healing
Each year when the light thins and the trees surrender their leaves, we are reminded that systems rot slowly, from the inside out, while pretending to stand tall. The fluorescent hum of classrooms carries through the shorter days, and the rhythm of school life resumes its weary repetition—meetings, promises, half-measures. Parents sit again in plastic…
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Kelly Gallagher-Mackay on the future of public education
In On Student Absences, Race-Based Data, Private Schools and More, education scholar Kelly Gallagher-Mackay reminds us that public schooling in Canada remains one of the few institutions still striving for equality, even as it strains under chronic absenteeism, inequity, and mental-health collapse. She notes that the share of students missing over ten percent of classes…
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The cost of partial inclusion in schools
I have returned to writing after a long silence—one imposed less by choice than by survival. The move was necessary, a matter of financial gravity after years of lost income entwined with the harm my children endured within an ableist school system. Leaving our home felt like surrendering a life I had fought to sustain,…
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Starving the future: how underfunding and poor education policy are functionally eugenics
From the safety of our northern vantage, it is easy to feel heartbroken and a little superior when we watch the dismantling of the American social welfare state—when we see libraries defunded, schools privatised, and healthcare withdrawn with brutal efficiency. We shake our heads at the cruelty of it, believing ourselves buffered by decency or…
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The promise of continuity when transitioning to a new school
Every September, education administrators assure families that the transition to middle or high school will be smooth, that each Individual Education Plan will follow the student like a guiding light through the unfamiliar corridors, that the new teachers will arrive prepared and informed. For parents of disabled or neurodivergent children, those assurances carry the weight…
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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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The Ombudsperson and the war of attrition with systems of escalation
This essay is in response to the closure of my complaint by the Office of the Ombudsperson of British Columbia. It documents my family’s experience navigating the education complaint system, the Teacher Regulation Branch, and the Ombudsperson itself. It exists to show how a system meant to protect fairness becomes one that delays, deflects, and…
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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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Bearing witness to truth
Every once in a while, a piece of writing crystallises what thousands of parents have been living for years — the quiet collapse of public education as a place of belonging for disabled children. Kim Block, Chair of BCEdAccess, has written such a piece. Her essay, published on October 18, 2025 and reprinted by the…
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Keeping vigil
I live as though in a vigil, waiting for my child to heal from the slow injuries of school, which for many people represents a place of nurture and discovery, yet for him became an arena of exhaustion where survival eclipsed joy and the aftermath has demanded a long convalescence that feels almost like watching…
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Care and support for children with disabilities within the family
Children thrive when their caregivers thrive. The Special Rapporteur reminds us that the well-being of children with disabilities is bound to the well-being of their families—especially mothers, who carry most of the invisible labour. When schools fail to support families, they create conditions that push children toward exclusion or even institutionalisation. Families are often forced…
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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…
