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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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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Alberta’s erasure of disability rights
In November 2025, the Alberta government released the final report of the Aggression and Complexity in Schools Action Team, offering seven recommendations to address what it calls “rising aggression and complexity in classrooms.” The package includes $300 million over three years to hire 1,500 educational assistants, the creation of a Class Size and Complexity Cabinet Committee,…
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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…
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The return of functioning labels: How austerity turns advocacy into competition
A parent recently posted about profound autism, describing the experience of having her son’s reality erased when people say that “profound autism” doesn’t exist. Her frustration is legitimate—parents of children with intensive, lifelong support needs face profound institutional abandonment, and “profound autism” names a reality that deserves recognition and resources. But her post also illustrates…
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Why I won’t stop in 2026
The principal used collective punishment against my child almost two years ago, and yet I remain unreconciled to what she did. People suggest moving on, starting fresh, forgiving. Schools are obsessed with ‘fresh starts,’ framing each September as reset opportunity, as though institutional harm dissolves at arbitrary calendar boundaries. My daughter carries what happened in…
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The principal’s casualness reveals authorisation to harm
When a principal cancelled my daughter’s volleyball game with bureaucratic ease, her comfort while causing harm revealed systematic institutional authorisation.
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Your child’s teacher crossed a line. The school shrugged. Now what?
Every time my phone lights up with a call or email from the school, my stomach drops. I brace automatically: Is it another subtle threat? Another criticism of my parenting disguised as “concern”? Another make-work task to “fix” a problem they created? After years of this, I’ve learned to navigate school communication in a state…
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From trauma to topology: the grotesque work of quantifying institutional denial
When institutional harm accumulates in childhood—in objects confiscated, spaces denied, bodies excluded—the evidence lives first in memory and affect. The saucer eyes of a humiliated or frightened child. The sting in the sobs of a child who just wants to be with her friends at the volleyball game. The physical weight of a garbage bag…
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Autism and bullying in BC schools
Autistic and ADHD children face bullying at astonishing rates. Large-scale studies report that nearly half to two-thirds of autistic students have been bullied, with some surveys finding 44–67% victimized[1] – far above the ~20–40% typical rate in general populations. For example, one meta-analysis found 67% of autistic youth experienced some form of school bullying[1]. Youth with ADHD…
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Designed for denial the architecture of accommodation refusal
Designed for denial describes systems structured so that refusing accommodation is the path of least resistance, the default outcome, the architecturally embedded response to requests for support. These are systems where saying no requires little justification, documentation, oversight, or consequence, while saying yes requires the requester to overcome multiple barriers, satisfy gatekeepers who are not accountable…
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A multi-lens analysis of accommodation denial in BC Schools
When the school handed me a garbage bag filled with jackets at the end of the year, it was evidence of a failed executive function accommodation. When I was handed a box containing hundreds of dollars of fidgets, it was evidence of a regulation accommodation that had been denied. There’s a lot of reasons an…
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Why teachers cannot be trusted to explain accommodation denial
When my daughter reported that boys were harassing her through the bathroom door and the principal responded by telling her to return to class, the institutional response positioned her as the unreliable narrator—the one whose testimony required verification, whose distress could be minimised, whose understanding of harm could be dismissed as misperception or oversensitivity. Disabled…
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How FESL enables ongoing exclusion of disabled children
In 2020, the British Columbia Ministry of Education and Child Care brought into force the Framework for Enhancing Student Learning, a policy architecture ostensibly designed to guide the province’s approach to continuous improvement in public education, with particular attention to improving equity for Indigenous students, children and youth in care, and students with disabilities or diverse…
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The affective architecture of room clears
Room clears should be rare. In adequately resourced classrooms with sufficient staffing, with educational assistants trained in co-regulation, with adults who understand that compliance is not wellness and frozen silence is not calm, most crises could be prevented or held without architectural intervention. But British Columbia schools operate under manufactured scarcity, austerity politics disguised as…
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Justice and dignity too expensive for BC NDP
In 2018, experts told BC exactly how to fix special education funding. The government has spent five years “consulting” instead. Meanwhile, your child sits in hallways. The 192% problem nobody wants to fund Between 2015 and 2024, autism designations in BC schools exploded by 192%. Total student enrolment? Up just 11.6%. The province knows this. They…
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When delay becomes policy: British Columbia’s strategic abandonment of disabled students
In 2018, an independent panel reviewed how British Columbia funds kindergarten through grade twelve education and recommended a prevalence model for special education funding, a shift that would allocate resources based on statistical prevalence of disability within the general student population rather than on individual diagnostic designation. The proposal threatened to expose what the existing system carefully…