Euphemism
A euphemism is a softer, vaguer, or more acceptable word used in place of a clearer one, often to make something harmful, coercive, discriminatory, or uncomfortable sound neutral.
In schools, euphemisms can hide what is actually happening. A child may be placed on a “partial schedule” instead of being described as informally excluded. A “safety plan” may replace the fact that the school is managing risk without providing access. “Parent choice” may describe a family leaving after support failed. “Capacity” may stand in for funding decisions, staffing shortages, or refusal to accommodate.
Euphemisms matter because language shapes accountability. When harm is renamed as process, support, transition, safety, or choice, the institution can appear reasonable while the child and family absorb the consequences.
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When children write the rules
The teacher’s letter arrives home with careful reassurances about fairness, dignity, and professional expertise, yet embedded within its polite paragraphs sits a fundamental contradiction: the rules governing this seventh-grade classroom emerged from the crowdsourced preferences of twelve-year-old children rather than from pedagogical research or developmental understanding. Ah yes, the wisdom of crowds—particularly effective when the…
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Truth is never negative: on becoming the voice a system tried to silence
I have come to understand that my role in this landscape exists because every public system that touches disabled children in British Columbia carries a quiet, shared expectation: families will smooth the rough edges, soften the evidence, dilute the language, and narrate harm as misunderstanding or miscommunication rather than what it is—the predictable outcome of…
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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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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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VSB’s accessibility plan: more marketing than meaningful change
The Vancouver School Board has released its Accessibility Plan for 2025–2028, a document that positions itself as a forward-looking commitment to equity, belonging, and barrier removal, offering warm assurances about inclusion while presenting a polished institutional narrative that feels carefully tuned for public confidence rather than rooted in the depth of community experience. Families who…
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Why the SD23 suspensions report matters for exclusion analysis
While I was looking for more disclosures from school districts to the Ombudsperson, I stumbled on this older document that summarises suspensions in School District 23. The document offers a valuable complement to the exclusion data disclosed by other districts, because it reveals how disciplinary frameworks operate alongside accommodation-framed removals, and this pairing creates a…
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On euphemisms, PDA, and the rebranding of autism
When I look back on the early years of coming to terms with autism in our family, I understand the urge to rebrand it. The word autism lands hard at first. It sounds clinical, final, filled with sadness, injury, bad smells, and bleak prospects. In that first stage of reckoning—when your mind keeps circling what you imagined…
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Collective punishment in war and school
Every empire writes its morality through the safety of the bodies of children. Whether on the battlefield or in the classroom.
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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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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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Protecting the ledger over the learner: operationalising scarcity in BC School Districts
British Columbia’s public schools are mandated to provide inclusive education for all students, but they do so in a context of chronic resource scarcity. Scarcity in education means there are not enough funds, staff, skills, or services to fully meet all student needs. School districts have had to develop strategies to manage and ration what they do…
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After Moore: why winning didn’t fix public education
When the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favour of Jeffrey Moore and his family in 2012, affirming that meaningful access to public education was not a luxury but a legal right for disabled students, it seemed as though the tide had turned. The Court’s decision, rooted in the BC Human Rights Code and later…
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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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Incident Ipsum: decoding the bureaucratic poetry of school emails
It began, as so many things do, with a friend forwarding an email she could hardly parse. The first message made little sense; the follow-up from a case manager arrived dense with jargon, couched in performative empathy, and copied unnecessarily to a wider audience. The tone was professional. The effect was punitive. The email accomplished…
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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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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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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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The compliance economy
In their article Of Sinners and Scapegoats: The Economics of Collective Punishment, J. Shahar Dillbary and Thomas J. Miceli argue that collective punishment emerges not merely as a failure of precision or fairness, but as a deliberate mechanism for preserving internal group cohesion. The scapegoat, must be non-random, visible, and different, and their suffering must be…
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The truth shall set us free: healing from institutional violence in BC public schools
Healing doesn’t begin with massages or mindset shifts. It begins with telling the truth about what was done to us—about what it means to watch your child collapse under institutional betrayal, to be praised for your composure while they take away his lifeline. The system demands civility while delivering harm. This essay is a witness…
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Why we keep returning to collective punishment
This site is about collective punishment, so naturally we have to write about it on a fairly regular basis and it’s become an interesting experience of returning again and again. Every time we write about collective punishment, it feels like tracing a wound the system keeps trying to call a scar—something old, something resolved, something…