Freedom of Information (FOI)
It shouldn’t be this hard to get the truth. FOI requests are slow, bureaucratic, often redacted into oblivion — and yet, they remain one of the only tools families have to pierce the silence of public institutions. We file them not because they work well, but because they exist. Because when everything else has failed — the meetings, the appeals, the common sense — sometimes the only way left to be heard is to ask, on the record. This category collects stories, strategies, and reflections on what FOIs reveal, what they don’t, and what it costs to keep asking.
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Meditating on Canary Collective’s “Filed and Forgotten”
When Canary Collective named the truth about incident reports, they articulated something already deeply known—something felt in the gut, carried in the silences of meetings, and confirmed by the absence of a child’s voice in the official version of events. Their words moved slowly and powerfully, affirming what many parents have experienced but been denied…
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$10K and an NDA
Would 10K and an NDA make the most excellent name for a country song? I didn’t file a Freedom of Information request to stir conflict — I filed it because nothing made sense, and I needed a clue, any thread at all, to understand what had just happened to my family. I call FOIs the…
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Rethinking accessibility leadership, training, and labour in BC public education
In accessibility work, most transformative insights come directly from disabled people. Lived experience is primary data; manuals and metrics are, at best, secondary literature. In schools, teachers are experts in pedagogy, yet few are trained in disability or neurodivergence. That absence is not incidental—it is engineered, and the consequences are everywhere. The current failure—and promise—of…
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Protecting children’s dignity and safety in a broken system
We should be able to expect a system where no child sits in wet clothes all day, and no child is changed alone by a single staff member behind closed doors. These are basic, non-negotiable standards for dignity and safety, not optional aspirations. While we can all acknowledge that the system is under immense strain,…
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Fighting for transparency via FOI requests
For parents of disabled children, the struggle for transparency often feels like fishing in murky waters, straining for glimpses of the truth beneath a bureaucratic surface designed to obscure, rather than reveal. It was this feeling that drove me to file a Freedom of Information (FOI) request for records pertaining to my children at their…
