Inclusive Education
An educational model that commits to teaching all children—regardless of disability—in regular classrooms with appropriate supports. Requires more than placement: it demands structural change.
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On opposite sides of the same door in BC schools
Families and teachers are describing the same failure from two positions inside it. The system survives by keeping them from recognising each other.
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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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A summer reading list for education leaders
The Canary Collective went upstream this week, and the gloves came off. In “Delay, Distract, and Deny”, Wren takes the old public-health parable about pulling bodies from a river and turns it into an indictment: while families stand waist-deep in the current keeping disabled children afloat, almost no one walks up the bank to ask who…
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Too many tongues: how schools turn caregiver testimony into threat
How schools turn caregiver testimony into threat — and why the monstrous advocate is made by the institution that fears her memory.
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CBC covers SD8’s elimination of Indigenous Education teachers
Earlier this week we wrote about School District 8’s decision to cut all Indigenous Education teacher positions from its elementary and middle schools, replacing them with support workers — a role with no instructional authority and no capacity to lead the cultural programming these teachers built over years. CBC’s Amber Wang has now published a…
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Save Indigenous Education teachers in SD8
Kootenay Lake School District is moving toward a staffing change in Indigenous Education that families say will remove teacher-led Indigenous Education from elementary and middle schools and replace the teacher with Indigenous Support Worker positions. On paper, this may look like a staffing model change. One role is removed. Other roles are added. A budget…
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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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Exclusion tracker: what 6,783 reports are telling us
The numbers arrived quietly, published in an interim report from the National Exclusion Tracker — five months of data collected since the tracker expanded from a BC-only tool to a national one, capturing the experiences of families across eleven provinces and territories. 6,783 reported incidents of exclusion from K–12 education since September. 68% of them…
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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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25 ways AI can encourage critical thinking and make your classroom more accessible
Educators have spent the last two years debating whether artificial intelligence belongs in the classroom, as though it were still possible to close the door on the tidal shift already transforming how children read, write, and think. Large language models (LLMs) are not a novelty—they are a new infrastructure for thought, capable of flexing around…
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Coerced care, gendered neglect, and the reframing of family collapse
It began with daily incidents that were anything but small. My son repeatedly hugged my daughter against her will, pressing into her space while she pulled away, asking for it to stop. She reported that when she turned to supervision aides for help, they told her it was fine because they were siblings. Staff framed…
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No good news on government K-12 page
The BC k-12 portal promises inclusion, yet broken links and missing disability guidance reveal gaps in safety and access.
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ADHD and autism aren’t phases
We don’t expect a wheelchair user to “earn” the right to walk by graduation. We don’t tell a student with diabetes that the goal is to get off insulin. And yet, in schools across our district, support for autistic and ADHD students is treated like a ladder they’re supposed to climb once and throw away…
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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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How it broke me open: the unbearable clarity of seeing things as they are
I know another reason the collective punishment incident was so devastating for me, like truly sent-me-spiralling kind of devastating, wasn’t just because of what was done to the kids (although yes, obviously that too), but because of what it broke in me, in how I’d been holding things together for so long with this scaffolding of…