Institutional Harm
When harm is built into policy and procedure—not an accident, but an outcome.
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The children don’t see autism, they see meanness
How schools weaponise ableism through gendered care expectations. Harm amplified by systemic ableism The principal once told me, almost as an aside, that the children “don’t see autism, they see meanness.” It was meant as an explanation, but to me it landed as an indictment of a school culture—to let that ableist misunderstanding stand unchallenged.…
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Human Rights Tribunal complaints are designed to exhaust
There is a silent calculus embedded in every human rights complaint: how much of your energy, your time, your composure, and your life force are you willing to lose in order to gain a largely symbolic victory. For those of us who have faced institutional harm the question is often whether we can survive the…
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Nobody is going to thank you
Nobody tells you that you can pour every last scrap of yourself into advocacy and still feel your bond with your child begin to strain. There is a familiar story passed among parents—one in which you step in, do a little advocacy, and watch as the pieces fall into place. The children grow, the challenges…
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They keep moving the goalposts while our kids pay the price
It began with a phone call that felt like a lifeline. A new teacher was coming, they said, and maybe this would be the one to understand. We clung to that hope. We paid for another assessment, scheduled more therapy, spent weekends in waiting rooms and weekdays in meetings where the promise of change hovered…
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Capital planning as an equity issue
School construction and renewal determine more than where children learn—they decide who will be welcomed, supported, and given dignity in public education for decades to come. A district’s capital plan is a blueprint for access, and when that plan is delayed, misaligned, or wasteful, the effects cascade into every other area of the system, including…
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PTSD, big reactions, and school’s responsibility for care
The presence of PTSD—whether diagnosed formally or manifesting in trauma-linked behaviours—does nothing to diminish a student’s legal right to safety, dignity, and education. Schools are bound by law to provide accommodations and proactive support to every student, including those whose distress may surface as loud, sudden, or intense reactions. PTSD can be the direct result…
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The brutal truth about schools weaponising therapy to deny your child’s rights
Schools are weaponising therapy as a gatekeeper to support—forcing parents to “prove” worth through endless interventions while shielding systemic harm. The system is broken, not our children.
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25 signs that your IEP team is disabling your child
In the space where families gather with school teams to shape a child’s Individual Education Plan, the language often carries more weight than paper can bear, for each phrase can open a door toward inclusion or quietly plant the seeds of exclusion, and the difference lies in whether the plan nourishes capacity or erodes it.…
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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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12 ways to tell when a crisis at school is really a failure of support, supervision, or repair
The hardest moments to navigate are often the ones that happen in seconds—but have been building for months. A single moment can change everything. A shove on the playground. A child running out the door. A sharp word or a sudden slap. To someone looking in from the outside, these moments can seem like they…
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Why do teachers punish the whole class for one student?
Collective punishment is when a group is made to face the same consequence because of the actions of one person or a small number of people. In school, this can mean the entire class loses recess, an activity is cancelled, or privileges are taken away because of something one student did. The rules are applied…
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When the bell rings but the doors stay shut: why withholding recess is a breach of children’s rights
Few topics ignite as much debate as the cancellation of recess. Threads often begin with a frustrated parent describing how an entire class lost recess because of one student’s behaviour, or a teacher recounting the expectation to withhold outdoor play for incomplete work. Commenters share stories of children sitting silently at their desks while watching…
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Why outspoken mothers face retaliation for advocacy in BC schools
Some of our articles speak in a more academic voice, especially when we are naming systems that silence or harm within BC schools. This is a sister essay to Epistemic silencing of disabled children’s primary caregivers, written as a more accessible entry point for readers who are newer to the topic or looking for clarity…
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The orange shirt I folded
I was folding laundry late one night, brain running on the kind of background grief that rarely quiets, when my hand closed around the orange shirt. I moved to set it aside—automatically, instinctively—because I remembered September was coming, school would be starting, and Orange Shirt Day would follow quickly after. That shirt would be needed…
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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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A thousand cranes, a thousand truths
When I was a little girl, I folded cranes. Hundreds of tiny, meticulous, brightly patterned creatures, each creased into being by the stubborn, lonely determination of a child who could sense that the world was coming undone and wanted, somehow, to hold it together. I folded them from the paper margins of my workbook, from…
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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 threat of clarity: women who know too much
Why confident, justice-oriented women are punished in public systems The woman who knew too much She is articulate, principled, professional, and polished—measured in her cadence, practiced in her facilitation , and fully aware of the power her clarity holds. She enters each room equipped with documents, timelines, policies, and annotated proof of harm, accompanied not…
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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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Collective punishment: how schools displace guilt, erase harm, and preserve the collective
One of the things that was so traumatising about the collective punishment that was callously perpetrated against my daughter was the light and evasive tone of the principal. She said that the punishment had to be “swift.” I frequently wondered about the choice to psychologically wound disabled children while treating the infliction of that wound…