J. Shahar Dillbary

Children are not pawns: disability, private schools, and budget cost-containment

Public money should not be subsidising private advantage while public schools are told to make do with less. That is the clean version of the argument. It is intuitive, politically useful, and often true. When governments claim there is not enough money for education assistants, specialist support, safe buildings, accessible classrooms, or meaningful inclusion, it…

Scapegoats for austerity: BC education funding excludes disabled children

BC education funding scapegoats disabled children, using collective punishment and performative inclusion to divide parents and maintain austerity.

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…

Neural evidence exposes the steep cost of sacrificing vulnerable children to punitive myths

Neural evidence from Altered Neural Responses to Punishment Learning in Conduct Disorder offers a precise account of how punitive school discipline collides with the neurodevelopmental profiles of vulnerable children, because the study shows that punishment learning relies on the anterior insula’s capacity to transform discomfort into behavioural adjustment, and this capacity expresses irregular patterns in the children…

This isn’t a unique case, is it?

My children’s father said in a meeting: “Surely you’ve dealt with this before and you have a solution? This isn’t a unique case, is it?” The question hung in the air, simple and devastating, exposing in one breath the entire pretence on which school leadership rests. The question matters because it cuts through bureaucratic delay…

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…

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…

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…

7 signs your child (or you) is being positioned as the problem to preserve the group

When a parent becomes too precise, too prepared, or too emotionally honest, the school system may cast them—or their child—as the problem. This essay outlines seven signs that scapegoating is being used to preserve group harmony at the cost of justice, with particular attention to how this dynamic unfolds in British Columbia public schools.

The paperwork trap: when doing everything right becomes your downfall

When parents follow every rule, cite every policy, and document every meeting in the British Columbia public school system, they are often framed as adversaries, not allies. This essay explores how procedural knowledge becomes a liability, how the IEP process punishes fluency as threat, and why the most thorough advocates are the ones most likely…

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…

End collective punishment in BC schools