Learning Disability
A learning disability is a lifelong difference in the way a person processes, stores, and expresses information—an invisible and often misunderstood variation that exists not in isolation, but in constant relationship with the accessibility of the learning environment. This tag brings together stories, critiques, and resources that challenge deficit-based framings, centre lived experience, and demand educational practices that create true access for students with disabilities, rather than demanding constant adaptation from those already working hardest to belong.
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What districts refuse to count, they refuse to see
Canary Collective makes explicit what current FESL reporting renders invisible: the exclusionary practices that shape access to learning but disappear from accountability structures because districts are not required to document them publicly.
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BCTF lobbies for changes to new literacy screening mandate
The BC Ministry of Education and Child Care announced a new mandate this week requiring literacy screening for all kindergarten students beginning in the 2025–26 school year, expanding to K–3 students the following year. The British Columbia Teachers’ Federation published their response, which deserves careful attention. No budget for implementing literacy screening Everyone can see…
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Four years on a waitlist
Richard Hackett’s eight-year-old son Austin has waited four years for occupational therapy services in Ontario, placed on the waitlist when he was four years old and still waiting as he navigates school with a learning disability and ADHD. The family received a school-based assessment with no follow-up, no results shared, no clarity about whether support…
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VSB’s FESL report: the aesthetics of performative accessibility
An analysis of how VSB’s FESL report performs inclusion through language and process while avoiding measurement, accountability, and material change.
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Kamloops mother speaks after district ignored daughter’s dyslexia for thirteen years
‘She was failed’: Mother speaks out after Kamloops student’s dyslexia ignored tell the story of Heather Morrison. She spent thirteen years asking teachers and principals to assess her daughter for learning disabilities, watching her child move through kindergarten to graduation while reading at an elementary level, her distress mounting with each deflection, each dismissal, each…
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The return of functioning labels: How austerity turns advocacy into competition
A parent recently posted about profound autism, describing the experience of having her son’s reality erased when people say that “profound autism” doesn’t exist. Her frustration is legitimate—parents of children with intensive, lifelong support needs face profound institutional abandonment, and “profound autism” names a reality that deserves recognition and resources. But her post also illustrates…
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Justice and dignity too expensive for BC NDP
In 2018, experts told BC exactly how to fix special education funding. The government has spent five years “consulting” instead. Meanwhile, your child sits in hallways. The 192% problem nobody wants to fund Between 2015 and 2024, autism designations in BC schools exploded by 192%. Total student enrolment? Up just 11.6%. The province knows this. They…
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When delay becomes policy: British Columbia’s strategic abandonment of disabled students
In 2018, an independent panel reviewed how British Columbia funds kindergarten through grade twelve education and recommended a prevalence model for special education funding, a shift that would allocate resources based on statistical prevalence of disability within the general student population rather than on individual diagnostic designation. The proposal threatened to expose what the existing system carefully…
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Teachers deserve compensation commensurate with the complexity of their labour
The research confirms what every parent already knows: teaching requires orchestrating dozens of simultaneous human variables inside conditions designed to foreclose success, and the work demands relentless cognitive precision, emotional attunement, and adaptive improvisation across every minute of every day. A classroom contains children processing information at radically different speeds, carrying wildly disparate skill foundations,…
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What the BC government wants us to see: data and public education
Governments build their authority through the quiet choreography of information, and educational systems refine this practice into a disciplined structure where the presence of data becomes a symbol of competence while the absence of certain measurements becomes a strategy that protects institutional dignity, and across decades of policy and public communication the pattern of what…
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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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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 schools plan to fail autistic girls while pretending to support them
In January 2025, my daughter’s school closed her Urgent Intervention Plan with a calm, administrative gesture that belied the violence of what had taken place—not only in the school hallways, but in the documentation itself. It came wrapped in phrases like gradual re-entry, verbal reinforcement, and classroom reintegration, but what it really contained was a careful distortion of…
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Collective punishment in schools: How humiliation undermines emotional safety and learning
In classrooms around the world, students are sometimes punished for the misbehavior of others. One student breaks a rule, and the entire class loses a privilege. This practice – known as collective punishment – persists even though it is broadly recognised as unjust. In fact, collective punishment is explicitly banned under Article 33 of the Geneva Conventions…
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When compensation is mistaken for capacity: why I support Dyslexia BC
In every school, there are those children—gifted and hyper-conscientious—who stay behind after the bell has rung, who do the homework even when no one collects it, who chase perfection out of a desperation to stay afloat in a system that offers no life raft for those who do too well to be noticed. These are…
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Summer school blues: on being excluded from the gifted program
In the spring of 2018, I applied to the Vancouver School Board’s summer Gifted/Challenge Program for my twins, Jeannie and Robin, who had just finished kindergarten and were, in different ways, already outpacing the curriculum. Robin was already captivated by the ancient world—particularly Egypt, with its pyramids, its rituals, its mythologies of death and continuity,…
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Not sick. Not fine. Not supported. Sexism in Vancouver School Board.
They said she was doing well. They said it with the softness of authority — that practiced tone that suggests neutrality while sidestepping consequence — a tone I’ve come to recognise as institutional, not personal, and absolutely not maternal. They said she was fine because she was quiet. Because she didn’t scream. Because she didn’t…
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What would it really cost to fix the problem?
We talk so much about the cost of inclusion—as if it’s indulgent, optional, something that must be justified—but we rarely talk about the cost of exclusion. And those costs are everywhere: in emergency rooms, in overburdened case files, in classrooms where distress goes unseen. When schools can’t support disabled students, families fall apart trying to…
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Support is a bridge
What happens when schools pretend the bridge is whole. The appearance of help “She gets check-ins from the area counsellor once a week.”“We’ve made sure the classroom teacher is aware of her IEP.”“We’re doing everything we can within the current resources.” These are the phrases they recite—softly, professionally, as though reassurance were a substitute for…
