Rationing care
Rationing care is the slow, daily process by which professionals decide who gets seen, heard, supported, and believed—based not on need, but on patience, performance, or policy alignment. It is a violence dressed in professionalism, a soft form of abandonment reinforced by funding formulas and compassion fatigue. This tag collects writing on how care is withheld, distributed, and weaponised in schools and support systems.
-
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…
-
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…
-
The Cowichan case, land-title hysteria, and the unfinished work of justice in public education
I have been reflecting on the public reaction to the Cowichan case findings, and the deeper I look, the more I notice similar patterns emerging across conversations about reconciliation and disability justice in public schools: the tendency to get stuck in the T part of “Truth and Reconciliation” and to only have the T be…
-
On children, war, and remembrance
Each November, we are asked to pause—heads bowed, hearts heavy—to remember the lives destroyed by war. Yet remembrance without reckoning becomes ritual, a polished echo of conscience that lets the same moral logic continue unchallenged. Every essay in this series has exposed a fragment of that logic: how endurance became virtue, how obedience replaced empathy,…
-
Our goals are not the same: ableism in bc public school
I want my children supported to grow and learn; schools uphold ableism by demanding they mask compliance or feign helplessness for support.
-
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,…
-
Post-COVID rise of blended classrooms in BC elementary schools
In British Columbia’s elementary schools, multi-grade or “blended” classes (where students from different grade levels learn together) have become more prevalent in the post-COVID period. Educators report that shifting enrolment patterns and funding pressures after the pandemic have led schools to organise more combined-grade classes than before www2.gov.bc.ca. The increase in split classes is largely driven…
-
The afterlife of austerity
When public institutions are forced to survive under prolonged austerity, something deeper than budgets begins to break—something in the connective tissue of trust, of care, of the quiet, ordinary belief that systems exist to serve people. The myth of resilience—the comforting story we tell ourselves about teachers with hearts of gold and staff who always…
-
What looks like a reward is often a repair
When a child returns from the office with gummy worms or a cartoon, it may look like a reward—but often, it is a repair. In a system built on scarcity, the smallest gesture of care is mistaken for indulgence. This essay reframes the narrative around “rewarding bad behaviour” to reveal what is actually happening beneath…
-
The right amount of agony in BC schools
After watching my children endure eight years of institutional failure, eight years of exclusion disguised as discipline and support withheld under the language of inclusion, I have come to several conclusions. Certain forms of suffering—like being agonised inside—do not draw support because they do not disrupt the adult’s flow, do not demand intervention with noise…
-
Bound by blood
Maternal embodiment and the unbearable violence of institutional disbelief. We were once one body There is a biological, emotional, and moral reality so fundamental that no policy manual can contain it, and no professional training can domesticate it—my child once lived inside me. His limbs pressed against my ribs before they ever touched the outside…
-
Wait and see: a mother’s warning
Before kindergarten began, we told them—unequivocally, painstakingly, with as much specificity as we could muster—that our son had been harmed in daycare, that he had a long line of diagnoses and was awaiting an autism assessment, that his nervous system was thrashed, and that he would require sustained, full-day relational support in order to experience…
-
The cost of masking: What we lose when children perform wellness
This evening, I walked my son down the street toward the place where his father was waiting to pick him up. It was an ordinary hand-off on an ordinary day, except I carried that soft, watchful question I always carry now, held quietly in my chest until the timing feels right. I asked if he…
