hand icon with "End collective Punishment in BC Schools"

Resources for decision makers

This page offers tools for school decision makers—those who design, enforce, or justify institutional practice—to confront the culture of control they have inherited and sustained.

In schools across British Columbia, decision makers hold extraordinary influence over the daily lives of children—setting codes of conduct, approving behaviour plans, allocating staff time, and interpreting what counts as safety, regulation, disruption, or belonging.

While educators may implement the strategies most visible to families, it is decision makers who define the parameters within which those strategies unfold: the policy language that obscures harm, the data systems that equate compliance with success, and the staffing ratios that guarantee unmet needs.

This page offers a point of entry for those willing to examine the foundations of school culture—not in defence of the status quo, but in recognition of its failure to uphold dignity, justice, or care.

Here you will find writing and resources that challenge the deeply held assumption that children must be controlled to be educated, that discomfort is a necessary rite of passage, and that exclusion is the natural outcome of disorder. These are not isolated missteps by individual teachers or misbehaving students. These are systemic failures engineered through scarcity logic, institutional ableism, and policy inertia—and they demand decision makers who are brave enough to choose a different path.

Resources

This section includes essays, frameworks, and practical tools to support school decision makers in building cultures of accountability, care, and inclusion. You will find analysis of codes of conduct, critiques of dominant behavioural paradigms, position papers on collective punishment, and writing that reveals the emotional and political costs of institutional harm. These resources are designed for superintendents, principals, vice-principals, district administrators, school trustees, policy drafters, and all others whose decisions shape the conditions under which students and educators attempt to survive.

Whether you are ready to act, unsure where to begin, or reckoning with past decisions, this is a place to listen, reflect, and rebuild.