Your Accessibility Committee
A series about institutional betrayal, process theatre, and the architecture of performative inclusion.
This tag collects essays written during and after participation in a school district’s so-called accessibility committee—a process branded as collaborative, but engineered for control. Each post exposes a specific facet of the committee’s structure, tone, and tactics, from the inaccessible tools to the trauma-inducing introductions, from the recycled engagement norms to the complete erasure of community authorship. These are not meeting notes. These are post-mortems. Written in real time, under duress, by someone invited to collaborate but positioned to perform. Together, they form a record of extraction disguised as equity. You may call it consultation. We call it evidence.
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On far gone conclusions and participating in a school district’s accessibility committee
You called it collaboration. We recognised the smell of extraction. The invitation: dressed in equity, padded with keywords You summoned us to assist. You issued invitations laced with keywords—barriers, co-design, lived experience, equity—an enticing academic dialect for what turned out to be unpaid policy laundering in a branded container. You framed it as collaboration, spoke…
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Barriers in the process mirror the barriers we named
We gathered to name the obstacles—but the process itself became one of them. The same systems that silence us replicated themselves in real time, even as we tried to describe their harm. The process was a case study in itself We were invited into a session to name the barriers we faced—attitudinal, structural, policy, communicational,…
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What collaboration really means
You cannot ask for collaboration after the structure has been built. If the goals are fixed, the roles already assigned, the rules already written, then what you are offering is participation. Not partnership. Participation is not collaboration Too often, institutions conflate involvement with influence, as though inviting someone into a process late—after the budget is…
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Introductions are an access issue
Every structure carries weight. And when you ask us to begin with a name and a smile, but offer no container for safety, you are asking us to choose between authenticity and self-preservation. What seems simple is often a site of harm For people whose presence in institutional space is routine and unremarkable—those whose titles…
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Don’t wait until the lawsuits
By the time harm becomes legally actionable, it has already become unbearable. If people are still talking to you, they are still hoping you will change. Institutions often ask the wrong question When institutions receive stories of harm—when a parent names systemic exclusion, or a student speaks quietly of despair, or a staff member shares…
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I am just me: What it costs to show up
If I could have walked away from this institution, I would have—but I couldn’t, and so I came, and the price of showing up was almost everything I had left to give. Showing up is not the beginning—it is the aftermath By the time I appear on your committee call or log into your engagement…
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Ego has no place in accessibility
This work requires transformation, not performance. Your legacy is not what you protected. Your legacy is what you changed when you were told it was failing. Leave your laurels at the door Accessibility work is not about legacy preservation. It is not about titles or tenure or whether your department once won an innovation award…
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We must start with an acknowledgement of harm
Before we talk about solutions, or even feelings, we must name what has been done. We begin in the wreckage When an institution convenes a committee to explore accessibility, equity, inclusion, or anything vaguely shaped like justice, it often opens with a bright, empty cheerfulness—a blurb about building community, a land acknowledgement read like punctuation,…
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Whose barriers get counted in Vancouver School District?
When I first opened the Vancouver School Board’s Accessibility Engagement Summary Report, I did what I always do with these kinds of documents—I made a beeline for the methodology, the numbers, the breakdown of who actually got to speak. On page 10 I discovered that 2,855 people had participated; on page 11 I discovered that…
