We are coming up to the final month of the school year, June. June is a well-known month in our community as exclusion skyrockets. Countless parents and guardians receive last-minute phone calls or emails telling them that the school cannot support their child, or that it is in the best interest of their child not to join their class on the field trip.
June has a celebratory feel to it. With warmer weather, classes are heading outside more often to benefit from outdoor learning. Students are excited and looking forward to sports day activities, class field trips, overnight camps, and swim trips.
Suddenly, all of the barriers become evident, and schools take the easy way out – offloading their responsibilities onto families, hoping they won’t kick up a fuss. Many schools put expectations on parents to attend the field trip, and only then will their child be allowed to join the rest of the class. Parents are left scrambling to, yet again, take time off work.
It’s extremely upsetting to get those dreaded decisions from the school, made without consultation. Parents are then forced into last-minute and unexpected advocacy situations. Some parents, out of desperation, have taken their issues to the media, wanting to help others and raise public awareness.
Here are a couple of media articles on exclusion and field trips:
Daily Hive News – June 9th, 2022 – Boy with autism excluded from kindergarten field trip
Tracking exclusion is an important part of advocacy. We need data.
I will always remember attending a workshop where the Human Rights Commissioner was speaking. She talked about how important data was, and said, “We need to be undeniable.”
The Exclusion Tracker was created by two mothers from the Surrey school district who recognized the issue, the need, and the importance of tracking this information. It is because of their ingenuity that exclusion has been tracked since 2018 – parents taking matters into their own hands and getting the work done.
BCEd Access now partners with the Family Support Institute in the management of our Exclusion Tracker. Family Support Institute has the staff and capacity to fully realize the tracker’s potential.
You can find the Exclusion Tracker through our website:
or directly on the FSI website:
We understand the emotional labour involved in filling out these surveys. We appreciate every parent who is somehow able to fit in one more task after already tackling what feels like a never-ending list of things to do each day. It is because of all of you that we can be undeniable.
Exclusion happens. The experience of having your child rejected and explicitly told they don’t belong with their class is heartbreaking.
Schools have a duty to accommodate to the point of undue hardship.
It is because of parent advocacy – filing BC Ombudsperson complaints – that the Office of the BC Ombudsperson decided to start a systemic investigation, the first of its kind in Canada into school exclusion.
The survey for parents and guardians was originally set to close on April 1st, 2025. Due to the overwhelming response, it has been extended. As of May, the survey is also open to school staff. It is confidential; their employers will never know they filled it out. For the Fairness in Schools link to both surveys for parents and education staff, click here.
Filing complaints and completing exclusion surveys are a form of advocacy. They collect data. They let the larger systems know what is really happening. If we don’t speak up, no one will know. Exclusion cannot be a secret that no one talks about. From a systemic perspective, when you fill out the Exclusion Tracker, you make your experience count. The system now sees you and hears you.
We thank all the parents who have filled out the Exclusion Tracker throughout the school year. If your family experiences any exclusion in the month of June – an especially high time for exclusion – please consider reporting it. If you have the capacity, we encourage you to submit to both the Exclusion Tracker and the BC Ombudsperson’s survey. But even completing just one makes a meaningful difference. Every story shared helps make exclusion visible and undeniable.
If you want support, strategies to deal with exclusion, and insights from parents and guardians with lived experience, please join our Facebook group of over 6,400 members.
Here is the Exclusion Tracker link. Thank you, FSI, for continuing this important work – and a huge thank you to the creative, driven mothers who started it. We stand on the shoulders of giants, carrying on their work and using it as a stepping stone to push our advocacy even farther.
BCEdAccess Society 