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If children were repeatedly struggling in a river and lifeguards were being injured rescuing them, we would demand answers. Were there enough lifeguards? Did they have the training and equipment they needed? Had warnings been ignored? Why were so many children reaching the point of needing rescue?
A child may have jumped in or played too close to the current. Children make choices while still developing the skills to recognise danger and keep themselves safe. Adults remain responsible for supervision, protection, and support that account for those developing abilities.
If a child injured a lifeguard while struggling to stay afloat, we would take that injury seriously. We would examine the conditions that put both at risk and what would prevent another injury. Harming someone during a rescue would not make the child less entitled to protection or erase adults’ responsibilities.
School safety deserves the same scrutiny. We need to ask what put children and staff at risk, what support was missing, and who had the authority to act before a crisis occurred.
Recent reporting by the Globe and Mail and CTV News documents serious concerns about injuries and unsafe conditions in schools. Under the heading “Inclusion done wrong?”, CTV’s September 16 article presents rising violence partly as a consequence of the shift towards inclusive education. It also describes classrooms without adequate educational-assistant support and the loss of specialised programming.
What support was withdrawn? What replaced it? Were students’ needs being met before incidents occurred? The figures presented establish serious safety concerns. They do not establish that educating disabled children alongside their peers caused those concerns.
Blaming inclusion accepts inadequate funding as a fixed parameter and then asks which children should be removed to make the remaining system function. Questions about staffing, accessible education, supervision, accommodation, and funding become a referendum on whether disabled children belong.
Looking upstream means examining the conditions that put children and staff at risk, the warnings that preceded a crisis, and the decisions that left those warnings unanswered.
What happened before the incident?
When something frightening happens at school, attention understandably goes to the immediate event. A student hit someone, threw a desk, bit or kicked an education worker, ran from the building, or made a threat. Those incidents matter, particularly when someone is injured.
An account that begins with the rescue can leave out every warning that came before it.
Our families hear that “unexpected behaviour occurred”, that a child “went from zero to sixty”, or that there was an “unknown antecedent”. But a crisis does not begin at the moment an incident report starts.
We need to know what happened that morning, that week, and sometimes throughout the preceding school year:
- Was the student overwhelmed by noise, crowds, or sensory demands?
- Was the academic work accessible?
- Were accommodations being provided?
- Did staffing change unexpectedly?
- Was a trusted adult absent?
- Was the student being bullied?
- Were transitions predictable?
One parent explained:
“Two crisis situations could have been prevented if they had read the IEP and documents I provided weeks before school started. Now my kid only attends for an hour, 3 days a week.”
— Anonymous parent, Year in Review – A Collective Scream
Sensory overload, inaccessible teaching, abrupt transitions, unpredictable staffing, and missing accommodations can make participation harder and contribute to distress. An adult who knows the student and has the time and skills to respond can often recognise distress early and help before it becomes a crisis.
Yet an incident report may describe exactly what a student did while saying little about the accommodation that was unavailable, the educational assistant who had been reassigned, or the bullying that had already been reported repeatedly.
Looking upstream means asking when the danger became apparent, who knew, and what they did. What contributed to this incident, and what needs to change so it does not happen again?
Inclusion is being blamed for something the evidence has not established
Education workers have been warning for years about understaffing, insufficient specialist support, and injuries. Staff who are injured at work deserve protection, support, and serious attention to the conditions that put them at risk.
Evidence that workers are being injured does not establish that inclusion caused those injuries or that disabled students are responsible for rising violence in schools.
The figures in CTV’s article measure different things: incident reports involving students or parents, accepted workplace injury claims, and responses to a voluntary teacher survey. As presented, they do not establish which incidents involved disabled students, whether required accommodations were available, or whether a different placement would have prevented the harm.
The survey’s finding that 95 per cent had experienced violence applies to its 165 respondents, representing about eight per cent of the union’s membership. CTV acknowledges that teachers experiencing violence may have been more likely to respond. In its response to the report, the BC Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) said its provincial survey, which used a random sample, found that 15 per cent of teachers had personally experienced workplace violence. The surveys cover different groups and use different sampling methods.
Disabled children are also experiencing violence
The framing of this debate makes disabled children most visible when they hurt someone else. At BCEdAccess, our members repeatedly report that their children experience violence from peers and adults. They describe bullying, assault, restraint, seclusion, and humiliation, alongside exclusion from learning and school life.
BCEdAccess’s 2022–23 Exclusion Tracker report found that nearly 18 per cent of survey respondents reported that their disabled child had been restrained, secluded, or both at school. More than 20 per cent were unsure whether their child had experienced these practices. These findings belong alongside staff survey results in any serious discussion of school safety.
Some families tell us their children are terrified to attend school. Some children say there is nowhere at school where they feel safe. Families report children running into dangerous situations without adequate supervision. Families report keeping their children home to keep them safe. These are serious safety concerns that require urgent attention.
Families also describe children being hamred by staff and then having to encounter those same adults at school, day after day. They report other staff minimising what happened and little or no lasting accountability. The child is expected to return while the family continues trying to secure protection.
A safety review that counts injuries to lifeguards while overlooking what happened to the children gives us an incomplete picture. Disabled children’s safety deserves the same urgency, scrutiny, and accountability.
Which voices are being heard?
Professional groups and staff unions feature prominently in these articles. Family perspectives can be harder to bring into public discussions. Parents are being asked to speak publicly about minor children, sometimes during the worst period of their lives, with little control over how the story will be framed.
When BCEdAccess recently sought families willing to speak with a national reporter about children whose behaviour had been described as violent, only a few came forward. Families worried that being identifiable could affect their child’s treatment at school or bring unwanted attention from the Ministry of Children and Family Development.
Their absence from media stories tells us something about how vulnerable families feel.
One BCEdAccess parent described an autistic child who was bullied while staff shortages meant the supervision already identified as necessary was unavailable. Eventually the family withdrew him from school, and both parents reduced their working hours trying to keep him safe.
“Our autistic child was bullied by a group of other kids, and instead of the school addressing it, our child was the one treated as the problem.”
Another parent described a daughter who was quiet and “non behavioural” and received virtually no support while her confidence and mental health deteriorated. For years, the family heard, “we have kids throwing desks and our supports are thin.” Eventually the child began self-harming and stopped attending school.
Who gets protected when violence happens?
When an education worker is injured, there are occupational health systems, incident reports, union representation, workplace investigations, and mechanisms designed to make that injury visible. Those protections matter, and they need to work.
For disabled children, reports of bullying, assault, restraint, seclusion, humiliation, and exclusion can be scattered across individual complaints and separate investigations. A child can experience several kinds of harm over several years without anyone assembling those experiences into a coherent picture.
Families repeatedly tell BCEdAccess that when an adult harms their child, they can spend months or years pursuing accountability and still feel that the response bears little relationship to the damage. The institutional process ends. The child continues living with what happened.
Families describe a similar problem when another student repeatedly harms their child. Some report that supervision is unavailable or that repeated requests for intervention produce little change. Some have resorted to involving police when their child is bullied in elementary school. Eventually, parents may conclude that the only reliable way to protect their child is to keep them home. The child experiencing the violence then loses access to education.
We would not pull a child half-drowned from a river, resuscitate them, and throw them back into the same current as soon as they could breathe. Yet families describe children being expected to return to the same unsafe conditions after a crisis.
A child becoming calm again does not mean the conditions have become safe. Recovery requires time, reliable support, and changes that address what happened.
Staff and families are asking for many of the same things
The teachers quoted by CTV ask for proper supports and increased classroom funding. The Greater Victoria Teachers’ Association’s published report summary itself attributes violence to the education system’s failure to meet student needs.
Responding to the report, BCTF president Carole Gordon stated:
“Let’s be clear: kids are not the problem; a lack of support is the problem.”
Her statement connects adequate staffing and services with early intervention and safe, inclusive schools.
Workers and families describe too few staff, too little specialist support, inadequate training, insufficient time, poor continuity, and adults stretched beyond their capacity. Workers experience these conditions as impossible workloads, stress, burnout, and injury. Disabled students experience them as inaccessible education, unsafe environments, distress, exclusion, and lost learning.
The child and the lifeguard both need protection. Why are we treating the conflict as though it exists between the people inside the classroom?
Existing allocations are repeatedly presented as the limit of what can be offered. Teachers are told there are too many needs in the room. Families are told there is nothing more available. Administrators are told to manage within their budgets. Disabled students learn, directly or indirectly, that their needs make them the problem.
That is a convenient political arrangement. As long as everyone inside public education is fighting about who gets the available staff and which children should be somewhere else, attention stays away from the decision-makers who determine the system’s capacity.
A plan on paper is not access
BCEdAccess families repeatedly describe support that appears in a plan but is unavailable during the school day.
A student may have an Individual Education Plan (IEP) while the teacher lacks the information, time, or staffing required to implement it. An educational assistant may be assigned to support students while being routinely redirected elsewhere.
One parent described what happened when the EA providing their son’s scribing support left the district:
“My son requires access scribe support. It’s in his IEP. Teacher is unable to accommodate being regular scribe and there is no EA available for his classroom. This means he cannot complete or participate in classroom work.”
— Anonymous parent, EAs Are Essential for Equitable Education
Support can even disappear because it worked. A child begins attending more consistently, coping better, or having fewer crises, and that stability becomes evidence that support is no longer necessary. When it is removed, distress returns and the student may be sent through another queue for help.
When support is keeping a child afloat, decisions to remove it must account for what happens without it.
Resources also need to be used effectively. A school may have a quiet space but deny a child access when they need it. A plan may identify early signs of distress while adults continue treating them as defiance. Funding matters, alongside staff practice, leadership, and accountability for implementation.
A safety plan cannot depend on a child who cannot swim keeping themselves safe beside a strong current. At school, a plan that relies on a child recognising danger, regulating distress, or asking for help must account for whether they can reliably do those things, especially when overwhelmed. Adults must provide supervision, protection, and support while the child develops those skills.
Inclusion requires flexibility
Meaningful inclusion requires flexibility. A student may need a quieter workspace, specialised teaching, small-group instruction, individual support, or a different pace. These can be essential parts of an accessible education.
BC’s own curriculum guidance distinguishes inclusion from full integration in a regular classroom. It emphasises meaningful participation and recognises a role for learning assistance rooms and specialised settings, with conditions governing alternative placements.
The Institute for Public Education BC’s Our Hopes and Dreams for Public Education in BC expresses this as “Sometimes together, sometimes apart, always belonging.” It envisions schools with the spaces, staffing, and teaching flexibility to meet individual needs without stigma, while preserving each child’s connection to their community.
Students need meaningful teaching, peer relationships, reliable support, and a voice in decisions. Students and families need autonomy to choose environments that support safety, curiosity, and learning, whether in their local school or a specialised program.
Small-group and individual instruction, as proposed in the CTV article, can be part of inclusive education. Support should respond to identified needs before crisis, including for children whose distress is quiet.
The province knows recorded designations have increased
The Ministry’s 2025 Estimates Notes, page 67, record substantial increases in inclusive education designations.
Between 2015/16 and 2024/25, public-school enrolment increased by 11.6 per cent, while the number of students with inclusive education designations increased by 46.6 per cent. Autism designations increased by more than 192 per cent, from 7,794 students to 22,824. For 2024/25, the Ministry reported 96,598 students with an inclusive education designation, approximately 14 per cent of BC’s student population.
These are administrative counts. They do not tell us how much support each student needs or how much of the increase reflects changes in identification. They do show that the province has recorded substantially more students with designations.
The same page records that, during work on an inclusive education policy and guide between 2018 and 2021, several partners raised concerns about releasing a new policy without updating the funding model.
These figures and concerns should prompt questions about whether funding, staffing, and school design can meet identified needs. A government can announce historic investments while children still lack educational assistants, accessible transportation, communication support, counselling, or a full school day. Total spending alone cannot tell us whether those services are reaching children.
The capacity to meet students’ needs depends on decisions about funding, workforce planning, service delivery, and accountability. Scarcity is a policy choice.
Public education has to serve the public
Public education must be designed, staffed, and funded for the children who live here. Disabled children are part of that public. Equal access and disability accommodation are legal obligations. Disabled children are rights-bearers.
Families do not control school conditions. Children do not set budgets, staffing levels, or supervision plans. The system knows many are still learning to swim. Providing safe conditions and support is an adult responsibility.
Withholding support and then using the consequences to justify exclusion is a defence of segregation. Don’t blame a child for drowning! It makes children pay for institutional failures while the people responsible evade accountability.
Meaningful inclusion supports school safety
Reliable supervision allows adults to interrupt bullying before it becomes chronic. Trusted relationships help staff recognise distress early. Accessible teaching, predictable routines, communication support, and functioning accommodations can reduce the demands that leave children overwhelmed.
Staff with adequate time and support have greater capacity to supervise, teach, intervene, and help students recover. Children whose early requests for help are heard have more opportunities to get support before distress escalates.
Providing these conditions is the work that happens before a rescue becomes necessary. Meaningful inclusion belongs in a school-safety strategy.
Look upstream and look up
Look upstream at the conditions that keep making rescue necessary. Then look up at the people who control staffing, resources, and the response to warnings.
At BCEdAccess, families repeatedly tell us they raised concerns early. Too often, meaningful action comes after a child reaches crisis, stops attending, or has already been harmed. By then, schools may have accumulated months or years of warning signs.
CTV’s article describes the province pointing to increased funding and district responsibility, while the district points to its existing violence-prevention program. Families and staff still need to know who will correct the conditions they are reporting, and by when.
Accountability requires someone with the authority to secure missing support, a deadline for delivering it, and a process for resolving failures. Reduced timetables need plans to restore safe, meaningful access to education, with fixed review dates. Those plans must respond to the child’s needs and views while holding adults to deadlines for providing support.
Partial days and repeated requests to stay home need to be visible in exclusion data. Public reporting should show whether injuries, unmet support needs, and lost instructional time are decreasing. A lower incident count achieved by keeping children out of school cannot, on its own, demonstrate success.
Student supports need clear responsibility so they do not disappear when staffing becomes difficult. Bullying reports need timely intervention and follow-up to establish whether the child is safe. Families need remedies that arrive while they can still make a difference.
A budget that cannot deliver safe, meaningful access to education is an inadequate budget. A funded support that never reaches a child is an implementation failure. Both require action. The people who control funding, staffing, and school operations must answer for these failures.
Children should not have to survive unsafe conditions to prove they belong in school.
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