Jan 20, 2025, Vancouver (BC) Sun: 'It's inhumane': B.C. children with disabilities excluded from school classes, activities
. . .Human rights laws and other legislation say children must be provided an education. Alsaafin, though, said she and many other families are frustrated by the roadblocks their students face.
Ombudsperson Jay Chalke’s investigation, announced Tuesday, appears to answer a years-long rallying cry from parents like Alsaafin. He is looking into “complaints from across the province” about students from kindergarten to Grade 12 “being excluded from school with little or no instruction.”
Many desperate families have high hopes for Chalke’s probe.
“Over the last five years, this practice of exclusion has got a lot worse. And the avenues of appeal … are virtually non existent,” said Angela Clancy, executive director of the Family Support Institute.
“I would love to see something that is written into law that absolutely prohibits discrimination of kids with disabilities, and instead enhances their supports and services.”
Our kids are not included, and they're not given the accommodations that they need and deserve in order to access a proper education.
Her New Westminster-based non-profit, which assists British Columbians with disabilities, helped 9,000 families last year.
Children being excluded from classes or activities is the most common concern voiced by families.
“The majority of the calls that we hear — which is in the hundreds a year, particularly last year — was kids being restricted to a very small amount of time in school every day,” Clancy said.
“Students that are left to sit in the cloak room rather than the classroom, or in the hallway rather than the classroom, or put in a seclusion and restraint room, locked in there and not allowed to participate in other activities.”
One Grade 2 student has gone to school 15 minutes a day since kindergarten, Clancy said. Other children can’t participate in recess or lunch, or go on field trips, unless their parents help.
There simply aren’t enough resources to support these kids, said Clancy, the legal guardian of a brother with complex disabilities who spent his school days in a segregated, windowless classroom.
The province gives extra money to school boards based on the level of help students are deemed to need. The NDP, since forming government in 2017, “has more than doubled funding” for diverse learners, for a total of $950 million this school year, Education Minister Lisa Beare said in a statement.
Most school boards say they have dedicated more money toward inclusive education and hired more support workers in recent years.
So why isn’t all that extra money making life better for these families? A new analysis by the Vancouver District Parents Advisory Council may offer some clues.
The parents’ group says that since 2016-17, the Vancouver school district did increase funding to support students with the most serious disabilities. But the rate of increase was outpaced by rising wages and the growing number of students with disabilities, leading to a steady decline in per-student funding over the past three years.
The council also found that while provincial funding went up, the Vancouver district spent a smaller portion of it on inclusive education in recent years. Vancouver spends less money for each student with a serious designation than the districts of North Vancouver, Maple Ridge, Richmond, Burnaby and Surrey.
The Vancouver parents’ group started its investigation after witnessing students increasingly excluded from instruction and activities. Parents say resource teachers were often pulled away to fill in for absent classroom teachers and there was a “drastic reduction” in educational assistants.
“Our kids are not included, and they’re not given the accommodations that they need and deserve in order to access a proper education,” said Sherry Breshears, the mother of a Grade 11 student with a disability.
Breshears, a researcher and University of B.C. lecturer, is a member of the Vancouver District Parents Advisory Council’s inclusive education working group, which did the analysis of district spending.
Her son’s Vancouver high school went from seven educational assistants two years ago to two last year, and then one went on leave, she said.
The decline in inclusive-education funding affects the 3,000 Vancouver students who have higher-level disabilities, as well as another 3,000 students who rely on portions of this budget for their support needs, her group found.
Breshears hopes the district will consider the group’s findings in its upcoming budget discussions.
The parents would like more money allotted to improve educational assistant-to-student ratios and hire more substitute teachers, so resource teachers are not diverted.
In an email, the board said it had budgeted more than $100 million [$69m] to support children with disabilities or diverse abilities this year, and that the large district has always offered “more specialized programs” for this group. . . .
The society’s unique, B.C.-wide 2022-23 “exclusion tracker” report documented 5,973 missed days or incidents of children with special needs being left out of school events. Lau estimated the numbers would be no better today.
Just as society fought discrimination over people’s race or gender identity, there now needs to be an “anti-ableism” movement to reduce the exclusion of these kids, she argued. “A lot of people working in education … come from an able-bodied point of view.”
The Education Ministry said in an email it does not track exclusion rates, but noted more than three-quarters of Grade 12 students with disabilities and diverse needs graduated last year, compared to just one-third a decade ago.
The ministry said the number of educational assistants in B.C. has grown by 30 per cent over the past five years and that it is “working closely” with school districts to help them recruit and retain these crucial workers.
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