Some children with disabilities have been banned from field trips, kept in the hallway or a private room, and received little academic instruction.
Lama Alsaafin’s 16-year-old son was languishing at home last week when B.C.’s ombudsperson announced a new investigation into why so many students are excluded from school.
Recommended Videos
It was the teen’s third straight day of not attending his Surrey high school.
It wasn’t because he didn’t want to go to his Grade 10 classes. Rather, Alsaafin was told there was no staff with sufficient training available to support her autistic son, who also has intellectual disabilities.
A lack of consistent support at school for the non-verbal teen has kept him home, on and off, since kindergarten.
“This current year, literally, it’s the worst year since he started school,” Alsaafin said. “He’s been kept home for weeks and weeks and weeks because I cannot send him to school.”
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.
Sherry Breshears
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.
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.
The district did not directly answer Postmedia’s questions.
In an email, the board said it had budgeted more than $100 million to support children with disabilities or diverse abilities this year, and that the large district has always offered “more specialized programs” for this group.
“These students can be placed in classrooms that allows them to only be with peers of similar needs, impacting the ratio for support when compared to other districts,” the email said.
Vancouver parent Kaori Lau said her Grade 3 daughter has good support at her school. She is board secretary for BCEd Access Society and said the group’s 6,000 Facebook members continually ask “where is all the special education funding going?”
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.
Beare acknowledged that “barriers remain” for some students, and promised to co-operate with the ombudsperson’s investigation.
Advocates hope Chalke’s probe will recommend the provincial law requiring mandatory hours of student instruction be equally applied to children who have behavioural or intellectual challenges.
The ministry’s email said school districts have a responsibility to provide “a safe and inclusive” environment for all students and staff, and how mandatory instructional hours are delivered can be made on a “case-by-case basis,” including online and self-directed learning.
Parents would also like a provincewide policy for diverse learners, as right now each of the 60 school districts sets its own services and funding.
The ministry, though, appeared to reject this request, saying: “Decisions related to specific educational programs, human resources (including the hiring of educational assistants), and resource allocation are made locally by boards of education.”
The story of Amber Oldershaw’s nine-year-old son Jaxson, who has autism, is an example of why parents are calling for standardized support across school districts.
Now in the Maple Ridge school district, Jaxson receives support to be in his Grade 3 classroom with other students, and has regular access to an occupational therapist, physiotherapist and speech therapist.
Jaxson was in another district from kindergarten to Grade 2, where there was no support worker for him. So the family paid for one. Jaxson was excluded from assemblies and field trips, and spent much of his time separated from other students, receiving no educational instruction and “playing with marbles all day,” Oldershaw said.
It was “inhumane” to exclude her son from activities that other students were enjoying, said Oldershaw.
“Just because they might get upset quicker than other kids and they struggle to communicate, it doesn’t mean that they don’t have feelings,” she said of children with disabilities.
Changing districts “was the best thing that we could have done,” she added. Jaxson is largely non-verbal, but now says “school” each night before bed because he is so excited to go.
In her son’s Surrey school, though, Alsaafin said when an educational assistant with sufficient training is not available to support him, a substitute is often incapable of handling the non-verbal, non-toilet-trained teen, who is at risk of running away.
When he’s sent home, it is disruptive for her work as a coordinator with the Family Support Network. It also hurt her son, as neurodiverse students do better with consistent routines.
“He has self-(harming) behaviours that escalate every time he’s having a new support worker who does not understand what his needs are,” Alsaafin said.
Just because they might get upset quicker than other kids and they struggle to communicate, it doesn’t mean that they don’t have feelings,
Amber Oldershaw
Surrey Schools spokeswoman Rena Heer declined to answer questions about the number of support workers at Alsaafin’s son’s school. She said the district allotted an extra $54 million this year, above the inclusive-education funding provided by the province, to support students with diverse needs.
When asked about students being excluded from field trips or assemblies, she said the district must ensure the rights of all students and a safe work environment for staff.
“Students may be sent home if an incident occurs to trigger an employee safety plan,” Heer said.
While Alsaafin appreciates the staff who work well with her son, she bristles when anyone implies the district is doing her a favour to keep her son in school.
“It’s a right that our children go to school in a safe and well-accommodated environment,” said Alsaafin, who through her job speaks with many other parents facing similar challenges.
“It breaks my heart. … This system is failing special needs students big time.”
With a file from Stephanie Ip