End Collective Punishment in BC Schools

06/02/2026

I have written more than a million words now, and I used to call that a symptom. I am beginning to suspect it is the treatment.

— Just a Parent

What a twelve-year mortality study measured, and what it accidentally wrote down: the code of conduct every district hands a mother on her way into the room. You learn it in your hands before you learn it anywhere else. At the table you fold them in your lap, you soften your face into the shape

05/26/2026

05/26/2026

I have always been obsessed with monsters.

Halloween, haunted houses, creatures in the dark, women with snakes for hair, mothers in caves, ghosts with unfinished business. I think I loved them before I understood why.

Monsters are where a culture puts the truths it cannot domesticate.

This article came from thinking about what it means to be made monstrous by an institution.

There is the condemnation: too intense, too emotional, too much, too angry, too persistent, too unwilling to move on.

And then there is the reclamation.

Because sometimes the thing they call monstrous is the part of you that survived. Let me say that again: sometimes the thing they call monstrous is the part of you that survived!

The part that kept records. The part that remembered. The part that grew teeth because the truth kept being softened, scattered, and buried.

School advocacy can do that to a person. You can enter the room trying to stay calm, reasonable, collaborative, acceptable. You can leave with your body clenched around everything you were forced to swallow. Over time, you can become almost unrecognisable to yourself.

That process can feel private.

It is political.

How schools turn caregiver testimony into threat — and why the monstrous advocate is made by the institution that fears her memory.

05/24/2026

If you follow this page, you already know the patterns: partial schedules, room clears, accommodation refusal, safety plans that remove rather than support.

K12 Complaints is where that knowledge becomes practical. It's a resource built for BC families who are navigating school harm, trying to name what's happening, and looking for the language to hold their district accountable.

Please follow and share:

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61590576381623

We blog at https://k12complaints.ca/

05/24/2026

I can confirm that I'm a member of the bad mother's club!

There is a version of “good parenting” that school systems often reward. It looks calm. Cooperative. Grateful. Patient. It attends the meetings, reads the reports, accepts the explanations, and tries one more strategy. It keeps the relationship warm. It softens the email. It gives the school mor...

05/16/2026

Institutional capture refers to the process by which individuals — parents, children, advocates, even dissenting professionals — are absorbed into the operational logic of an institution to the point where they begin reproducing its framework, its language, and its priorities, without necessarily endorsing them or recognising what is happening.

I'm grappling with my participation in this.

Institutional capture refers to the process by which individuals — parents, children, advocates, even dissenting professionals — are absorbed into the operational logic of an institution to the point where they begin reproducing its framework, its language, and its priorities, without necessaril...

05/08/2026

Happy Mother's Day!

Posting this a little early because you mommas deserve something that comes easy, lands on time, and does not require three follow-up emails.

For everyone already bracing for Mother’s Day: this one is for the mothers who are done being good.

Mother’s Day for the mothers who are done being good: maternal rage, institutional failure, and why being reasonable was never enough.

05/07/2026

We need to talk….. about public education that is.
Like you, the Institute for Public Education/BC believes that quality, inclusive, well-supported public schools are key to a thriving society and healthy democracy. But we’re increasingly worried that we’re at risk of losing our public education system through privatization, chronic underfunding, profiteering, and the diversion of public funding to elite private schools. That’s why we’re hosting a panel presentation and discussion, “Is Public Education at Risk?”, on April 23rd, and we hope you’ll join us.
Find out all the details here:
https://instituteforpubliceducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Is-Public-Education-at-Risk-April-23-2026.pdf

05/07/2026

Three Stooges Governance

BC needs an inclusion guarantee so schools cannot balance budgets by passing risk onto disabled children and their families.

05/04/2026

It's May the 4th, and many of you will innocently share Star Wars messages today. Lucas claims he built the original trilogy as an anti-empire allegory—the Rebels were the Viet Cong, the Empire was America during Vietnam. But intent isn't effect. What the films actually did was hype a generation about bombs in space. Make dogfights beautiful. Render the X-wing as toy and the Death Star trench run as the most thrilling three minutes in cinema. Reagan named his missile defence programme Star Wars and Lucas sued—but the cultural work was already done. You cannot make weapons look that good and expect children to grow up suspicious of them.

The aesthetics got absorbed into actual military propaganda. Heroic pilots, righteous bombing runs, redemptive violence, the moral architecture of good guys with the right weapons restoring order to the galaxy—that visual grammar runs through Top Gun and Iron Man and Captain Marvel and the broader Hollywood-DoD pipeline that has shaped over 2,500 productions in exchange for hardware access and script approval. Anti-empire stories get metabolised into pro-empire feeling.

Remembrance Day assemblies that sanctify rather than mourn. Lockdown drills that rehearse children in the choreography of their own potential deaths. Patriotic songs sung by kids too young to consent to the ideology.

Collective punishment is a war crime under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. BC schools enact it on disabled children.

Keep military industrial complex propoganda out of our schools. End collective punishment in schools.