Sarah Dyson’s son Alec is not a typical five-year-old.
To the untrained eye, some may say he’s disobedient, at least “for lack of a better way of saying it,” Dyson said.
“I can’t say no to him. We do everything indirectly. He either overhears me say something and then he decides it’s his idea, and he’s onboard with it, or I say something like ‘I think I might go do this, and I might do that,’ and then he’ll go ‘Oh, actually I wanna do that.’”
Alec is autistic, with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)—one of thousands of Canadian children diagnosed as such (a 2018 study by the Canadian Government found that one in 66 children aged five to 17 have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder).
“Since we’ve had all his assessments, and now that we understand him a lot better, we have completely flipped our parenting style … and it’s working,” Dyson said.
“We’ve got a much stronger relationship with him. There’s a lot less yelling, but … we walk around on eggshells around him.”
Enrolled for one year in the Whistler Waldorf School’s (WWS) “Little Cedars” program for early learning, Alec was “thriving” with the help of a support worker, Dyson said—but when it came time to enrol Alec in Kindergarten, the school said it couldn’t meet his needs.
After his parents, who are now moving home to Australia, submitted an official grievance letter, WWS agreed to accept Alec with seven conditions attached. But the parents were left disillusioned.
While Alec’s Waldorf teachers were “amazing,” communicating and collaborating regularly, “we are disappointed with the reluctance of the administration to accommodate for Alec’s disability, and the administration’s poor communication,” they wrote in a May 28 letter declining the conditional enrolment.
“We have found our experience with the Waldorf Administration to be very unprofessional.
“Nothing was ever discussed with us; we have only ever been told what the administration’s process would be and when we should expect a decision.”
Asked to comment, WWS’ director of advancement Jen Dodds said the school can’t discuss specific circumstances surrounding any individual family or student due to privacy laws and WWS policy.
“[WWS]’ thorough admissions process is intended to help ensure a good fit for prospective students and their families,” Dodds said, in an email.
“This includes a fair and inclusive process, as well as an acknowledgement of WWS’ non-profit, independent school environment and specialized curriculum programming. The end goal of the admissions process is to allow future students and families to make as informed decision as possible, so students have the best possible opportunity to succeed at WWS.”
As an independent, non-profit school, Waldorf is free to set its own policies with respect to admissions.
Even so, the school “is committed to meeting its obligations under human rights laws to ensure non-discriminatory access to education and reasonable accommodations in education short of undue hardship,” Dodds said.
“The WWS is also committed to being as inclusive as possible across all measures.”
While WWS was prepared to accept Alec, Dyson felt it was important to share her experience.
“One of the reasons that I want to speak up is so it doesn’t happen to future families,” she said.
“Waldorf is slowly but surely putting up so many hurdles in front of kids that need additional help that they end up being forced out of the school, essentially.”
STORIES OF EXCLUSION
Families of children with disabilities face myriad challenges in navigating education systems, whether the schools be independent or public.
While every family’s story will be unique in its own way, the reality of school exclusions—which can come in many different forms, some more overt than others—is one faced by hundreds of B.C. families.
Teacher and consultant Jenn Scharf, herself a mother of a complex learner, recently published a document titled Stories of Exclusion, which features 60 different stories from families across the province, each one detailing a different experience with school exclusion due to disabilities.
By sharing the stories with school districts and other education stakeholders, Scharf hopes to shine a light on system-wide problems (read the document in full at storiesofexclusion.com).
“It’s not that people don’t have good intentions … I’m a teacher myself, and there are great people in the buildings; this isn’t about people getting their personal backs up,” she said.
“We have to personalize those stories, but we have to not make it about us if we’re in a position of power … Maybe we have some work to do in spite of our best intentions, in spite of our hopes and dreams, in spite of what’s written in the education plan for the district. How is this actually happening on the ground?”
Through her own research and personal experiences, Scharf connected with the BC Ed Access Society (BCEAS), which itself has been advocating for disabled kids and complex learners in B.C. since the teacher strike in 2014.
BCEAS hosts a Facebook group with more than 4,000 families, Scharf said.
Reading about their experiences was what inspired her to start collecting the stories, “because I realized, ‘Oh my gosh—I’m a teacher, I have a Master’s [degree] in education, I’ve been in the system, and I’m struggling, and our family is traumatized,’” she said with a laugh.
“We are struggling—what about all these families who don’t have the level of privilege and access that I do? Maybe they don’t speak English; maybe they’re in that cycle of poverty?
“It all just kind of started adding up, and I realized, ‘OK, this is the work I need to be doing.’”
Scharf’s Stories of Exclusion has even found its way to Jennifer Whiteside, B.C.’s minister of education.
“Hearing the first-hand experiences of students with diverse abilities and their parents demonstrates the need to continue removing barriers to equity in our public education system,” Whiteside said, in an emailed statement.
“Our government is committed to working with parents, advocates and all our education partners to this end. By having an equity lens in all of our policies and at the forefront of our discussions and decisions, we can create environments that allow all students to have more opportunities to succeed.”
The province is supporting students with special needs with $664.4 million in supplemental funding in 2021-22 (an increase of $200 million since 2016-17), a ministry spokesperson said, including a 45-per-cent increase in education assistants over the past decade, as well as funding 170 seats in teacher education programs (including 50 focusing on inclusive education), among other initiatives.
“We are also taking action by reviewing our inclusive education policy and ministerial orders to ensure the responsibilities of school districts to provide necessary supports and services to students are clear,” a spokesperson said.
“We are on the right track, but we know there is more work to do to ensure students are getting the support they need to thrive in school.”
BCEAS EYES CHANGES AHEAD OF PROVINCIAL BUDGET
For all the progress being made, the work is never done for advocates like Tracy Humphreys, founder and chair of BCEAS, a completely volunteer-run organization.
Humphreys sees the group’s mandate as twofold: helping families on the ground, and pushing for systemic change.
Ahead of the province’s 2022 budget, BCEAS submitted an 11-item list of things that it sees as being beneficial for students with disabilities.
The list includes both structural and non-structural changes—things like mandatory anti-ableism, accessibility and anti-racism training for school administrators, and an annual audit of each district’s individual education plans, to name just a few.
The ministry, for its part, has been responsive to the group’s advocacy efforts, Humphreys said, and meets every two weeks with BCEAS, Inclusion BC and the Family Support Institute.
“It has been hugely helpful to have those meetings, because we get to talk about issues as they come up,” she said. “Instead of them boiling over and being really awful, we get to sort of talk about it.”
But the “difficult reality” of the way the School Act is structured is that, while the province is responsible for funding education, it’s the school districts and independent school authorities that decide where the money actually goes, Humphreys said.
“So a lot of the things that we do bring to the ministry level are things that maybe they can’t impact a lot, because districts have the autonomy to make their own decisions around how the service is provided,” she said.
“So that is one of the really big challenges.”
