Here is a definition of the terminology used on this site.

• bully: Learn more
• bullying: Bullying is a fraught term in the context of disability and education, and this site uses the tag with deliberate caution. Neurodivergent children are simultaneously more vulnerable to being bullied and more likely to be labelled the bully, and both positions share a common root: the deficit between the support a child needs and the support a school provides. Children who require scaffolding around social and emotional learning, regulation, executive functioning, and impulse control are set up for crisis when that scaffolding is absent, and the resulting behaviour is then reframed as a character problem rather than a resourcing failure. When schools make bullying about niceness rather than about the structural conditions that shape how children treat one another — staffing, supervision, accommodation, explicit instruction in social communication — they collapse nuance in ways that serve exclusion. Posts under this tag examine how bullying frameworks interact with disability, exploring the ways schools use bullying language to pathologise neurodivergent behaviour, to justify removal, or to avoid accountability for the environmental conditions that produced the conflict. The tag also covers the experiences of disabled children who are targeted by peers, particularly where institutional indifference to that targeting compounds the harm. Learn more
• bureaucratic harm: Bureaucratic harm is used for content about the emotional, relational, and embodied effects of educational conflict, exclusion, and chronic institutional stress. On k12complaints.ca, harm is not treated as a side issue separate from policy or legal process. It is understood as part of the evidence of what schools, districts, and systems do to children and families when needs are ignored, support is delayed, or distress is managed through punishment and removal. This tag may appear in posts about fear, grief, burnout, trauma, shame, recovery, or the long tail of educational harm after a crisis has supposedly ended. It also captures how repeated advocacy demands can affect family life, trust in institutions, nervous system regulation, and a child’s sense of safety, dignity, and belonging. Learn more
• burnout: Burnout is used for content about the emotional, relational, and embodied effects of educational conflict, exclusion, and chronic institutional stress. On k12complaints.ca, harm is not treated as a side issue separate from policy or legal process. It is understood as part of the evidence of what schools, districts, and systems do to children and families when needs are ignored, support is delayed, or distress is managed through punishment and removal. This tag may appear in posts about fear, grief, burnout, trauma, shame, recovery, or the long tail of educational harm after a crisis has supposedly ended. It also captures how repeated advocacy demands can affect family life, trust in institutions, nervous system regulation, and a child’s sense of safety, dignity, and belonging. Learn more
• camouflaging: Camouflaging is used on k12complaints.ca for content about neurodivergence, disability, learning differences, and the ways schools respond to students whose needs do not fit narrow norms. In education, these issues are never only about diagnosis; they are also about communication, sensory environments, executive functioning, regulation, stigma, and the supports a student needs in order to access learning and belong. This tag may appear in posts about accommodation, exclusion, behavioural interpretation, masking, assessment, late identification, and the mismatch between a child’s needs and institutional expectations. It is also used when challenging deficit-based assumptions that treat difference as a problem to control rather than a reality the school must understand and accommodate with dignity, flexibility, and meaningful support. Learn more
• cancelled field trips: Cancelled field trips are one of the mechanisms through which schools exclude disabled children from full participation in their learning community, and they operate through a logic that makes exclusion appear practical rather than discriminatory. Posts under this tag document the specific ways schools withdraw, alter, or condition access to field trips: cancelling outings and citing a lack of resources, telling parents they must attend as a condition of their child's participation, instructing a child to stay home on field trip day, redesigning the entire class plan around one child's accommodation needs in ways that make that child's disability visible to every peer, not getting the permission slip home to families where the child lacks executive functioning, or calling a parent to collect their child mid-excursion. Each of these practices transfers the school's resourcing failure onto the family and the child, reframing an institutional obligation as a parental responsibility or a logistical impossibility. The tag also captures how cancelled field trips function as collective punishment, where the withdrawal of an activity the whole class anticipated is attributed, implicitly or explicitly, to the presence of a child whose needs the school chose to leave unsupported. What looks like a scheduling decision is often a disciplinary one, and what looks like caution is often exclusion wearing a permission slip. Learn more
• capacity: Capacity describes the real limits on what a student, parent, staff team, or system can sustain. In school advocacy, capacity matters because expectations that exceed available support often get reframed as behaviour, refusal, or family non-cooperation. Learn more
• capacity theft: Capacity theft describes the systematic transfer of institutional obligation onto families when schools fail to meet a disabled child's needs, consuming the finite energy, time, and resources that families need to sustain their own lives. Posts under this tag examine how schools steal bandwidth from families in multiple directions: children who arrive home depleted, dysregulated, and unable to cope because their school day lacked meaningful access or accommodation, forcing families to absorb the regulatory and emotional labour the school refused to resource; endless meetings, administrative hurdles, and bureaucratic processes that consume parental capacity under the guise of collaboration; and the imposition of prerequisites — private assessments, specialist referrals, therapeutic activities, behaviour tracking — that families must complete before the school will provide the support it already owes. Each of these practices treats family capacity as an inexhaustible subsidy for institutional failure. A disabled child's right to educational access exists at the schoolhouse door; families carry no legal obligation to perform supplementary labour outside of school as a condition of their child receiving adequate support within it. Capacity theft names the mechanism through which schools externalise their resourcing deficits onto the people least able to absorb them, ensuring that institutional underfunding is experienced as private exhaustion. Learn more
• care moves: Learn more
• care plan: A care plan is a written plan for a student’s medical, personal care, disability, or safety needs at school. A strong care plan identifies the need, the responsible adults, the steps to follow, and how the plan will be reviewed when access or safety is affected. Learn more
• child abuse: Child abuse is a term this site uses with precision and without apology. The tag marks content examining practices and conditions within BC schools that cross the threshold from inadequate support into genuine harm — recognising that the line between systemic neglect and abuse is one that institutions have every incentive to obscure. Posts under this tag explore how restraint, seclusion, repeated humiliation, deliberate isolation, and the sustained withdrawal of accommodation can constitute abuse when inflicted on children whose distress a school has chosen to manage rather than understand. The tag also encompasses the harm that arrives through institutional failures of supervision: children who are sexually touched, physically targeted, or systematically tormented by peers when the adults responsible for their safety have been withdrawn, understaffed, or simply absent. When a school knows a child is vulnerable, fails to resource the supervision and support that vulnerability requires, and that child is harmed by another student, the school's negligence is inseparable from the harm itself. The tag further holds space for the slower damage: the cumulative weight of years spent in environments hostile to a child's neurology, where daily dysregulation, exclusion, and the erosion of selfhood compound into something that cannot honestly be called anything else. Learn more
• child health: Learn more
• child profile: A child profile is a plain-language summary of a student’s strengths, needs, triggers, communication style, regulation supports, and practical accommodations. It helps shift discussion from labels and assumptions to what adults need to know to support the child safely and respectfully. Learn more
• child protection: Child protection concerns arise when a child’s safety, dignity, supervision, care, or essential support may be seriously compromised. In school contexts, the issue can include not only active harm but also repeated failure to provide support needed for safe attendance and participation. Learn more
• child safety: Learn more
• child wellbeing: Child wellbeing refers to a student’s emotional, physical, developmental, and relational safety at school. It includes whether the child can learn, participate, recover from stress, maintain dignity, and trust the adults responsible for them. Learn more
• chronic absenteeism: Chronic absenteeism means a student misses a significant amount of school over time, whether the absences are excused, unexplained, illness-related, or created by school barriers. For disabled students, chronic absence can be a signal of exclusion, unmet support needs, burnout, or unsafe access. Learn more
• chronology: A chronology is a dated timeline of events, requests, responses, harms, decisions, and follow-up. It turns a confusing sequence of school interactions into a clear record that can support advocacy, complaints, or human rights analysis. Learn more
• classroom exclusion: Classroom exclusion is used for content about school practices, student support systems, and day-to-day educational conditions that affect whether children can safely and meaningfully participate in learning. On k12complaints.ca, this often includes discussion of accommodation, exclusion, discipline, supervision, behaviour management, educational planning, and the practical consequences of school decisions for students and families. Some posts use this tag to examine a specific tool or practice; others use it to question how ordinary school routines can become barriers when they are rigid, punitive, or disconnected from a child’s actual needs. The tag helps connect individual incidents to larger patterns in school culture, staffing, policy implementation, and accountability, especially where educational access is limited by institutional convenience or narrow behavioural expectations. Learn more
• coercive control: Coercive control is a pattern of behaviour used to dominate another person by restricting their freedom, undermining their credibility, and creating fear of consequences for speaking or acting independently. Unlike isolated incidents of conflict, coercive control operates through ongoing tactics such as intimidation, manipulation, monitoring, isolation, financial pressure, or reputational harm. The goal is not a single outcome but long-term power over the other person’s choices and voice. In school advocacy contexts, coercive control can extend beyond the home. When a parent—often the mother—raises concerns about a child’s rights or accommodations, schools may unintentionally reinforce existing power imbalances. Institutions sometimes favour the quieter or more compliant parent, interpret safety concerns as “conflict,” or rely on a narrative of neutrality that treats both parents’ accounts as equally credible. For a parent already navigating coercive dynamics, this can replicate familiar patterns of gaslighting and discrediting. Fear of retaliation from a former partner may be overlooked or used against the advocating parent, while the child’s needs become entangled in adult power struggles. Understanding coercive control helps schools recognise when “parent disagreement” may actually involve a pattern of domination that affects both the parent’s ability to advocate and the child’s access to appropriate educational support. Learn more