In British Columbia, families are told that public education is inclusive, progressive, and governed by principles of equity. But for thousands of disabled children, school is a place of attrition—where support is delayed until failure, where behavioural distress is mistaken for defiance, and where the right to access education is quietly exchanged for the demand to endure harm without protest. This is not an accident. It is a system functioning exactly as designed.
Disability vs debility: The harm no one documents
Disability, in the language of the state, is sometimes sanctioned. It arrives with a diagnosis, is codified in an IEP, and is framed as a legitimate basis for accommodation. Debility, as theorist Jasbir Puar writes in The Right to Maim, is something else entirely. It names the slow, grinding effects of structural neglect—produced not by a child’s body, but by the system that denies them care.
Where disability may be documented, debility is lived. It accumulates quietly over months or years, in classrooms where support vanishes, plans lapse, and trust erodes. Children are expected to function through dysregulation, mask distress until they collapse, and endure exclusion that is never officially recorded. These are not side effects. They are the core mechanisms by which austerity governs.
Starvation is a policy, not a condition
In a different context, we would call this engineered famine. Teachers ration time and attention. Parents ration trust and capacity. Children ration energy, compliance, communication. The system survives by starving each layer just enough to keep it from fully breaking—while allowing collapse to pool in the bodies of those least able to resist.
It looks like: no EA support until February. No specialist until May. No assessment until Grade 5. No diagnosis, no plan. No plan, no help. No help, no future.
This is not the natural result of complexity. It is the predictable outcome of delay-based governance: policy drift, leadership evasion, and the normalisation of suffering beneath a rhetoric of resilience. Doing more with less is not a virtue. It is a red flag.
The necropolitics of delay
Philosopher Achille Mbembe defines necropolitics as the power to decide who may live and who must die. In schools, death is not literal. But deterioration is.
Necropolitics in education means this: children whose needs cannot be met are asked to wait until they can be documented. Children whose distress does not interfere with others are ignored. Children who collapse quietly are erased by data systems that reward attendance and penalise disruption.
These children are still enrolled. They are marked present. But they are ungrievable. And their disappearance is described as family choice.
Rationing care through legibility
Kelly Oliver, in Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, reminds us that the demand to be legible—to be recognised within dominant frameworks—can itself be violent. It asks the suffering person to perform a story that others can tolerate, and punishes refusal with neglect.
In BC schools, this happens every day. The child who acts out is prioritised over the child who masks. The child with violent meltdowns is offered safety plans; the child who internalises distress is offered praise for resilience. Help is conditional. Support is rationed. Recovery is expected before repair.
We mistake performance for capacity. We treat calmness as a sign of regulation, and silence as agreement. We ask children to appear functional in order to earn what should have been guaranteed.
Resilience without rest, recovery without repair
The current funding model does not support readiness. It supports rationing. It withholds until collapse and documents only that which is visible. Children are told to behave while their nervous systems signal distress. Educators are told to regulate twenty-six children with the devotion of a parent and the resources of a substitute.
The predictable result: burnout, collapse, withdrawal.
This is not about individual failure. It is about cumulative harm—each child a reminder that love alone cannot fix a system designed to starve.
The cost of waiting
Every delay is a form of violence. Every unmet need is an early betrayal. And every time a child is punished for the predictable outcome of adult inaction, the thread of trust is severed.
Behaviour charts, hallway removals, group consequences—these are not trauma-informed. They are the aesthetics of control where care should be. They are stand-ins for funding. They are punishment in the language of policy.
Support must come before collapse. Regulation must be relational. Safety must be the condition for learning—not the reward for performance.
What should we do instead?
We must end the famine. We must refuse the politics of delay. We must fund public education at the level of need, not the level of denial.
That means:
- A resource teacher in every classroom, for a minimum of two hours per day
- One educational assistant for every 18 students
- Counsellors at a ratio of 1:250
- Waitlists under 60 days for assessment and intervention
- No more rationing of safety. No more conditional care.
This is possible. We have done the math.
Read our costed plan: What Would It Really Cost to Fix the Problem?
And sign the petition to end collective punishment in BC schools: End Collective Punishment
We do not need more innovation. We need to meet the needs that already exist. We need to name what has happened: that children were sacrificed to austerity, and families were blamed for failing to compensate.
This is debility by design. And it ends when we say: enough.