When parents hire lawyers to enforce their children’s right to education, people say they’re “taking money from the classroom.”
But when districts spend millions on legal fees fighting those same parents? Silence.
Vancouver School Board paid Harris & Company—a labour and litigation law firm—over $3.2 million in 2023/24 for legal services, a four-fold increase from the previous year’s $799,700. The district’s 2024/25 budget earmarks approximately $7.66 million for legal and litigation costs.
That’s money that could fund:
- 76 full-time teachers at average salary
- 153 educational assistants
- Specialist services for hundreds of students
- Infrastructure repairs in aging buildings
- The very inclusion supports districts claim they cannot afford
Instead, it’s paying lawyers to fight families trying to access what the law already guarantees their children.
The argument nobody wants to examine
When parents retain legal counsel to enforce accommodation, people frame it as hostile, adversarial, “taking money from the system.” The suggestion is clear: if you cared about schools, you’d stop fighting.
But here’s what that framing obscures: parents hire lawyers because districts refuse to comply with the law.
The legal obligation to accommodate disabled students exists whether parents enforce it or not. The money districts spend fighting enforcement is a choice—a choice to contest rights rather than respect them, to litigate rather than educate, to pay external counsel rather than provide the supports that would make legal intervention unnecessary.
If districts complied with their legal duties, there would be no appeals, no tribunals, no million-dollar legal bills. The money would stay in classrooms because families wouldn’t need to force compliance through formal processes designed to exhaust them.
What legal spending actually reveals
When a district allocates $7.66 million to legal fees while leaving $2.8 million in provincial inclusion funding unspent—as VSB did in 2023/24—that’s not resource scarcity. That’s priority choice.
When districts pay external law firms to argue that disabled children’s needs exceed “reasonable accommodation” rather than hiring the staff and specialists who could actually meet those needs, that’s not fiscal responsibility. That’s calculated refusal.
Legal spending reveals what districts truly value: defending institutional prerogative over serving students, preserving administrative discretion over honoring rights, and avoiding accountability over providing education.
The pattern extends beyond Vancouver
VSB’s spending is extreme but not unique. Across BC, districts allocate substantial budgets to legal services while simultaneously claiming resource constraints prevent adequate inclusion:
What districts fund:
- External legal counsel defending against human rights complaints
- Lawyers attending appeal hearings to contest parent requests
- Litigation fighting tribunal orders requiring accommodation
- Legal advice structuring policies to minimize institutional liability
What districts claim they cannot afford:
- Adequate educational assistant hours
- Specialist services as sustained therapeutic relationships
- Environmental modifications addressing sensory needs
- Professional development as implementation support
- Staffing ratios enabling individualised attention
The money exists. It’s simply deployed to fight families rather than serve children.
Addressing the “leave if you don’t like it” argument
Some people suggest that parents who challenge schools should simply leave the system—homeschool, find private alternatives, stop “causing problems” for everyone else.
This argument treats public education as a privilege districts grant rather than a right children hold. It positions accommodation as optional charity instead of legal obligation. And it ignores that many families fighting for inclusion cannot afford private alternatives—the legal battle itself often represents their last accessible option.
More fundamentally: when districts systematically exclude disabled students through inadequate support, accommodation denial, and punitive practices, the legal and moral responsibility to change belongs to the institution violating rights, not to the families experiencing that violation.
Suggesting families “leave if they don’t like it” is suggesting disabled children forfeit their right to public education rather than districts fulfill their duty to provide it.
The cost of fighting instead of complying
Legal spending represents pure waste—money that produces no educational benefit, serves no student, improves no outcome.
Every dollar spent on lawyers contesting accommodation is a dollar that could have provided the accommodation itself. Every hour administrators spend in legal meetings is an hour unavailable for the collaborative planning inclusion requires. Every appeal hearing is institutional energy directed toward justifying refusal rather than solving problems.
This spending pattern creates perverse incentives: districts find money for legal defense they claim doesn’t exist for student support, generating more conflict, more appeals, more legal costs in escalating cycles where fighting families becomes more financially rational than serving them—at least in the short term, until tribunal orders or human rights complaints force compliance anyway, now with legal fees added.
What compliance would cost versus what fighting costs
Here’s the uncomfortable truth districts avoid: providing adequate inclusion support from the outset costs less than fighting families through years of appeals and tribunals.
Compliance costs:
- Hiring sufficient staff (one-time recruitment, ongoing salary)
- Training and implementation support (upfront investment, diminishing over time)
- Environmental modifications (capital expense, long-term benefit)
- Specialist allocation (predictable operational cost)
Fighting costs:
- External legal fees (hourly rates, unlimited potential)
- Administrative time diverted to legal processes (ongoing opportunity cost)
- Tribunal awards and settlements (unpredictable, potentially substantial)
- Damaged relationships requiring ongoing management (immeasurable dysfunction)
Plus the educational cost: years of inadequate support producing academic gaps, mental health impacts, and developmental harm that accumulate while districts litigate rather than educate.
The political function of legal spending
Legal expenditures serve institutional interests beyond individual case outcomes:
- Deterrence: High legal costs signal to families that enforcement will be expensive, exhausting, and uncertain, discouraging challenges even when rights are clear.
- Delay: Legal processes extend timelines, aging children out of critical developmental windows and exhausting family capacity to sustain advocacy.
- Documentation: Legal proceedings generate institutional records framing district actions as reasonable responses to unreasonable parent demands, obscuring accommodation denial as professional judgment.
- Precedent management: Districts contest cases to avoid establishing patterns that would require systemic change, preferring to fight individual families repeatedly rather than alter policies.
This creates institutional efficiency from district perspectives: spending on legal defense protects administrative discretion and limits accountability more effectively than the alternative—complying with legal obligations and facing demands for adequate funding to make compliance sustainable.
Breaking the cycle requires transparency and accountability
Voters deserve to know:
How much does your district spend on legal services annually?
- Total expenditure
- Breakdown by firm and service type
- Comparison to prior years
- Cases generating highest costs
What percentage of legal costs involve fighting families over accommodation?
- Appeals and tribunal proceedings
- Human rights complaints
- Settlement negotiations
- Legal advice structuring exclusionary practices
How does legal spending compare to unspent inclusion grants?
- Provincial funding allocated for inclusion
- Actual expenditure on inclusion services
- Gap between received and deployed funds
- Legal costs as percentage of inclusion budget
What would it cost to comply rather than contest?
- Estimated cost of providing requested accommodations
- Comparison to legal fees spent fighting those requests
- Analysis of whether fighting costs less than complying
This information exists in district budgets, SOFI reports, and board minutes. It simply requires asking—and demanding answers.
The choice districts are making
When districts allocate millions to legal fees while claiming they lack resources for inclusion, they are stating priorities clearly:
Institutional protection over student service. Administrative discretion over legal compliance. Fighting families over educating children.
This isn’t resource scarcity. This is resource choice.
And it’s a choice the province enables by:
- Funding schools inadequately, creating scarcity that justifies refusal
- Failing to mandate transparent reporting of legal expenditures
- Allowing districts to spend inclusion grants on legal defense
- Imposing no consequences when districts violate accommodation duties
What needs to change
Immediate transparency requirements:
- Districts must publicly report legal spending, broken down by case type
- Annual comparison of legal costs versus unspent inclusion grants
- Itemised accounting of costs for fighting families versus serving students
Funding restrictions:
- Provincial inclusion grants cannot be redirected to legal services
- Legal costs exceeding defined threshold trigger Ministry review
- Districts demonstrating pattern of accommodation denial face funding penalties
Accountability mechanisms:
- Tribunal findings of discrimination trigger automatic compliance audits
- Repeat violations result in trustee removal or provincial administration
- Financial penalties for non-compliance flow directly to affected families
Systemic reform:
- Adequate base funding eliminating scarcity justifying refusal
- Needs-based inclusion funding replacing categorical delays
- Specialist ratios enabling sustained therapeutic relationships
- Infrastructure investment creating sensory-appropriate environments
Stop defending the indefensible
When people say “parents hiring lawyers take money from schools,” they’re defending a system that:
- Violates children’s rights systematically
- Forces families into legal processes to access what law already requires
- Spends millions fighting compliance rather than providing education
- Blames families for institutional choices to litigate rather than accommodate
The money leaving classrooms isn’t going to parent lawyers. It’s going to district lawyers fighting parents.
If districts want to stop spending millions on legal fees, the solution is simple: comply with the law.
Provide adequate inclusion support. Honour accommodation duties. Stop forcing families to enforce rights through formal processes designed to exhaust them.
The legal spending crisis is a compliance crisis. And compliance is cheaper, more effective, and morally obligatory.
Fund schools adequately. Stop fighting families. Educate children.
That’s what public education is supposed to do.