School boards across British Columbia perform an accounting manoeuvre so routine it has become invisible: they extract millions from their general operating budgets to fund legal obligations the Ministry of Education and Child Care refuses to pay for. This extraction—what New Westminster parent James Plett names the Deep Dive: The Inclusion Subsidy—transforms inclusive education from a Charter right into a zero-sum competition, where disabled students are positioned as consuming resources meant for everyone else.
In this framing, disabled children become a scapegoat for austerity. The harm caused by inadequate provincial funding is displaced downward, away from the policy choices that created it, and onto the students whose needs the Charter explicitly protects.
How the inclusion funding architecture works
The Ministry establishes three funding levels for students with designated disabilities, each tied to a diagnostic category and a fixed dollar allocation. Level 1 includes physically dependent and deafblind students. Level 2 covers moderate to profound intellectual disability, physical disability, visual impairment, deaf or hard of hearing students, and autism spectrum disorder. Level 3 addresses intensive behavioural intervention or serious mental illness. See The Right Amount of Agony in BC Schools for more on how BC decide who’s need are legible in BC schools.
Each level requires formal designation—often involving lengthy diagnostic processes that can take more than a year. For a child entering kindergarten, this delay represents lost learning time that can never be recovered. See When delay becomes policy: British Columbia’s strategic abandonment of disabled students for more on how delays are part of BC’s education system design.
What the Ministry does not fund
The architecture becomes clearer in its omissions. Students with mild learning disabilities receive no supplemental grants. Students requiring behavioural support receive no additional funding. Students with mental health needs fall outside the framework unless they reach crisis thresholds defined as “serious mental illness.” Parents report that even serious illnesses, such as failure to thrive related to Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID) are not counted as serious.
The province maintains a detailed checklist schools must complete to access funding, demanding professional diagnosis and documentation. Yet entire categories of educational need exist beyond this bureaucratic recognition. The checklist creates the appearance of rigour while systematically excluding students whose needs are real, persistent, and costly to support. See The goodwill ledger: how schools calculate inclusion allotments for more about who gets left out of inclusion funding.
The impossible choice districts are forced to make to fund inclusion
Districts face a choice constructed to feel inevitable: abandon students whose needs do not generate revenue, or subsidise their education using general operating funds intended for universal programming.
Most boards choose to subsidise. They treat undesignated students as if designated. They provide supports regardless of Ministry recognition. They do so because educators work with real children, not funding categories, and because Charter obligations do not disappear when the province refuses to acknowledge them. And because educators have to face parents who’s children would otherwise be totally abandoned.
Inclusion funding in New Westminster
As James Plett describes in Deep Dive: The Inclusion Subsidy, New Westminster makes the cost of this choice visible. As of September 2025, SD40 serves 547 students with Level 1, 2, or 3 designations, generating $12,994,660 in supplemental grants. District records show that 1,049 students receive inclusive education services—a gap of 502 children whose needs the province declines to fund.
The district’s total inclusive education expenditure reaches $18,533,340, leaving a shortfall of approximately $5,538,680. That gap is extracted directly from general operating funds.
Not mismanagement—mathematics
This variance is not budget mismanagement. It pays for learning support teachers, educational assistants, speech-language pathologists, behavioural specialists, and deaf and hard of hearing professionals—the infrastructure that makes inclusion somewhat materially possible rather than merely promised.
The Ministry’s response is to claim these costs are “baked into” the per-student allocation, justified by averages: some students cost more, some cost less, and it all evens out. This logic only holds if one accepts that disabled students should be subsidised by the erosion of everyone else’s education—and that their rights function as optional expenditures rather than legal obligations.
On “adequate” funding
British Columbia ranks third-lowest among Canadian provinces in per-student spending. The 2025–26 funding increase of 1.1 per cent failed to match inflation, let alone rising costs in staffing, facilities, technology, and materials.
The claim that inclusive education can be absorbed into this inadequate base funding rests on an ableist premise: that disabled students’ needs are exceptional burdens rather than ordinary features of a public education system governed by the Charter.
The accounting illusion of “underspending”
The Ministry often points to district surpluses and “underspent” Inclusive Education and Educational Assistant budgets as evidence that funding is sufficient and local governance is at fault. Parent-led analysis helps explain why this appearance persists.
Reviewing Ministry-mandated financial statements, a BCEDAccess member documents widespread underspending in Inclusive Education and EA salary lines across the province—even as classrooms experience staffing shortages and unmet needs. This is not evidence of excess capacity. It is evidence of an accounting system that tracks only narrow categories of spending while real costs spill elsewhere.
Where inclusion costs actually land
Inclusive education does not reside neatly within a single budget line. Its costs appear in general staffing, itinerant specialists, teacher workload, program compression, and reduced access to universal supports. When districts meet needs through these indirect mechanisms, the expense disappears from the categories the Ministry monitors.
Educational assistant staffing illustrates this distortion. EA budgets go unspent not because support is unnecessary, but because districts cannot hire or retain staff under current conditions. The money exists on paper; the labour does not exist in practice. Inclusion continues through overextension rather than employment.
How deflection becomes policy
This structural mismatch enables provincial deflection. By citing unspent line items and year-end surpluses, the Ministry reframes systemic underfunding as a district failure. BCEdAccess documents how trustees often review budget materials that differ from the formats ultimately submitted to the province, how discretion is limited to marginal reallocations, and how reporting relies on account descriptions unchanged since 2006.
The system obscures where inclusion costs actually land, then uses that obscurity to deny responsibility.
Designed for division
The result is a funding environment designed for division. When inclusive education is subsidised from general funds, every support appears to come at the expense of something else. Music classes are positioned against toileting support. Arts programming is weighed against educational assistants. Literacy interventions compete with autism services.
These conflicts are not natural. They are produced by a funding model that forces districts to cannibalise universal programming to meet legal obligations, then presents the outcome as an unfortunate but unavoidable trade-off.
Parents pitted against each other
Manufactured scarcity fractures parent communities. Early French Immersion families defend program survival. Neighbourhood school parents beg for their school to remain open. Families of disabled students face resentment for supports framed as draining resources. They get lawyers and are framed as draining the system.
Disabled children become the scapegoat for austerity, blamed for conditions created by provincial funding decisions while the Ministry remains insulated from direct accountability.
Governing under threat
School boards are legally prohibited from running deficit budgets. Deficits trigger termination and replacement by government-appointed administrators. Trustees therefore operate under coercive conditions: balance the budget or lose governance entirely.
Every budget cycle becomes triage—deciding which legally required services to fund and which programs to sacrifice to cover the inclusion subsidy.
Working conditions are learning conditions
The consequences surface most visibly in classrooms. Teachers manage rooms where many the students require individualised plans but they are lucky if they get a student support assistant part of the day. Specialists rotate across schools without continuity. Resource teachers carry caseloads that make intervention scattered.
These are not individual failures. They are predictable outcomes of a system that meets Charter obligations through institutional exhaustion.
The zero-sum game only works if we play
The zero-sum framing persists only while parents accept it. The moment families refuse to compete for scraps, refuse to treat disabled children’s rights as optional or excessive, and redirect accountability upward, the facade cracks.
New Westminster’s analysis provides the accounting that makes refusal possible. The $5.5 million gap is not rhetorical—it is documented variance between what inclusion costs and what the province pays.
There are no efficiencies left to find
Boards cannot find efficiencies in budgets already stripped to scaffolding. You cannot remove counsellors, custodians, or support staff indefinitely without collapse. The problem is not mismanagement. It is mathematical impossibility.
The actual demand
The demand is simple: fund the actual cost of inclusion. Not theoretical averages. Not outdated spreadsheets. The real cost—the staff, expertise, time, and infrastructure required to make inclusion a material reality. See The optimal funding model for inclusive education for ideas on how to improve the funding model.
What full funding would restore
If the Ministry funded inclusive education at actual cost, the subsidy would return to general funds. New Westminster’s $5.5 million would support early learning, classroom materials, technology, literacy and numeracy, arts and music, facilities, and mental health services—resources that benefit all students rather than functioning as a hidden tax extracted to cover provincial refusal.
Who is doing their job
School boards are doing their jobs. Educators are doing theirs under impossible conditions. The Ministry is not. BC NDP has had 8 years to make brave choices to protect children and they’ve played politics instead of doing what is necessary. See Justice and dignity too expensive for BC NDP.
Until inclusion is funded as a legal obligation rather than a discretionary add-on, every district budget will remain a crisis designed to pit families against one another while the real deficit—between constitutional responsibility and political will—remains unexamined.
Making austerity visible
The inclusion subsidy reveals what austerity always hides: scarcity is a policy choice. British Columbia has resources. Forcing districts to tax themselves to fund the Charter reflects priorities, not inevitability.
New Westminster quantified the cost. Parent-led analyses across the province are beginning to do the same.