students with diverse needs and disabilities

IPE/BC is an independent, non-partisan organization, however we recognize that IPE/BC Associates and guest authors hold a range of views and interests relative to public schools, education issues, and the political landscape in BC. Perspectives is an opportunity for Associates and others to share their ideas in short, accessible essays.

Education Assistants play a critical role in inclusion

September 12, 2025

By Kirsten Daub

When people think about education assistants, they often picture someone giving a student some extra help with math or reading. And while that is certainly part of what an EA does, their role encompasses so much more.

In every classroom across British Columbia, education assistants play a critical role in ensuring all students get access to the quality public education. EAs ensure that all kids – including kids with diverse learning abilities or disabilities – can have meaningfully access to public education in this province.

We know that not everyone learns the same way. Education professionals are adept at modifying curricula to suit a variety of learning styles and needs – Individual Education Plans (IEPs). But in a classroom with a large number and wide range of students, without an EA, teachers struggle to meet the learning needs of all their students.

EAs play a vital role in understanding the unique needs of students, making their IEPs work in the classroom context, and working with teachers to modify IEPs to respond to the unique needs of a student.

But EAs work goes far beyond implementing personalized learning strategies.

Kids are small versions of adults whose brains are still developing and often haven’t yet learned how to constructively express their feelings. Kids with neurodevelopment differences may need extra help with communication, social interaction and behaviour. EAs are experts in understanding what students are communicating with their behaviour and responding to that student’s needs.

It’s easy to get frustrated when we don’t feel understood. For some kids, that frustration becomes behaviour that’s disruptive or harmful to others. EAs have the specialized training and expertise to understand behaviour, support students in communicating their needs, managing those needs, offering emotional support to help students feel confident in the classroom, and facilitating interaction with other students and encouraging friendships.

In short, EAs are the key to fostering a truly inclusive education system for all students.

In an ideal world, every student who needed one would have an education assistant assigned to them. This is not our current reality.

Instead, EAs are often assigned multiple students to support. I’ve spoken with EAs who support four or five different students in one day. They are frustrated that they can’t spend more time with students, and they see first- hand that a growing number of kids are not getting what they need to succeed in the classroom.

Kids are getting frustrated, acting out and giving up.

Without a consistent level of support, EAs just can’t keep up with the needs of the students who need them to meaningfully experience public education. And when students’ needs aren’t met, that can make the role of an EA harder to fulfill. This is leading to EAs report experiencing stress and burnout trying to do a nearly impossible job.

School Districts across B.C. often struggle to balance budgets. Cuts to support staff are often how those budgets are balanced. In spring of 2025, for example, the Surrey School District faced a $16-million-dollar deficit. Part of the District’s response was to cut fifty EA positions. This can only mean that students who rely on EAs will have less support, and EAs will be stretched even more.

This is not a unique situation. School districts across the province need more funding to adequately staff classrooms. Many districts are struggling with recruitment of qualified EAs due to lack of hours and earning potential. As school districts make more cuts to balance budgets, the crucial work of EAs will become more unsuitable – EAs will suffer more burn out and leave the profession, and kid will have less support.

If B.C. is truly committed to inclusive public education, we need to make immediate and long-term investments. School operating grants as a percentage of the province’s GDP have decreased significantly since 1981.

We can do better for our kids.

Ensuring every student has the resources they need to succeed is an investment in stronger families, stronger communities and a better province. Most importantly, increased education public education spending is an investment in our kids – all our kids.

Kirsten Daub is member of the IPE/Board of Directors, the K-12 Sector Coordinator for the Canadian Union of Public Employees in British Columbia (CUPE BC Region) and a CUPE National Servicing Representative. Previously, Kirsten worked for over ten years for CoDevelopment Canada building international solidarity between unions and social justice organizations in Canada and Latin America.

Not enough funding has cost me everything

Why BC’s inclusion model is failing—and how to fix it

August 25, 2025

By Anna Geeroms

As a Treasurer, I spent years poring over balance sheets, tracing every transaction until the truth revealed itself. When you stare that long at a general ledger, you start to notice not just the cost of doing something, but also the cost of inaction.

That’s where I am now with public education in British Columbia.

Because while school districts talk about affordability and prioritisation, I see something closer to structural negligence: the steady exclusion of children from classrooms and friendships; the erosion of trust between families and educators; the churn of staff leaving through burnout and moral injury; and the downstream costs absorbed—quietly, repeatedly—by hospitals, social workers, tribunals, and, devastatingly often, the justice system.

The worst part? The enthusiasm in Victoria. The press releases. The celebration of ‘historic’ incremental changes. But more funding, when it’s still not enough, doesn’t build equity. It buries families.

What happened to my son

Before kindergarten began, we told school clearly and carefully: our son had been harmed in daycare; he was on a waitlist for autism assessment; he will need full-day relational support to feel safe. They said many children adjust with time. They took a ‘wait and see’ approach.

Within weeks, he stopped entering the classroom. They called us daily, threatening to call 911 if we didn’t come quickly enough.

Eventually, a temporary support worker helped him feel safer—but her assignment ended. He unravelled. In a panic, he once lunged at the teacher strangling her to the pure horror of his astonished classmates. He was six. We were told he might be suspended.

He was eventually allowed back—for one hour a day, in a windowless room labelled ‘closet’ on the floor plan. My presence was required. He never returned to kindergarten class. Never rejoined his peers. Never brought home stories or art or anything like joy.

This is what happens when schools ‘wait and see’, instead of act.

And you would’ve thought that the strangling incident and autism diagnosis should have been enough evidence that he needed intensive and ongoing support, but that was just the beginning of having to fight every year, often multiple times a year to have support restored. Hardly a single school year started with support in place.

Inclusion isn’t happening—not really

British Columbia claims to embrace inclusive education, but what we offer in practice is often triage. Support is delayed until crisis. Staff are stretched thin. Children without formal diagnoses fall through the cracks. Parents fight for years to get their children diagnosed and then are told there are no resources to support them. Families feel like they are trapped in a cycle of bait and switch while our children are circling the drain.

Thousands of children remain on waitlists for assessments. Others go months—or years—without the IEPs they need. In Vancouver alone, there’s a shortfall of over 100 Education Assistants. Province-wide, the average counsellor serves 693 students—almost triple the expert recommendation.

We have built a system that expects every child to cope—until they can’t.

What real inclusion requires

Inclusion isn’t ambient goodwill. It’s not vague optimism. It is a structure—concrete, visible, and adequately staffed. At minimum, it requires:

Class sizes of no more than 18 students, so teachers can know and support each child
At least one full-time Educational Assistant (EA) in every classroom, all day, every day
Additional EAs where needed, so disabled children can remain with their peers instead of being separated to access help
Resource teachers embedded in classroom life, not stretched across entire schools
One counsellor for every 250 students, not 693
Mandatory, ongoing professional development in trauma-informed, neurodiversity-affirming practices
Calm rooms, sensory supports, and physical accessibility features that offer dignity—not containment

This is the floor, not the ceiling. Support must follow the child, flex with their needs, and never be withdrawn the moment they appear to cope. That’s not inclusion. That’s abandonment.

The cost of exclusion

I have spent years fighting—just to keep my children safe, just to keep them included. And that advocacy has cost me nearly everything: my home, my marriage, multiple job promotions, my mental and physical health. It has broken my heart in half more times than I can count.

I served on their Accessibility Committee—showed up, contributed to the plans, offered solutions grounded in both systems knowledge and lived experience. But over time, I came to believe those structures are unequipped to lead the change that’s needed. The very institutions that claim to champion inclusion are often the ones upholding the conditions that harm children. Repair cannot begin until they reckon with that contradiction—and until we lift the manufactured austerity driving the day-to-day reality of public education.

When we underfund inclusion, we don’t save money—we just move the bill. We shift the burden to emergency rooms, social workers, tribunals, and police. We destabilise families. We force mothers out of the workforce. We create manufactured crises out of preventable needs. We spend money on legal fees instead of educational salaries. We watch children become so overwhelmed and unsupported that they can no longer leave their rooms—and then we call that a mystery, instead of naming it for what it is: a failure of care.

School exclusion is a pipeline. It begins the moment a child is made to feel that their presence is conditional—that they are too much. And it compounds: in anxiety, in early police contact, in fractured families, in long-term reliance on disability supports.

Meanwhile, companies like Microsoft and SAP are investing in neurodivergent talent. They recognise those minds as assets—if the environment is right. Public schools, by contrast, are spending public money to suppress the same traits. That’s not just unjust. It’s economically incoherent.

What will it cost to fix?

These changes require investment—real, ongoing, unapologetic investment. But they are not extravagant. They reflect what educators, advocates, and families have said for decades: that inclusion takes people, not promises. Staff time, not slogans. And the cost of avoiding it—of delaying, deferring, rationing—adds up faster than we admit.

It’s time to fund what we say we believe

When people ask what it would cost to end exclusion in BC schools, I no longer shrink the answer to fit the frame of political plausibility. I give them the real answer. Because the numbers are only part of the story. The rest lives in the child who curled up in the coatroom, the mother who broke down in a hallway, and the futures still being written—with every budget we pass, every threshold we enforce, and every support we choose to fund—or withhold.

About the author

Anna Geeroms is a neurodivergent solution architect and product owner with more than two decades of experience designing accessible digital systems in education, government, nonprofit, and justice sectors. She specialises in inclusive design and systemic transformation, blending technical expertise with lived experience. Her work explores how digital tools, public policy, and design practices can converge to build more just, accessible systems that hold complexity and uphold care.

She is the mother of twin AuDHD children, including one with a PDA profile who recently withdrew from Grade 7 following years of school-based trauma, delayed supports, and systemic neglect. And step-mother to a 23 year old studying fine art.