Thirty years ago, the modern conception of inclusive education was born at a UNESCO World Conference on Special Needs Education held in Spain — and captured in what is known as the Salamanca Declaration. “Every learner matters and matters equally” is the guiding principle and that has meant including most students, if not all, in mainstream classrooms
Since 1995, school systems like New Brunswick and many around the world have shifted in their approach to serving learning challenged kids — from providing ‘special education’ support programs to including more children in inclusive learning environments. While the principle is nearly universally accepted, few nations or states have followed one Maritime Canadian province, New Brunswick, in virtually eliminating specialized support programs for children with severe learning challenges and complex needs.
For a province that promotes itself abroad as an exemplar of ‘inclusive education,’ New Brunswick Child and Youth Advocate Kelly Lamrock’s latest report, Policy of Giving Up, is a devastating indictment. Maintaining all-inclusive classrooms comes at a steep price because hundreds of the most challenged, vulnerable and troubled kids are being excluded for days and weeks-at-a-time, just to maintain the current model.
One of those children is the 9-year-old son Riverview mother Cassie Martin, a high-needs child who uses a wheelchair and lives with multiple and complex challenges, is more than a statistic. He’s a living example of a student sent home regularly and labelled a ‘partial-day student.’ Nor is he alone because it’s now happening in many cases, and to 500 or more children, in New Brunswick’s purportedly inclusive school system.
Lamrock’s latest investigation looked at the plight of students like Cassie Martin’s son, who are sent home and, in some cases, with “no educational services at all.” While the practice was once relatively rare, Lamrock reported that today more than 500 children are being denied an education for most of the week.
Through its own investigation, Lamrock’s office found 344 students on ‘partial-day’ programs in the Anglophone school districts. While such students were not even tracked in Francophone schools, the office puts that number at around 150 students.
Under current, de-facto policy, students who pose the greatest challenges essentially disappear. Many receive no additional services nor are they provided with alternative learning strategies. Even more disconcerting, Lamrock found no evidence that districts were tracking the impact of partial days on the children or monitoring their progress.
Then came the gut punch: “It is a policy of giving up on the children most in need.”
Children in care are the most in need of a proper education. Yet the Child Advocate found those students nearly 20 times more likely to wind up on partial days and be told not to come to school. That is an utter travesty and completely indefensible.
School districts are not only breaking promises to be inclusive, they are actually breaking the law. That’s the view of Lamrock, one of the province’s better-known lawyers.
The Education department’s rationale for resorting to ‘partial-days’ is suspect, especially so when the publicly-stated policy is inclusive education for all. Under Policy 322 on Inclusive Education (2013), it is permissible to allow “variation of the common learning environment” when a student in a common setting pose “undue hardship.” In such cases, there still remains a duty to provide some form of alternative provision.
In presenting his report, Lamrock provided an important clarification of what is required to fulfil the commitment to educate all students. “Placing a child in a setting where they receive short-term, targeted, and appropriate interventions to help them gain skills or master behaviours that they will need to return to the classroom is a variation of a learning environment,” he said.
“Sending a child home with no educational services is not a variation of the learning environment,” according to Lamrock. “It is a denial of any learning environment.” Taking a step back, it is also a clear indication that the inclusion model is full of holes.
Education Minister Bill Hogan’s response to the revelations was hard to fathom. Put on the spot under the glare of cameras, he promised to look into the prevalence of ‘partial day’ plans but cast doubt on Lamrock’s claims that significant numbers of children and teens were cast adrift without education support services.
That’s completely at odds with the claims made by his immediate predecessor, Dominic Cardy. Almost exactly five years ago, in May 2019, Minister Cardy identified the spread of ‘partial-day’ plans as a problem and directed Anglophone districts to track and report on the growth in numbers. This is, in all likelihood, the only reason the data even exists, albeit tightly guarded by school districts.
What’s standing in the way of rooting it out in the system? The fundamental contradiction embedded in the N.B. inclusive education model. Students with severe learning needs and complex challenges are now too numerous to be accommodated in regular classrooms. To restore proper support programs cuts against the grain of the gatekeepers, most notably Inclusive Education Canada, anchored in Minister Hogan’s home town, Woodstock, N.B.
Confronted by the usual deflections that we need to “address class composition” or to provide “more resources,” Lamrock called a spade-a-spade. “Whatever the response is,” he told CBC News, “it can’t be to take the 500 most vulnerable kids and send them home and say ‘Good luck, we’ll see you when you are homeless or in jail.’ And that’s what we’re doing right now.”
Thirty years on, New Brunswick’s inclusive education provision falls short of the laudable Salamanca principles. Adopting the language of inclusion means little when so many kids are ‘left out’ and underserviced in publicly-funded schools. It amounts to covering up the cracks and implicitly accepting exclusions through the back door. Let’s hope the message sinks in, this time around.
*An earlier version of this commentary appeared in The Telegraph-Journal (Provincial), June 14, 2024
What is the true state of inclusive education if hundreds of children are excluded regularly and placed on “partial day plans”? In adopting the total inclusion model, did New Brunswick create the problem by eliminating virtually every support program serving those with severe needs or disruptive behaviours? Is the province violating its own education law by failing to educate every child? Is it a matter of funding and resources or trying to fit everyone into a preconceived model of school provision?
Educhatter 