Sent Home Should Not Mean Shut Out: Understanding Homebound Education in BC

 

Across British Columbia, families are increasingly reporting a troubling reality. When students are removed from school for extended periods due to suspension, mental health crises, or disability-related distress, they are often sent home with little or no educational support. Learning stops. Connection fades. And responsibility quietly dissolves.

There is well-documented research on the harms of suspension and exclusion from school, and our public education system was not built to serve all students equitably. Families experience this every time children are pushed out rather than supported. Naming that reality does not mean accepting it. This post is not about debating whether students should be suspended, nor does it excuse exclusion or normalize the system’s structural flaws. It is a critique of how districts compound those flaws by failing to follow existing ministry policy and legal obligations once a student is removed from school. Because under BC law and policy, education does not end when a student is sent home.

The Legal Obligation to Continue Education

The School Act is explicit. Section 85(2)(d) gives boards the power to suspend students only so long as the board continues to make available to those students an educational program. In plain language, learning must continue during a suspension, and a student must not be deprived of access to education. Suspension does not give districts permission to pause instruction or abandon educational responsibility.

This legal obligation exists regardless of whether a district uses a formal suspension process or relies on informal removal, a practice that is often used to avoid the accountability that formal suspension would trigger.

What Homebound Education Is Meant to Do

Homebound education services exist to ensure that students who cannot attend school for extended periods continue to receive an educational program during their absence. According to BC’s Inclusive Education Services: A Manual of Policies, Procedures and Guidelines, the purpose of homebound services is to enable students to continue their education while absent from school due to illness or related medical or psychiatric reasons.

The policy is also explicit that students suspended by a board of school trustees under the School Act may be served through a homebound program.

This matters because many students who are removed from school are not suspended in a formal sense. Instead, districts rely on informal exclusions, reduced schedules, or extended “stay-at-home” arrangements. These decisions are often framed as temporary, flexible, or supportive, but in practice, they frequently result in students being out of school with no instructional program in place.

A Quiet Push Out

In many districts, homebound education is bundled together with hospital services and referred to broadly as “hospital/homebound.” In practice, this framing overwhelmingly positions homebound instruction as a medical service rather than an educational entitlement tied to exclusion from school. As a result, virtually no districts clearly communicate that homebound education may apply to students who have been suspended or informally removed from school for behavioural or disciplinary reasons.

Instead, students who are pushed out of their school environments are often redirected into alternate programs or online learning, regardless of whether those options meet their needs or align with their educational program. These shifts are frequently presented as solutions, but they function as a quiet push out of the student’s right to remain connected to their school, teachers, curriculum, and community.

District-specific practices around providing homebound education for students out of school due to behavioural or disciplinary reasons are unclear and lack transparency. There remains vague and conflicting information on district websites, and many districts seem to treat homebound instruction for non-medical reasons as discretionary rather than as a required educational response to exclusion.

As is often the case in education, policy exists at the provincial level while implementation is uneven, opaque, and inconsistent from district to district, leaving families to navigate accountability on their own.

Homebound Education Is Not Optional or Minimal

Homebound education is not a courtesy, nor is it a workaround. It is a required educational program that must be as similar as possible to what the student would receive if attending school, to the extent that the student’s condition allows.

Students are expected to receive direct instruction from a qualified teacher, with regular and sufficient contact to maintain learning. Long-term planning remains the responsibility of the classroom teacher in collaboration with the homebound teacher and school-based team, and coordination is expected between principals, teachers, families, and relevant professionals. Instruction may be delivered face to face, virtually, or online, but it must remain connected to the student’s curriculum and, where applicable, their IEP.

Sending work home without instruction, offering occasional check-ins, or placing students into alternate programs by default does not meet this standard.

Psychological and Psychiatric Reasons Count

Students eligible for homebound services explicitly include those absent from school for psychological or psychiatric reasons. This is critical, as many students excluded from school are disabled, neurodivergent, or experiencing mental health crises that make school attendance temporarily inaccessible.

The policy does acknowledge that in some cases, traditional homebound instruction may exacerbate a student’s difficulties. When this occurs, districts are required to develop alternative educational plans in collaboration with mental health and community service providers.

What is not permitted is withdrawing educational access altogether.

Education Does Not Pause When School Attendance Stops

Homebound education exists to prevent exactly what too many families are experiencing: students disappearing from public education under the guise of flexibility, safety, or staffing constraints.

Sending a child home without instruction is not a neutral act. It is exclusion.

Education must follow the student, even when they are not in the building.

Especially then.