In Unity: Both Sides of the Same Fence

Somewhere along the way, protecting children and supporting teachers became positioned as competing goals.

If parents advocate strongly when barriers are preventing their children from accessing education, they risk being accused of failing to understand the realities teachers face. If teachers speak openly about impossible workloads, inadequate staffing and classrooms without the resources required to meet the needs within them, the conversation can quickly shift toward whether the needs of students, particularly disabled students, are simply too much.

We have been handed a strange equation in which someone always seems to have to lose. Either children have equitable access to education and teachers are stretched beyond capacity, or teachers are protected from unreasonable working conditions and children are expected to accept less. Either families become more “realistic” about what schools can provide, or educators somehow find more of themselves to give.

But what if the equation itself is wrong?

Protecting children's access to education and supporting teachers should not be conflicting agendas. One does not have to come at the expense of the other. In fact, they are deeply connected. Children need adults who have the time, capacity and resources to know them, teach them and respond to them. Teachers need systems that allow them to do that work without requiring personal sacrifice to compensate for what is missing. And yet we keep being asked to choose.

Perhaps part of the problem is that education has increasingly come to operate like a machine. There are inputs and outputs, staffing allocations and caseloads, schedules and ratios, budgets and designations, attendance rates and achievement data. Children enter one end. Expectations and resources are distributed. Outcomes are measured at the other.

The machine has to keep moving. But education is profoundly human work.

Children do not arrive at school as units of need that can be efficiently distributed across available resources. Teachers are not interchangeable pieces capable of endlessly absorbing additional demands. Relationships cannot be entered into a spreadsheet. Belonging cannot be measured in staffing ratios. A child's experience of safety, dignity and access cannot always be captured by whether they were physically present in a classroom. When we forget that, we begin trying to make human beings fit the machinery rather than asking whether the machinery is serving human beings.

This is particularly visible for disabled students. Ableism remains deeply embedded within education. Disabled children continue to encounter inaccessible environments, lowered expectations, exclusion and barriers to equitable participation. Families have legitimate reasons to challenge discriminatory practices and decisions that cause harm. Supporting teachers cannot mean asking families to overlook those realities, and unity cannot become another word for silence.

At the same time, we cannot build meaningful inclusion on the exhaustion of educators.

The system, however, continues to operate from scarcity. There are not enough educational assistants, specialists, counsellors, resources, time or people. Teachers are asked to respond to increasingly diverse classrooms without adequate resources, while families encounter barriers the education system has an obligation to identify and remove.

When there isn't enough, the machine does what it is designed to. 

It sorts. 

Prioritizes. 

Rations. 

Calculates.

Which child receives adult support? Which student can manage with less? Which classroom has the greatest need? Which teacher can absorb another responsibility? Which barrier can wait? How far can the available resources stretch?

Slowly, the language of human need becomes the language of resource management. And scarcity begins to shape how we see one another.

A parent identifying a barrier to their child's access can begin to feel like another demand on an already overwhelmed teacher. A teacher saying they do not have the resources or capacity to remove that barrier can sound to a parent like a refusal to accommodate their child. Families become frustrated when their child's access appears contingent upon what happens to be available. Teachers become frustrated when they are held personally responsible for addressing barriers without being given the conditions necessary to do so.

The child may absolutely be encountering a discriminatory barrier that must be addressed. The teacher may absolutely be working within conditions that make addressing it extraordinarily difficult.

Neither truth makes the other less true.

But scarcity tells us there must be a winner and a loser.

It positions children's rights against teachers' capacity. It turns access into negotiation. It asks us to determine how much support can be afforded rather than what is required for equitable participation. It asks teachers to stretch further and families to understand why their children may receive less.

And then it keeps everyone extraordinarily busy.

Parents document barriers, attend meetings, send emails, follow up and advocate when their children remain unable to access education equitably. Teachers plan, adapt, supervise, document, respond and try to make tomorrow work with what they have. 

Everyone keeps moving because the machine keeps moving. There is very little space to stop. And perhaps that is where we are losing something important. Because when everyone is consumed with managing the immediate crisis, there is little capacity left to think critically about the conditions creating it. We become so focused on determining how to distribute what remains that we stop asking why there isn't enough. We become so accustomed to making the system work that we stop asking whether the system itself is working.

What would happen if we did stop?

What if, instead of asking how much less a child can manage with, we asked what is required for that child to have equitable access to education? What if, instead of asking how much more a teacher can absorb, we asked what conditions are required for that teacher to do their job well? What if we stopped treating those as different questions?

Because perhaps the parent saying, my child cannot access education under these conditions, and the teacher saying, I cannot provide what students need under these conditions, are not standing on opposite sides at all.

They may simply be describing the same failing system from different places within it.

That recognition does not erase ableism. It does not excuse discrimination or harmful practices, and it does not mean parents should stop challenging them. There will still be times when families and educators disagree, when accountability is necessary and when uncomfortable truths need to be spoken.

But supporting teachers and protecting children are not mutually exclusive positions.

We should be able to demand schools where disabled students have equitable access and teachers are not drowning. We should be able to insist that disability-related barriers are addressed and insist that educators have the resources necessary to do that work. We should be able to confront ableism and stand beside teachers who say the conditions they are working within are not sustainable.

One does not have to lose for the other to win.

Perhaps that is what scarcity has prevented us from seeing. It has kept us on opposite sides of a fence, fighting over what little is available, while the machinery behind us continues to operate largely unquestioned.

There is tremendous power in turning around.

Parents understand what happens when their children encounter barriers to education. Teachers understand what happens inside classrooms when needs exceed resources. Educational assistants understand what happens when support is stretched across too many children. Students understand, perhaps better than anyone, what it feels like to exist inside systems that were not built with them in mind.

Imagine what happens when those voices stop competing and begin asking the same questions.

Why isn't there enough?

Why have these conditions become normal?

Who benefits when we believe the only options are asking children to accept less or asking teachers to give more?

And what could education look like if we started with the human beings instead?

Perhaps that is where something different begins. Not by pretending parents and teachers always agree. Not by minimizing ableism or asking anyone to stop advocating. But by refusing to accept a system that repeatedly positions the rights of children against the well-being of the people who teach them.

Education was never supposed to be a machine. At its heart, it is children and adults learning together, relationships being built, curiosity being nurtured, belonging being created and young people discovering something about themselves and the world around them.

Maybe we have spent so long keeping the machine running that we have forgotten to ask who it is supposed to serve.

Let this be the year we remember.

Let this be the year we stop fighting over who should carry the cost of scarcity and start questioning why scarcity has been accepted in the first place. The schools our children deserve, and the schools our teachers deserve, are not competing visions. They may, in fact, be the very same schools.

And perhaps this is the year we start demanding them together.