Stretched Thin: When School Starts Without Your Child

It is September again, which means families across the province are being told some version of the same thing: “We just don’t have the support in place yet.”

The EA has not been assigned. Staffing is still being sorted out. The schedule is not finalized. Everyone needs a little time to get to know the student. Maybe a shorter day would be better for now. Maybe Mom can stay close by. Maybe Dad can pick them up after lunch. Maybe they should wait a few days before starting.

It is presented as the inevitable messiness of school start-up. Give us some time. Be patient. We are doing our best. Parents, desperate for their children to have a successful start to the year, are often incredibly understanding. They know schools are stretched thin. They know teachers are stretched thin. They know there are staffing shortages and competing needs and schedules that still need to be figured out.

But parents are stretched thin too, and their understanding can very quickly become part of the mechanism that keeps their child out of school.

Schools know something about parents: very few will knowingly drop their child off after being told the school does not have the support necessary to meet their needs. Why would they? If you tell a parent that their child’s EA is not there, that nobody is available to provide the support their child requires, or that staff are concerned they cannot safely manage them, what exactly do you expect that parent to do? Wave goodbye and drive away?

This is especially true for parents who already know what happens when their child is unsupported. They know the phone calls. They know the dysregulation. They know the behaviour that gets described as unsafe after the supports that might have prevented it were not provided. They know the shame and exhaustion their child carries home. They know what it feels like to spend an entire school day with their phone beside them, waiting for it to ring.

So when the school says, “We just don’t have the support yet,” most parents do exactly what the school knows they will do. They protect their child. They keep them home, agree to the shorter day, delay the start, stay nearby, or promise to come immediately if things go wrong.

And somewhere in that transaction, a failure of the education system quietly becomes a parental choice.

The language can shift remarkably quickly. The parent “agreed” to the gradual start. The family “preferred” shorter days. Mom “decided” to keep him home. Dad “was available” to pick her up. The student “did not attend.” Missing from that story is the reason the parent made the decision in the first place: the school started the year without the support their child required to access it.

We need to become much more critical of what we call parental agreement when the alternative being offered is to knowingly leave a child in an environment that has already said it cannot adequately support them. That is not a meaningful choice. A parent’s unwillingness to watch their child struggle should never be used to make exclusion look consensual.

September is not a grace period for inclusion. Children with disabilities do not become less disabled because staffing is still being finalized, and their support needs do not disappear because schedules are complicated. They do not require less accommodation because the first few weeks of school are busy.

More importantly, many of these children are not surprises. Their names did not suddenly appear on a class list the night before school started. Schools may already have years of IEPs, assessments, transition plans, School-Based Team records, behaviour or safety plans, previous teacher knowledge, parent communication, and documentation describing exactly what the student requires to access school successfully.

September happens every year.

The children were coming.

That is what makes the annual scramble so difficult to accept. These needs are often known long before the first day of school, yet somehow the beginning of September continues to be treated as a period in which disabled students are expected to wait while supports are organized around them. Staffing is still being sorted out. Schedules are still being finalized. Everyone just needs a little more time. But that time comes at the expense of the child who is missing school, starting without the support they need, or being asked to struggle until the adults around them get things figured out. What gets described as a temporary logistical problem for the system can very quickly become a significant barrier to education for the child.

The consequences of that delay can follow a child long after September ends. A child starts school without adequate support and struggles. The struggle becomes behaviour. The behaviour becomes the focus. Calls home begin. Days get shortened. The child spends increasing amounts of time outside the classroom or at home, and before long the conversation has shifted from “we did not have the support in place” to “this child cannot manage a full day.”

That shift should terrify us, because it allows systems to create the very evidence later used to justify exclusion.

The beginning of the school year matters. September is when classroom communities form, friendships begin, routines become familiar, relationships with teachers develop, and children start figuring out where they belong. A child sitting at home waiting for support is not simply missing math or reading. They are missing the beginning of their own school year.

When a child misses that beginning, the impact does not simply disappear once the staffing problem is eventually solved. Anxiety may have increased, trust may already have been damaged, friendships and classroom relationships have begun forming without them, and routines have been established while they were away. The longer this continues, the harder returning to consistent attendance and participation can become. A child who needed support to access school in the first place can now be facing additional barriers created by the very exclusion that resulted from not providing it.

Teachers, we need to talk about your role in this too. I know teachers are stretched thin. I know classrooms are increasingly complex, educational assistants are absent and not replaced, resources are limited, and teachers are expected to somehow hold together systems that are cracking around them. None of that is imaginary, and none of it should be minimized.

But those realities cannot become justification for excluding children.

Somewhere along the way, we have become far too comfortable allowing systemic failures to be solved at the expense of the child rather than demanding that the problem move upward to the people with the power to address it. When a child cannot attend because the necessary support has not been provided, the problem should move up the system. Instead, far too often, the child moves out of it.

And teachers and school-based staff can end up doing the dirty work. They make the phone call. They explain that staffing is short. They ask whether someone can come get the child. They suggest half days until things settle down. The parent comes, the child leaves, the immediate pressure on the classroom disappears, and the people with the greatest institutional power to address the underlying problem remain comfortably removed from the consequences.

Teachers should be furious about being placed in that position, not comfortable carrying it out. If there are not enough resources for a child to safely and meaningfully access their education, make that failure visible. Document it. Escalate it. Put the pressure where it belongs rather than allowing the child and their family to absorb it.

Do not make the child disappear to make the system work.

And parents, if you are starting this school year hearing that the support is not there yet, my advice is to document it from day one. Every time your child is asked to stay home, arrive late, leave early, attend a shortened day, delay their start, or attend only when a particular support person is available, put it in writing. If the conversation happens at the school door or over the phone, follow up with an email documenting what you were told.

Be clear that you expect your child to have full and meaningful access to their education. Be clear about the support that is missing and why your child requires it to access school. Be clear that you are not voluntarily choosing to reduce your child’s access to education and that any reduction is occurring because the support they require has not been provided. Where that barrier is connected to disability or another protected characteristic, name the connection and document the impact. If it continues, escalate your concerns within the school district and keep documenting.

Do this because what starts as “just the first few days” has an alarming ability to become a few weeks. A few weeks can become a reduced timetable. A reduced timetable can become an attendance problem. And eventually, the original story about a school that did not have support ready can be replaced by a story about a child who cannot attend and a parent who agreed.

The paper trail matters because the story is being written from the first day.

I see the parents beginning another September already exhausted. The parents who spent August sending emails because they knew exactly what their child would need. The parents who attended transition meetings in June, shared assessments, updated plans, answered questions, toured classrooms, prepared visual schedules, drove past the school repeatedly with an anxious child, and did everything they were asked to do to make September successful.

Then September arrives, and they are asked to stretch a little further. Rearrange work. Find childcare. Stay close. Sit in the parking lot. Pick up early. Try again tomorrow. Give everyone a little more time.

Meanwhile, their child waits.

We cannot continue building an education system that depends on families quietly absorbing the consequences when schools are not ready for their children. We cannot allow a parent’s instinct to protect their child from foreseeable harm to be transformed into evidence that they agreed to exclusion. And we cannot keep accepting “we don’t have the support” as though it answers the question of what happens to the child who needed that support to walk through the doors in the first place.

Parents, I see each and every one of you. I see how hard you are working simply to get your children through doors that opened for everyone else this September. Your children and their lives matter. Your voices matter. Your stories matter.

The children were coming. Their needs were known. Their right to be there was never supposed to depend on whether the system was ready for them.