“They have an opportunity now to make inclusion work; to stop parents going to court”

– Rick Moore.

Inclusion is providing for special needs children in classrooms.

It’s a goal of the B.C. Ministry of Education.

But, in 2002, Christy Clark, as minister then, removed class size and composition from teacher contracts.

But the province spent $2.6 million on  lawyers to deny the support teachers and programs kids needed for equal learning opportunity.

Because the Supreme Court ruled last November that teachers can bargain learning conditions, after all, money will flow back into the system for learning assistants, counsellors – the staff that make inclusion work.

In 2013, Susan Lambert, retired BCTF president, told me: “We’ve lost 1,500 learning assistants, special education and ESL teachers. It would take $3.3 billion to bring conditions in schools back to where they were in 2001.”

These aren’t alternate facts. The dollar figures were reported by the province’s secretary treasurer, she noted.

But the government’s abandonment of special needs kids didn’t start with the Liberals.

In 1994, Rick Moore’s son, Jeff, a North Vancouver Grade 3 kid with dyslexia, depended on a reading program delivered by specialized teachers at the district’s learning centre. The district closed it, blaming the NDP government for funding cutbacks.

The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal later determined Jeff and all learning disabled students had been discriminated against under the Human Rights Code.

READ MORE: MapleRidgeNews.com