Your Child's EA Support Was Removed in New Brunswick: What Are Your Rights?

You fought hard to get EA support written into your child's PLP. Then, without any formal meeting or written notice, the hours disappeared. The EA is covering another classroom. The support that took months to secure is simply gone.

This scenario is common enough in New Brunswick that parents have named it on community forums: "EA cannibalizing." Understanding why it happens — and what you can legally do about it — is essential for any NB parent navigating the system.

Why EAs Get Reallocated in NB

New Brunswick's inclusive education model assigns Educational Assistants (EAs) to classrooms, not to individual students. This is a structural distinction with serious practical consequences.

When a highly complex, dysregulated student enters a classroom, the EA in that room will naturally be drawn toward managing immediate safety needs. Students with moderate support needs — those whose PLPs specify EA hours for literacy, behavioral regulation, or task management — lose that support without any formal decision being made. No meeting was held. No PLP was amended. The EA is simply occupied elsewhere.

Schools are operating under severe EA shortages. The province's Child, Youth and Senior Advocate documented in the 2025 Wake Up Call report that classrooms are regularly managed without the EA hours promised in PLPs because the provincial pool of trained EAs is insufficient to cover the needs of the existing student population. Some parents have reported their child's EA being pulled to cover another school's staffing emergency mid-week.

This is the structural reality. But structural realities do not suspend your child's legal entitlements.

The Legal Problem with Undocumented EA Removal

When EA support is specified in a Personalized Learning Plan, that support represents the school's documented position on what your child needs to access education meaningfully. Removing it — without a PLP meeting, without written alternatives, without parent consent — creates several legal problems:

It may constitute a failure to accommodate. Under the NB Human Rights Act, the school's duty to accommodate a student's disability does not pause because of staffing shortages. If the school cannot provide the EA hours specified in the PLP, it is legally obligated to identify and implement alternative accommodations that achieve the same educational outcomes.

It may invalidate the PLP. A PLP that specifies supports that are never delivered is not a functional plan — it is a paper exercise. Courts and human rights tribunals look at what actually happened, not what a document says. A school that writes EA support into a PLP and then fails to deliver it has created a documented gap between policy and practice that works against the school in any dispute.

It may constitute constructive exclusion. If the removal of EA support leads to your child being unable to access the curriculum, regulating behaviorally, or attending safely — and if the school responds by suggesting a partial day plan or reduced attendance — the underlying EA removal is the proximate cause of the exclusion. Documenting this chain of causation matters.

How to Document the Loss and Create a Paper Trail

Before making any formal demand, you need documentation. This is what you should be tracking:

A service delivery log. For each school day, note what EA support your child's PLP specifies, what actually happened, and any observable consequences (behavioral incidents, incomplete work, reports from your child about what occurred). Entries do not need to be long — two or three lines per day is sufficient to build a pattern.

Written communication with teachers. Send brief email check-ins to the classroom teacher once a week: "Just checking in — was [child's name] able to access the EA support specified in the PLP today?" Even a non-response is documentation. A pattern of non-responses or vague answers is evidence.

Your copy of the PLP. Make sure you have the most recent signed version. The Justification Summary and the specific support provisions are what you will reference in any formal demand.

Formally Demanding Replacement Accommodations

Once you have a documented pattern, your next step is a formal written request to the EST-Resource and school principal. This letter should:

1. Identify the specific EA support hours promised in the PLP
2. State that based on your service delivery log and communications, this support has not been consistently provided
3. Reference Policy 322 and the NB Human Rights Act duty to accommodate
4. Request a formal ESS Team meeting within ten business days to either restore the EA support or document specific, evidence-based alternative accommodations that will achieve equivalent outcomes

The key phrase is "equivalent outcomes." You are not simply accepting "we'll try to do better." You are requiring the school to document, in writing, how your child's PLP goals will be met even when an EA is unavailable. This could include dedicated assistive technology, modified instructional delivery by the classroom teacher, small-group pull-out with the EST-Resource, or structured peer support — but whatever it is, it must be specific, measurable, and written into the PLP.

If the school's ESS Team meeting does not produce written commitments, your next step is a written complaint to the District Superintendent. State that the school is failing to deliver documented PLP accommodations and has not provided alternative supports as required under the duty to accommodate.

When Escalation Is Warranted

Most schools will respond to a well-documented formal written request. But if the pattern continues after an ESS Team meeting and written commitments — or if the school refuses to acknowledge the problem — you have three parallel escalation options:

District Superintendent complaint. Write to the superintendent of your district (Anglophone West, South, East, or North — or the relevant Francophone district). Attach your service delivery log, the PLP, and your written correspondence. Request written acknowledgment and a resolution plan within fifteen business days.

NB Ombudsman. If the district's response is procedurally unfair — if they ignore you, change the terms without notice, or deny you the right to a formal meeting — the Ombudsman investigates government bodies' procedural conduct.

NB Human Rights Commission. If the cumulative failure to provide accommodations constitutes disability discrimination, you can file a formal complaint. The Commission can investigate, mediate, and ultimately order systemic remedies. Complaints must generally be filed within 12 months of the incidents.

The Critical Documentation Move: RTIPPA Request

If you are preparing for a formal complaint or appeal, submit a Right to Information and Protection of Privacy Act (RTIPPA) request to your District's RTIPPA Coordinator. Request all educational records, behavioral incident logs, ESS team meeting minutes, and internal email correspondence regarding your child going back at least two years.

This often surfaces internal documents — emails between teachers, notes from principals, reports to district supervisors — that reveal whether the school's own records align with what you have been told. Parents who have done this have discovered that internal documentation acknowledges support gaps that were never communicated to the family.

For fill-in-the-blank templates for all of the letters described in this post — the PLP support demand, the ESS meeting request, and the district escalation letter — the New Brunswick Special Ed Advocacy Playbook provides the exact language, grounded in Policy 322 and the NB Human Rights Act, that school administrators are legally obligated to respond to.

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