Kelly Lamrock's 'A Policy of Giving Up': What NB's Child Advocate Reports Mean for Parents

In 2024 and 2025, New Brunswick's Child, Youth and Senior Advocate published a series of reports that validated what thousands of NB parents had been experiencing for years — and that exposed, with documented evidence, how routinely the provincial education system fails students with exceptionalities.

If you have been told your child's situation is just "how the system works" or that the school is doing everything it can, these reports matter to you directly. They document systemic concerns, what the government's own watchdog has condemned, and context that can inform formal complaints and legal review.

What the CYSA Does

The Office of the Child, Youth and Senior Advocate (CYSA) operates independently of the provincial government. The Advocate — currently Kelly Lamrock — has the legal authority to investigate systemic failures in the delivery of services to children, demand records from government departments, compel written responses from the EECD, and publish findings.

The Advocate's office also accepts individual complaints from families. CYSA case specialists can help parents navigate the school system, identify when their child's rights may be affected, and engage with the Department of Education. Families can contact the office through its current intake process.

"A Policy of Giving Up" (2024)

The 2024 annual report, titled A Policy of Giving Up, was the Advocate's most direct indictment of New Brunswick's inclusive education system to date. The key findings:

Children are being illegally excluded. The report documented that children with disabilities — primarily those with complex behavioral, neurological, or cognitive needs — were being routinely sent home on indefinite "partial day plans." The Advocate found that these plans were not being used as the last-resort, time-limited strategy Policy 323 requires. They were being used as an administrative workaround for EA staffing shortages. The Advocate characterized this as an illegal denial of education.

The system is managing exclusion, not preventing it. Rather than addressing the root cause of classroom support failures, the report found the system had developed a culture of managing the consequences of inadequate resourcing — sending difficult-to-support students home, relying on unrecorded behavioral interventions, and allowing the situation to be absorbed by families without systemic accountability.

Seclusion rooms are operating without legal authority. The Advocate published a separate report titled Isolated: How School Seclusion Rooms Became an Accepted Practice Outside the Law, finding that physical seclusion rooms — enclosed spaces where dysregulated students are placed — operate in NB schools without any legislative basis. There is no law authorizing their use. Former school staff reported being told to "not record" their use. The Advocate called for immediate cessation of the practice.

"Children Cut First" (Spring 2025)

The spring 2025 report, Children Cut First, focused on a $47.1 million budget cut to child welfare services within the Department of Social Development. The Advocate warned that cutting early intervention funding — the services that support families before children reach school age with complex unaddressed needs — would directly increase the complexity of student needs entering a school system already in crisis.

The report's core argument: every dollar cut from early intervention and family support ultimately multiplies the cost to the education system, to families, and to children whose needs go unmet for years.

"Wake Up Call" (September 2025)

The September 2025 Wake Up Call report — formally titled Learning from the Education Budgeting Saga — was comprehensive and systemic. Its major findings:

The Integrated Service Delivery model is failing. ISD is supposed to coordinate health, social, and educational services for complex-needs students. The Advocate found that the model's theoretical coordination rarely translates to actual service delivery in practice, leaving teachers to manage impossibly complex classrooms without timely clinical guidance.

Chronic absenteeism is at crisis levels. Between September and December of the 2024–2025 school year, 32.5% of NB students were chronically absent. The same period in the 2025–2026 school year showed only a marginal improvement to 29.3%.

One in 200 children cannot get an education. The report quantified what parents had been experiencing: approximately one in every 200 children in New Brunswick is chronically absent specifically because the public school system "will not or cannot educate them."

Incremental solutions are insufficient. The Advocate explicitly rejected the government's incremental approach and recommended that the province establish outcome-focused statistical indicators, mandate that districts with failing outcomes develop formal remediation plans, and ensure school readiness by Kindergarten and core literacy by Grade 5.

Why These Reports Matter for Your Advocacy

These are not opinion pieces. They are formal reports from an independent statutory officer who has the power to demand government accountability. Their findings do several things for NB parents:

They validate your experience. If you have been told that your child's situation is an isolated case or that the school is doing its best, these reports establish that the failures you are experiencing are systemic, documented, and condemned at the highest independent oversight level in the province.

They provide context for complaints. When you file a formal complaint with the NB Ombudsman or the Human Rights Commission, you can cite the Advocate's findings as contextual evidence that the failures you experienced may form part of a known, documented pattern. The reports do not decide whether a particular case violated the law.

They provide context for an undue-hardship discussion. The reports document the financial, employment, and health impacts families can experience from exclusion. They do not decide an individual undue-hardship claim, but they can inform questions about how claimed resource limits relate to the duty to accommodate.

They are public documents. The CYSA reports are tabled documents available through the Legislative Assembly of NB. You can cite, quote, and attach excerpts to any formal written complaint or appeal. Doing so demonstrates that your complaint is grounded in verified provincial data, not personal grievance.

How to Engage the CYSA for Your Own Child

The CYSA office accepts individual complaints from families. If your child's rights are being affected — particularly around exclusion, seclusion, unauthorized restraint, or chronic PLP non-implementation — contact the Advocate's office through the official Child and Youth Advocate page.

CYSA case specialists do not represent you legally. They investigate and advocate from a systemic perspective. But their involvement often accelerates district-level resolution, because districts are acutely aware that CYSA interventions can escalate to formal published reports.

Filing a CYSA inquiry while simultaneously pursuing the school and district escalation chain keeps maximum pressure on all levels of the system simultaneously.

For a complete guide to using the CYSA, the Human Rights Commission, and the district escalation process together — along with fill-in-the-blank letter templates that reference the Advocate's findings — the New Brunswick Special Ed Advocacy Playbook integrates all three pathways into a single, step-by-step system.

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