School board officials in Langley are apologizing after a special needs class was all but left out of a middle school yearbook handed out on the first day back.
When most parents get their hands on their school yearbooks, they anxiously flip to the page with their child's photo and name. But when Riley Hooper's mother looked for her son, all she could find was a candid shot showing only the side of his face, his attention consumed by an iPad.
Students in other classes at H.D. Stafford Middle School were featured in a traditional layout: rows of class pictures with generic blue backgrounds, with their names listed to the side and their class division number as the page title. Hooper's classmates were featured on a page called "we play," with candid shots of the special needs students and no names.
"I want to have a class photo like them," Hooper told CTV Vancouver, pointing to a more traditional page.
"Not only did they not use the school pictures that we purchased and paid for like all the other kids, their names are not even on the page," Hooper's mother Debra Benning said.
"It breaks my heart. I feel like these kids are part of the community, and they need to be treated as such."
She said when she first picked up the yearbook she stood in the school hallway crying. She couldn't even find their page at first, and thought they'd been completely omitted.
"But then I realized the page was there, it was just a totally different format… It was the worst case pictures that they could've even found," Benning said.
Benning was irked by the page title as well.
"All that was on the page was 'we play.' They do a lot more in that class than just play," she said.
Ken Hoff, communications manager for the Langley School District, said the exclusion was an error and was "very unfortunate."
Hoff said the layout for the section of the book featuring Hooper's class was different than the rest, but isn't sure exactly how it happened. Staff and students put the book together, and must have missed that the class was left out.
He said the school's administration has spoken with the boy's family and offered an apology. They will also be speaking to the families of the other children in the class.
"Moving forward, all we can do is try to ensure that something like this doesn't happen again," he told CTV.
"I think it's just a matter of checks and balances, and being a little more diligent in double-checking these things before they go to publication."
But this case is the second year in a row that the class has been treated differently in the yearbook.
Hooper's mother said the first time it happened she addressed the school board and the principal, and was called in for an apology and assured it wouldn't happen again.
When asked why the problem wasn't fixed, Hoff said there were measures put in place to try to address it.
"Unfortunately it's happened again," Hoff said, reiterating that the district would use it as a learning opportunity, and be "more diligent" in the years to come.
He said the district will also use it as an opportunity to "further explore our goals of inclusion in the community."
Benning also told CTV News she has heard from the principal of the school, who reached out to the company that printed the yearbooks. They are working on a fix, but aren't sure yet whether they will reprint the books for the left out students or issue an insert for all of the school's students' yearbooks that would include official class photos.
With a report from CTV Vancouver's Nafeesa Karim
