Yesterday we visited the school, to inform those coming cold to the High School meeting about some of the ugly things that have happened on that pretty campus.

We were lucky to finally get someone from the school to talk to us.  Mr Cole, husband of Our Eldest Child’s ex-teacher, was kind enough to request to be recorded.  In doing so he gave us firm evidence of the necessity for Disclaimers for schools such as this one and a swift change in the law.  He candidly used the school’s status as a “Private”, as the very reason that it was ok to chuck out three kids with no warning, consultation, or right of appeal.

Does Sir Geoffery Palmer of the Law Commission, or the Education Minister herself know, we wonder, that teachers in Private Schools, Mr Cole left last year, would be prepared to say such things with total seeming confidence that such victimisation of children, rejected across the board in all State and Integrated schools, including Steiner ones, were perfectly ok here?

We must tell them immediately.  

Sign the petition!

The more research we do, and the more evidence we hear from people in the community about the long history of bullying that this school has born witness to, the clearer it is becoming that it is in the interpretation of Steiner in the context of a supposed legal ‘freedom’, that this school holds to, which appears to include an image of itself as operating on some kind of higher vibration, by different standards of behaviour than most people recognise as humane but apparently blind to its own despotism, and propped up by archaic legislation shot with loopholes, (or rather just a large loophole with a few thin threads of regulation, as inefficient as this school).

We have found plenty of evidence of Steiner Schools, organised in a thoroughly modern way, around the ideas of living democracy and respectful of the rights of all to feel safe.  These schools are operating all around the world as well as in New Zealand, and we believe that the actions of this particular school in regard to both ours and other people’s children, represent a real danger to the good reputation of Steiner Schools that Mr Cole claims to be concerned with, at the same time as he is besmirching it.

Therefore we want to state, clearly here for the record that in our view it is not Steiner that is at fault.  We chose to go the Steiner way and tried our best, even though our child was not separated from bullying children, and neither was the bullying stopped.  The abrupt way our children’s lives at the school were terminated, and the loss of the school has caused our family much grief and our children much damage.  

It’s obvious really for anyone following the journey recorded here, that we are not anti-Steiner people, but it is worth stating clearly, as an establishing shot, to create the proper context for what is to follow.