What does it mean to project?  It means to throw.  Psychologically it means to throw out or away, to attribute to another qualities that are really in yourself.  

We’d like to ask anyone reading this to consider what it might feel like when a whole “community” does that and you are on the receiving end of behaviour they don’t want to own.  And what about if you’re nine years old?  Or five?  That is a pretty hefty load that the parents, teachers, management and trustees of the Titirangi Steiner School are expecting our children to bear.  

Let’s be really clear about this.  A whole ‘community’ of supposedly responsible adults is prepared to let a 9 year old child carry the can for a school’s lack of ability to impose its own behavioural policy?  And that is not child abuse?  And it’s unreasonable for her parents to be so angry that they want to see justice at any cost?

We have been told by several people that the school is busy painting a picture of us that makes it look as though we are responsible for ‘everything that is wrong in the school’.  We know that Mark Thornton has done this by trying to get people to believe untruths about the order that things happened in (for example).  And quite a lot of parents bought that, probably because they don’t want to think that they are being lied to by the man they give their cheques to.

His modus operandi when it comes to this goes further than simple lying.  He made a joke at the ‘secret meeting’ about us, that went something like this:- 

“If we reinstate them it would be like this:  I stand in a Catholic Church calling myself a Catholic, but I don’t believe in Christ, same thing..haha!"

What on earth does this mean?  He must be saying that we want to come to Titirangi Steiner School but that we don’t share the values of the school.  This is the question we have ourselves asked in our video “Axed”’.  (Actually we are finding in our research that bullying is very much NOT a part of Steiner philosophy and that Steiner himself was of the opinion that in the case of irreconcilable differences between teacher and pupil that the teacher should leave! - more on this later.)

Our 8 year old has only been at the school for 4 months.  Apart from that, our 5 year old has been in kindy for over a year with absolutely no problems...ask Sheryl, Our Middle Child’s teacher.  (Kindy is run as a different school in many ways, including financially.) 

How can a ‘joke’ such as Mr Thornton’s be an appropriate way to deal with a situation in which a school has ‘asked a family to leave’ for the very first time in its 25 year odd history?  (Obviously we weren’t at the meeting, but we can produce witness to it in court if necessary).

Does he mean that we have not understood the way a Steiner School operates?  That is surely his responsibility, since he is the Manager of the School!  Surely an ‘inclusive’ policy would have tried to educate us before dumping all our children in this way after four months?  You can see how many emails we wrote, yet not once is there an example of him or anyone else responding with an indication that we were barking up the wrong tree.  

Does this ‘joke’ of Mark Thornton’s reflect the seriousness of what has just happened to our daughters?  We really can’t see it.  What we can see is an example of how he is trying to split things.  “Asking a family to leave” neatly tries to disguise the devastating effect of that ‘asking’ (asking = trespass orders by the way), on the CHILDREN.

Because the other thing he said at that meeting was that the girls could not have been expelled because they had “not even been accepted into the school”.  Oh really, and Our Middle Child had been there for a year?  

What he was referring to, of course was the fact that he had never followed the procedure laid out in our letter of welcome.  Apparently they were supposed to officially welcome Our Eldest Child into the school at the end of her first full term.  They did not follow the procedure (notice any pattern emerging?) and in that meeting he had the temerity to use that very failing of his as a reason why our daughter has not been abused by the school.  Just as he threw out the child that was being bullied - projection.

But there is more.  This was in an email that we received the other day....

“There is a group of parents who are supporting you strongly. However, they also find it difficult at the current stage of the development to express this openly. This is mainly because of the picture management is trying to portray of you.”

It strikes us as really incredibly sad that a whole group of adults are having difficulty speaking up for an abused child, even when they feel strongly that the child has been badly treated.  The projection that the school is throwing on us must be really powerful if it can intimidate grown men and women in this way... What in the world could be so frightening, if it isn’t the way the school might behave towards those who questions its dynastic proclamations? 

Why does the school need to do this anyway?  If we’re so awful, why not invite us in, let us speak and just sink ourselves... give us a bit more rope?

(Have you considered why we have so much support when we have to communicate in this open transparent and inclusive manner on the internet?  Have the school called a public meeting - for everybody?  Could they authentically do that without inviting us?  I don’t think so. (We, on the other hand, have extended an open invitation to them, and to you all, to come and air your point of view in an interview.))

Because they know that in the real world, they haven’t got a leg to stand on, kicking vulnerable children out of a school because the teacher and management can’t stop a group of 10 year old boys from bullying.  It’s not a very good advertisement for the school, or for the school ‘community’.

People who have a genuine point of view don’t need to behave like this.  They aren’t afraid of different opinions, or of open debate.  What is it about this school that makes it necessary to get rid of a whole family, just because they point up some (pretty obvious)  behavioural problems?

It’s a projection, pure and simple.  They are trying to paint a picture of us that’s bad because that’s the only thing they have to stop people seeing that they have done a bad thing.  They don’t have any facts on their side, apart from that we got angry a couple of times... quite understandable when you’ve been treated as less human than others.  

And they’ve got to come up with something to distract parents from the fact that this child abuse has been committed in your names.  Otherwise you would all get angry with them.  (This is what you should be doing - it is the moral choice, the only way to avoid collusion, and what you would obviously all want if it was your children who had been so abused.)

What’s worse is that if they don’t want to face up to this bad thing now, it clearly shows that they won’t in the future either.  Their current actions and this projection shows you exactly how their future reactions will look.  That has to be a scary thought if you love your kids, (of course you love your kids, just not many people give a damn about ours), because who can say what could possibly happen at the school that you may need to question in the future?

We don’t know how many parents are buying into it all, but we’d like to ask you to consider the effect of knowing that people are spreading this kind of muck about you when you’ve already been booted out of a school for no reason, in a country you’ve only been in for a year and a half and all the grown-ups are apparently too scared to speak up!

And for the children, the added experience of knowing that all those adults who used to talk to you and smile at you in that reassuring way we all have that says “I’m an adult, you’re safe with me”, were lying.  Can you admit how devastating that is?

Projection is a fact of life.  We all do it sometimes.  But an institution that does that to the very children they claim to cherish is, in our humble opinion as the scapegoats, not fit to exist.  

Please read that sentence again because the only way you can actually hold a different point of view is if you sincerely believe that our daughter deserved to be treated like that, first bullied and bruised, then dumped.   She was 8 at the time.

She hasn’t been given her handwork bag back yet, despite asking for it twice and her teacher hasn’t bothered to reply to her email itemising the damage and theft from her other belongings before they were returned to her.  Interestingly and very disappointingly,  her teacher Susanne Cole has been completely silent towards us all on this matter, making zero effort to communicate, or show the least care for Our Eldest Child.  This is in spite of the fact that she apparently found her ‘delightful‘ not many weeks earlier.

Do you honestly believe that our daughter did and does deserve that?  More than your own kids would?  Was she really asking for it?  Are you surprised to find that you can hold such a point of view of a 8 year old?  Have you realised yet that it is a projection?

Of course, it wasn’t your projection in the beginning because “the school” did this to us.  But the way they are behaving now, ‘painting negative pictures etc’, like the secret meeting and the encouragement to bitch and slander, and treat us and our little girls as a joke, is an invitation to you to join in, to collude in the projection, and to join in the child abuse.  Certainly Management uses your tacit say-so in its continuing deafness to our entreaties for respect for our children’s human rights. IT”S BULLYING FOLKS.  Is that ok with you?

Are you going to continue to buy into that?  Will Mark Thornton, the College, and those members of the Trust who get into bed with them, suck you into their projected version of events where they haven’t just sold their souls to the devil merely to avoid dealing with their own mess?

Go on then, if you must, it’s your choice.  But please in the name of sanity at least be aware that it is a choice.

Be aware also that the more our daughter is indirectly or directly demonised by this massive, infantile collective projection, the further we will take our efforts to throw that projection off, and the direction it will be thrown is right back at the school, very directly indeed.  (Would you do less for your own children?) 

That is when you will realise that you were part of the projection too, because that is when you personally and your own children will feel it.  They are throwing it out on your behalf but it doesn’t feel like it.  When it comes back it will effect everyone and everyone will have to wear it.  Ask Isabelle, a parent in class 3/4 what that feels like.  She was so frightened when it flew back at her (because she “joined in” and made an outrageous slanderous suggestion about us, which she has apologised for by the way), that she called the police and got another trespass order against us - more bullying.  Projections have such power.

Of course that happened because she was worried about ‘damage to our lovely school’.  That’s because she’s bought the hype, that our daughters and us have done that damage.  She doesn’t realise yet that it’s a projection, and so doesn’t yet see just how much damage Management and teachers have just done to ‘our lovely school’.

Please read the correspondence and pay careful attention to the chronology.  Get a picture of the true situation and resist this slimy, pastel coloured invitation to collude in the abuse of children.

It’s a better way forward, it is an adult way to behave and, if the school can be “persuaded” to deal with its problems rather than projecting them onto vulnerable ‘sensitive’ kids, then it might just grow itself into a sustainable institution, fit for the rigours of life in the 21st Century, rather than the apparently corrupt, cowardly, backward-looking, dogmatic, misogynist and bullying institution it seems presently content to remain.  Given what we’re uncovering about Steiner’s take on such matters, he must be turning in his grave!

Does the Titirangi Steiner School honestly believe it is invulnerable or somehow immortal just because people built it with their bare hands and because it has existed for a quarter of a century?

If you have a good look around at world regimes, the banking crisis, and countless other examples you will be hard pressed not to agree that inflexible and arrogant institutions a lot older than that, have been, are, and will continue to be imploding, collapsing and ceasing to exist in this age of massive global change.

Please call for the immediate re-instatement of these children - and re-assert the humaneness of Steiner Education.  Say no to this tired old projection.