Letters

8th of June 2009

Delivered by Hand

To the management and College of Titirangi Steiner School

Having not received your response to the concerns of last week due to the lack of an attachment in your email and subsequent computer/internet problems over the weekend, we are aware that an agenda has not, to our knowledge, been finalised for our meeting this afternoon.

Seeing as how you have finally got around to organising the meeting, we figured the least we could do was to attend and to try and bring something positive as well, not just our anger and desperation about stopping the physical hurting.

Our major concern over the weekend has been a consideration of the children, all of them. It is sad to consider that the failure of parents and school entities to arrive at a true understanding, based on internationally recognised standards of recognition of human rights, is having and will continue to have a negative impact, both on their safety and access to a safe school environment.

Although you may believe that we are the only people in the school community to hold similar views about physical harm and other bullying in school, we think you are wrong and that, in fact, that cannot be true.  No parent actually considers it all right to see their child come home having been battered.  The experience of seeing your children being intentionally hurt, is one which has been written about at length in so many different ways, whether in family, school, gangs, or war, but it always produces sickening anguish. These are completely ordinary and natural feelings.

What can also be said through observation of history is that if people do not defend their children, then the reasons must be fairly powerful, involving substantial threat.

Our hope is that, given the impasse on this particular front, that we should seek mediation from a body whose intention is to discover the synergy inherent in this situation.  Would it have arisen if it was not meant to be dealt with?

Meanwhile, however the hurting will finally be stopped, how are we all, (us as parents and you as the people we ‘entrust’ our children to) going to prevent this impasse from further hurting [R]?  We am sure we can all agree that this is of the utmost importance given that she has struggled on in that class only because of how much she likes the curriculum.  Any of you that have taught her must agree with that.  We support her in this and only try to ensure that she is safe from intentional and indifferently careless harm.

We thought we would put down our thoughts on the best way forward, given the impact that these unresolved issues are having on [R], to make sure that her rights to an education are not compromised and given the fact that she loves the curriculum as much as we do, and, were it not for the fact that her physical safety and emotional equilibrium is compromised at school, by the bullying, she would be very happy there.  i.e. it is the management of peer to peer relationships that is causing the problem, not the curriculum, (except to the extent, possibly, that the peer to peer relationships are seen as being an actual part of the curriculum, which is an area we are learning about, being new to Steiner.)

We want to make it absolutely clear, before the meeting, and notwithstanding any possible actions that may be necessary, or have been mentioned or referred to, that the issue of violent, harassing, bullying behaviour at school, although dramatic in its effect and time consuming, is one part of [R]’s school life and when it is absent, she likes the Steiner School very much, and considerably more than mainstream ones.

We note that of late, the instructions as to what to do in the case of an incident have been somewhat confused, as, having been asked to talk to Susanne, then Mark, then Susanne, again, she eventually asked me to bring an incident it to an evening teachers meeting instead, which is a public forum.  This was confusing to us, as fairly new parents at the Steiner school, since it does not obviously fit in with any available guidelines in these matters, making it hard to follow. 

This confusion notwithstanding, we also note that at the last teacher’s meeting, Susanne expressed the clear point of view that a large part of the problem in Class 3 and 4 is the developmental stages of the children.  What she said about it was extremely interesting, and the salient points are listed below, such that:-

Class 3’s are at a particularly tender time in their development, needing to establish themselves within their peer group, it is an inward looking time and We was personally lucky enough to experience an illustration of this through participating in a short Eurythmy demonstration.

This attitude of year 3s was then contrasted with the developmental needs of the year 4 group who were referred to as looking ‘outwards’, and certainly the Eurythmy demonstration of this was very different, the outward-looking nature of the exercise making it harder to ‘feel’ what others in the group were doing and therefore act in harmony with them.

We refer to this exercise for six reasons:-

1- It shows how different the needs of the two year groups are, which was the purpose of it.  The year 4 group was also referred to as coming into a Viking-like energy, and certainly in voice work in that year, they do a lot of very strong work to help them take the energy they have developed within the group, outwards on their own behalf and towards the world. (This is our current understanding of this, which, although fascinating, we are new to, so we hope we are expressing it adequately)

2- It explains clearly why there are so many problems in that Class because not only are there many more boys than girls, but the vast majority of the boys are in the Class 4 year group and all of the most ‘boisterous‘ ones.  Without glossing over the fact that there definitely is bullying in this class environment, the year group numbers, and sex/ratio balance definitely has a major effect and is in part responsible for making [R]’s experience so disorientating. (Another way of putting that could be that it is much more intimidating being bullied by boys possibly up to nearly two years older).

3- Not only that, but during the meeting Susanne also referred to the fact that this time in year 3 was very beneficial to those children, who. on reaching this point in their development had the opportunity to really get to know the group that they had been playing with since kindy, or possibly before.  This really made an impression on us since that is largely emphatically not the case.  Several of the children in Class 3 are very recent arrivals from other countries who, not only do not know the other children, but who also are not familiar with the culture here, this would further exacerbate the possible alienation of points 1. and 2. above.

4- Because of Susanne’s (or the College’s?), correct observation of these class difficulties and the subsequent action the school has taken to separate the classes, we have been able to observe [R] as she comes home from school, having not been sharing lessons with the class 4 group.  Quite simply, the difference is that she is not hurt in any way, We leave it to you to imagine the tangible difference in such a child.

5- Given our joint responsibilities to uphold human rights under any act you care to name.....it would seem reasonable, therefore, to consider a partial attendance at school, so as not to compromise her other rights to a safe education, with the other part being accomplished at home.

6- An important part of such a decision is that [R] herself wants very badly to stay at the school, and even though she is a minor, we believe that her rights extend to staying at the school that she wants to go to, if at all possible.  This necessitates a willingness by the adults and institutions around her to give her ‘respect’ and ensure that she is ‘treated with dignity’, as your guidelines state. 

Certainly,  given how much [R] does like the curriculum, we would regard it as a hatchet job to her self-esteem as much as to her Human Rights if she has to leave the Steiner School because she gets hurt there....I’m not sure what kind of sense anyone could make of that.

These are the reasons that we would like to propose this as part of the agenda for the meeting this afternoon.  We would have mentioned them sooner, but our minds were moved by the axe.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Angel Garden                        Steve Paris