Letters

15th of June 2009, 12:13pm

To the Trustees

As the school entity with ultimate responsibility for the continued existence and excellence of the school, we are writing to appeal to you to help us and the school to re-open dialogue.

We understand that defensiveness has arisen and grown on both sides and that the school presently feels unable to continue, which in turn has led to increasing defensiveness on our part.

We feel that it is most important to realise that the children have been very adversely affected by these recent events and are currently not welcome in the Steiner School due to things over which they have absolutely no control.

The children deserve a Steiner Education, and it was only to try and safe-guard that that we have felt it necessary to continually address problems of intentional hurting in the class.  This is just one class, and had no bearing on our other children, who are now all equally compromised.

The school has obviously not been able to respond to our legitimate concerns, due it seems, in part to our method of communication.  While we would like you to consider that it is hard to remain calm when your child is being hurt, we acknowledge that the school broadly shares would like to ask the school to let us know what they would feel is a good way to move the situation forward, keep channels of communication open, and move away from defensive positions.

In saying this, we are acknowledging that the school broadly shares our aims of creating a safe environment where children can have access to the wonderful curriculum.  It would be immoral for miscommunication and misunderstandings between adults to be allowed to spoil those opportunities for innocent children and we feel confident that, on this at least, we are all agreed.

We also need to make it really clear that we are not going to drop this matter and just disappear.  We have just bought a house here and that represents, in part, as we wrote months ago, a commitment to stay and sort out any problems that might arise, whatever they are.

While understanding that our very clear and assertive approach to this problem seems to have alienated the school, we would also like them to understand that pushing us away so that communication is no longer possible, leaves no avenues apart from those involving other agencies and legal actions.

Instead we would prefer to discuss, with open minds and a preparedness to listen, how to move things forward for the sake of the children.  Perhaps beginning with some mediated, off the record and without prejudice discussion either on or off school premises, sometime within the next week.

We trust in your desire to see and your ability to create conditions in which the school can thrive and prosper for which good communication is an absolute necessity and a most basic building block.

Yours sincerely

Angel Garden and Steve Paris