Letters

22nd of June 2009, 2:04pm

To Mark Thornton

In response to your letter of the 18th of June, which we received Friday the 19th, we understand that the school has no intention of re-opening dialogue with us at the present time.  This is in spite of efforts of parents within the school, our own efforts, as well as the evidence we have provided about there being no grounds for your actions.

Although we received an email from Sean Gribben last night, appearing to suggest that perhaps there might be some kind of ‘finalizing’ meeting, we did not understand the contents of the email and having requested clarification twice, are still awaiting further response.

In the meantime, we are assuming that your ‘no meeting’, ‘no mediation’ ‘maybe’ ‘who knows?’ ‘keep them hanging’ letter still stands and we are therefore not modifying our actions in any way.  While still desiring to meet, we note that your incredible slowness is a choice and entirely unnecessary as your decision to kick us out was made very fast indeed (or so it appears).

Two weeks after your damaging action against our family, you have not retracted any of the erroneous information that has been circulated, or shown us any indication that the school is ready to take its responsibility for causing any part of the problem.

That is why, today being [R]’s birthday, we have decided, in acknowledgement of the harm towards her that you have seen fit to sanction, to publicise the website we’ve been putting together to the school.  The address is www.titirangisteinermessenger.com.  You will also be receiving an email with the same information as will many others in the school.

We will be grateful if you will circulate the address to all the parents, as if we have to do it, we will have to use methods that will bring further attention to the site.  

While we hope you will decide to talk to us again in the near future, we feel that the facts of the matter should be made available to the school community, who otherwise will only have what you all tell them about it to go on.  As you have shut us out, this is really the only way to do that and the resulting visibility of the material being on the internet is the consequence of your own unwillingness to communicate reasonably.

Meanwhile we must ask you to complete the task we required of you in our letter of the 11th of June, namely to give account of your actions both in regard to lawfulness and with regard to your own stated rules regarding contracts with parents which are also legally binding.

For example, although I am sure that there may be circumstances in which a contract can be terminated promptly, would you please spell out for us, how this set of circumstances can possibly fit.   In your answer would you please, for your own sakes really, stick to the facts in terms of chronology, as we have substantial evidence of the order in which things have happened and it will not help your own case if you do not stick faithfully to the truth.

So you might explain how you came to throw a whole family out of the school with no warning, notice, interview etc., when they, and the trustees believed that there was to be a meeting and even that meeting was not about the family, but about the genuine issues they had been bringing up.  (If the meeting was to be about the family, then that is again prejudicial to you since this intention was then covert, we having no knowledge of it).  I hope this is clear.  If you need further examples, please let us know.

We ask you also to research the various Acts that may have bearing on your actions, both in this matter of unfairly dismissing us, and with regard to any possible dereliction of duty of care to the children who you have promised to keep ‘safe’, through lack of supervision, (health and safety), false advertising etc.,

Your reasons for kicking us out seem vague and flimsy and, again, pay no attention to chronology.

Briefly

1.The school has no proper policy to keep the children safe.  There is a policy but it does not keep all the children safe.  We are in opposition to that and consider that the school should get one immediately as you advertise for little children to go there.  The fact that there was a meeting organised to discuss these matters is proof enough that you yourselves were of the opinion that it could possibly be improved!  We are in ‘fundamental opposition’ to children being abused at school and your current policy does not prevent that as our cataloguing of incidents at the school continues to demonstrate.  Also, if the policy is so good, why have we been chucked out for not understanding how it works?  We kept asking.

2.May we please have some examples of your no 2. that took place before you aggressively and abusively terminated our children’s education at the school? i.e. would you pay proper attention to chronology please.  Confronting a teacher about lying about having not properly supervised children with dangerous weapons at the school cannot reasonably be said to count.

3.Chronology is again important.  You cannot use things that happened after your action of excommunicating us as reasons for having done so.  We do not know what you can think is the proper response for such tawdry behaviour from a soit disant professional institution, but we make no apologies for pointing out the probable lawlessness of your recent actions having found ourselves aggressively dumped.  What on earth do you expect us to do, slope away with our tails between our legs?

As far as before you did that, we tried latterly to make you aware of how many laws you may be failing to uphold with your slapdash approach to these very serious matters of bullying, harassment and physical assault in the school, warning you of the legal dangers you would be in if there was a permanent injury to a child, or worse.

The large volume of correspondence clearly shows that.  Due to the seriousness of your failings around the axe incident, (for example), we did begin to seriously look at the legal situation.  Responsible parents should not be criticised for that, and genuine, responsible institutions need not feel threatened by such scrutiny.  I’m afraid your extremely defensive response to parents trying to stop bullying does rather speak for itself.

We do not believe that any relationship is irretrievable if there is a will to try from both parties.  If we did, we would have left after two weeks at Steiner watching [R] through the holidays be so scared, hearing parents saying that this situation had been going on for years, or perhaps again when you, Mark, sabotaged the careful arrangements we had made with Susanne to help out with supervision at playtime.  It was obvious from these early encounters that communication is not the school’s strong suit, but out of appreciation of the curriculum and love for our children, we persevered and will continue to do so.

We have even communicated with the College specifically in an effort to acknowledge and placate their delicate sensibilities.  Please don’t try and pretend that it is us who have given up when in reality you just want us to disappear.  

We trust that you will soon come to see all these events from a different, more realistic perspective.

Yours sincerely

Angel Garden and Steve Paris