Letters
30th of June 2009, 4:33pm
To the Trustees
We are writing to draw your attention to the legal implications of the school’s action in suddenly ejecting parents who won’t stop complaining about bullying and harassment at school, with no warning, no procedures, on some flimsy excuse, and in direct breach of their contractual obligation to meet with those parents, which meeting had been a long time being set up, as you know.
According to Mark Thornton, “the Trustees are not charged with the role of managers of the school; rather, they must obtain sufficient information to be satisfied that the workings and dealings of the school do not expose the school to clear legal risk or monetary loss”.
Starting with the money, if all the parents of the children who have just left the school (that we know about), were paying full fees, the school would have just lost around $25,000. (All but one of these were in the same class as [R]).
This would lead us to observe that the trustees must not have had enough information, whether they have asked for it or not, to prevent this loss. The only other possibility is that more money would be lost by actually dealing with the problem of violence in school effectively, which possibility poses more questions than it answers.
We have asked the school to provide details of the lawfulness and procedural correctness of its recent actions and we are waiting for a response. We have today received a letter advising us that there will be no mediation and according to Heather Peri, our correspondence is now ‘closed’, despite the fact that neither her nor Mark have ever given us valid reasons for their actions (the ones included in the letter they sent us on the 19th of June - www.titirangisteinermessenger.com/TSM/090619.html - were far from valid as was demonstrated in our reply of the 22nd of June - www.titirangisteinermessenger.com/TSM/090622-1404.html). We must remind the school that they have a duty to account for their actions as we have requested, and within a reasonable time frame.
In the mean time, there are some salient facts which must be looked at squarely with the rigour that only your position of ultimate responsibility can bring to them, to avoid opening the school to further dangers on the legal front also.
On Thursday 4 June a boy (10), notorious for years in the school, was left unsupervised in the bush with a girl (8), who he has assaulted in the past (I have personally witnessed this, to my horror and disgust), and who he had admitted to Mark during a recent interview to being ‘pissed off with’, with an axe.
Due to being unsupervised he was able to threaten [R] with the axe and then push her backwards into a tree.
The decision was made the next day to throw us out of the school suddenly and unexpectedly. The action that almost certainly changed somebody’s mind was that of Angel having confronted the teacher on Friday morning, which resulted in him admitting that what he had just said about being in sight of the boy with the axe who was threatening another child, was not true.
We know that the big Monday meeting was still set to go ahead on Thursday evening and therefore the only possible conclusion is that the mention of the axe incident was simply unacceptable to management, college and trustees, since we have never been openly criticised for bringing up any incident before, neither had any of our children ever been in any kind of trouble except [R] on a single occasion. Yet this one action of ours appears to have prompted our immediate ejection from the school with no procedures, consultation, or warning whatsoever.
The specific failures of management in this matter, although multiple, we will not detail here, as we await with interest the school’s appraisal of their own behaviour in a legal-contractual context, and in the context of the schools responsibilities under the Bill of Rights Act, the Health and Safety Act, as well as the Human Rights Act, and Acts pertaining to the Rights of children.
We had an understanding that the school had a sincere desire to keep the children safe from harassment and bullying, and an expectation that they would take vigourous action to prevent any physical assault of children in that class. This expectation was continually fuelled by management and teachers, effectively encouraging us in continuing both to keep [R] at the school, and to keep bringing the subject up.
Mark Thornton told both of us, and Steve twice, that he had ‘no tolerance’ whatsoever of such behaviour and that offenders would be segregated.
In reality, stopping harassment and assault has not been the absolute first consideration, having to vie for importance with the desire not to exclude bullying children, and largely losing that misguided competition; a mistake which has caused real harm to children at the school. Procedures are inconsistent and non-transparent and children continued to leave, many months later, as harassment and assault continued largely unabated.
Meanwhile, the school’s apparent encouragement of our loving protection of our daughter, turned to aggression towards both us and all of our children. The meeting we had waited weeks for was cancelled with no notice, we were booted out with no warning, no proper reason and no right of appeal. and still people have been ‘horrified’ to see the effect of this provocation on us. It may be obvious now, with hindsight, that there was another agenda running below the surface which suddenly erupted, but that does not explain why it was there.
The possibility that the desire to keep the children safe was not sincere is too gruesome to contemplate, yet these circumstances did give rise to a situation in which children were exhorted to tell, making themselves further targets without proper safe-guarding actions being taken by the responsible adults - a torturous situation to put children in, never mind the ensuing provocation of worried parents.
The fact that we have built a website in protest, which is currently well-visited, advising people of these appalling instances of mismanagement and institutional aggression towards our children, will also open the school to further financial losses, if more people decide to pass over the school as a viable choice for their children. We also know of at least one parent who has withdrawn from school life because, in their words “there was bullying, and the school did not deal with it properly”. Several others have told us that they are “on the fence at the moment.”
At any rate we can observe that indeed, by their actions, Management and College have ensured that the school has already been opened up to both financial loss and legal risk and as at some stage the school will be called upon to answer for these actions in a legal framework, which has implications for all school entities, including yourselves.
If all the school entities, CoT, management and trustees, are so prepared to risk financial loss and legal action to avoid confronting the acts of harassment and assault perpetrated by a few pupils and very largely one or two boys, then either management is simply completely inept, or we must suspect that there is some extremely powerful agenda operating.
Because this agenda is not overt, we can only ponder the implications of such an observation, pending enquiry.
We note that none of our legitimate questions in this matter have been properly addressed, we have not been accorded even basic human dignity in this matter, being treated less like human beings and more like a bad case of the flu. A meeting was held last night to discuss us, in our absence, which we find both sinister and further provocation to act.
We note that Sue Russell of the Federation will be discussing some of these issues with members of College on Thursday, as we have asked her to examine the situation in the light of the very real possibility that actions at this one small school can now risk damage to the reputation of Steiner Education generally.
As one visitor to our web site put it, “what was presented I find disturbing, and if true, and as a Steiner School .. they have stained the cloak of a humane and large international organisation.”
Yours sincerely
Angel Garden Steve Paris