St Andrews College, or StAC as it is known, is a private school in Christchurch New Zealand. I went there from Year 9 in 2000 to yr 13 in 2004. I left halfway through 2004. Here is why:
Nigel Fairbairn, chosen to be rector in 2002 after former rector Barry Maister retired in 2001.
He replaced the open and welcoming culture of the Barry years with the tyrannical and oppressive
one of Stalinist Russia. This became immediately evident with the imposition of
assemblies every week. He claimed this was about school pride and school unity; It was about
brainwashing and indoctrination, especially evident with the removal of student run assemblies.
The keynote speech every week was "obey us" and "be what we want you to be".
The immediate and deadening silence
of anyone who ventured their opinions on school life (particularly Nigel's resignation) was evident - a drastic change from the Maister golden years, threats and suspensions were
now the norm. The separation of administration and teaching roles was another school-breaker,
this caused an obvious rift between teaching staff and those in control - you would think a school
should have teachers involved in administration somewhere?
Nigel believed in treating students like two-year olds - one of his favourite techniques was 'the stare';
during an assembly he would stop mid-drone and stare down a student who had their top button undone -
as if he was in charge of a kindergarten! He should wait until after the assembly and talk to the student, or let the
chain of command do it for him.
Many teachers left since Nigel has been in power.
Mr. Keith Toner, Mr. Graeme Daly both long serving mathematics teachers - Mr. Richard Hales, Mr. Bill Hall,
Mr. David Ruddle, Mr. Ross Gibson, custodian Mr. Jack Patterson, long-time drama head Mrs. Rosena Hallum
(supposedly retired, but worked at Christ's College as a reliever), highly regarded ESOL teacher Mrs. Helen Briggs,
and deputy rector, Mr. Tim Oughton (after receiving a job offer at Wellington), just to name some. This was followed by the attempted removal of him from
the board by two members (John Rainy and Peter MacDonald), with many wanting the board to publically admit they
made a mistake in hiring Nigel in the first place. But the rest of the board couldn't admit they made a
mistake - they had swallowed the new philosophy hook, line and sinker. They defended him at the PTA meeting - which
neither the board (I believe) or rector should have been attending, they clamped down on people who criticised him
and only began to react when parents started withholding fees.
The bottom line is, StAC isn't a school. It's a business, with students as the revenue stream.
Mr. Tony Turnock, who fled to the Ministry of Education (for 3 months apparently) after Nigel announced his resignation. He was a weak Head of Education at StAC, who would never stand by what he says and would hide behind the various committees he was on to make sure he couldn't give you a decision or be to blame. What did I want from him? A scholar's tie or academic blazer. To be eligible I needed to get a 'calculated statistic' of my NCEA results higher than (3.25) - Equivalent of 80%, apparently. Last year (2003) I took two first year computer science courses at the University of Canterbury (COSC121 and COSC122) and got an A+ and A respectively and very high places in class in the assignments (higher than 20th in all tests). I asked him to take this into account for a scholars tie, however he said no - because it wasn't an NCEA qualification. I then got my parents to ask him - he would say (over the phone) that he would look into it and ring back in two weeks - he never did. When my parents and I caught him at parent-teacher interviews he denied ever speaking to my them. His excuse: I don't know how those results are equivalent to NCEA Computing. Guess what? I was constantly in the top 5th of a class at university when I was sixteen, I think that is an achievement worth getting a tie for. A further annoyance - I was top in New Zealand in the Australian Schools Computer Studies competition in 2002, I was given the award at assembly and NIGEL even said what a fantastic award it was. Academic blazers for these awards were only implemented the next year, I asked if they were retrospective and was told no (during 2003 while I was at uni), I basically left it at that. Guess what? The same day that I left StAC during the assembly they gave a student a retrospective blazer award for the same type of award I won, but in music. My reasoning? The student is a head of round square and figureheads need to look the part (I'm not angry at the student, just the system).
Incompetence sums it up here. Not knowing anything and the unwillingness to believe students know more than they might. Whenever a (better) alternative was suggested it was always smacked down because "it couldn't be done" or some other nonsense - even though many other installations have the feature or implementation. An example is the Centrinity "FirstClass" email system - StAC paid a truckload for it. I know people who offered to give StAC a working email system with web-based administration to add to their intranet for a very good rate. It was refused because it the quote was "too low" and Mrs. Kite didn't believe that it was legitimate (This is a rumour and unconfirmed). She obviously doesn't know about open source software and the price of labour. So stac moved from an open, extensible Internet-style (intranet) system (having the advantage that it could be run on different software from different vendors) to a closed, proprietary, pre-Internet, bbs-style system (FirstClass) - dumb move. Although the intranet was primitive at the time it would have cost far less to improve it.
In year ten I figured out that students had supervisor access to their network space. This meant that each individual student had the ability to give permission to other students to access specific files or folders in their network space. I coded up a VBscript so that when a bunch of files and/or folders were dragged onto it, it would copy them to a specific user's network space dropbox folder. Strictly an opt-in scheme - you created a folder in your network space which you gave write access to others, this meant other students could put files there, but not delete them, overwrite them, read them or look at them - the only thing they could do was see the names of the files in the dropbox and put more files there. To remove yourself you simply deleted the folder. This was fantastic as you no longer had to find someone to give a floppy disk to - you could just send them the file directly and they could see it was from you - thanks to Novell's owner tracking.
After this gained popularity I was called in. The charges: hacking, allowing others to copy other peoples assignments and letting myself see other people's work. I did none of this. It was infeasible given the way I had written the system. The only thing it made easier was copying assignments, but only if someone gave their assignment to you. Besides you could look at the ownership history and see that it was copied anyway - much easier to determine copied work than if they had given it to a person on a floppy disk. I explained it to them how it worked just like I had to you and they couldn't understand (bear in mind these are meant to be "trained professionals"). They didn't know what the difference between file permissions was and they didn't want to know - I had created something better than they could. I was told not to go off on tangents - What a stupid thing to say! To learn you must be curious, some of the most significant advances in human history have been people going off on a tangent! (Albert Einstein, Christopher Columbus). If they had offered then and given me something interesting and challenging to do they could have a incredibly powerful network right now - unfortunately they felt my computer-savvy friends and I were inferior and correspondingly kept to their ignorance and arrogance. The extremely ironic part is, FirstClass offers students similar (but even less convenient) functionality to my script, a year after I wrote it.
There has always been a senior student council however late 2003 during the Year 12 leadership week it was announced that the soon-to-be created "Round Square Council" would swallow much of the student council's responsibility and power (see StAC website for "Round Square" information). The student council was also renamed the senior college committee, blatantly watering down the only independent student body at StAC.
I got on the student committee after pushing for and getting the elections. I was appointed the "Round Square Liaison" by my fellow committee members - what followed was amazing. This is what happens at a Round Square meeting - Nothing! All that happens is that the individual student ideas are ignored and squashed in favour of those by Dr Curtis or a Round Square 'leader'. What is happening is already decided beforehand and it is a sheer waste of time - people think they are doing something by talking about doing something. It is also censored in a ridiculous way - on the raising of the prefect slave auction idea, it was raised by Dr Curtis that it wasn't PC, because there could be people at StAC whose ancestors could have been slaves. How pointless - you are worried by a hypothetical complaint by a hypothetical person who cares - everyone knows that we aren't encouraging slavery by having a prefect slave auction. Dr Curtis - I thought you valued freedom of speech? Why are you censoring yourself?
The fatal mistake of StAC is that they senior students are treated as two-year-olds. I knew what was going on at the start of the year - were we told anything? No. The students have never officially been told anything to date, except that Nige is leaving at the end of the year. Give the students responsibility and accountability and you will find adults emerging - the horrendous number of absences are a symbol of this - how many Year 13 students bunk tutor group? It is a pointless exercise by many. All that happens is some teacher reads the notices - I can arrive 15mins late and read them in the foyer before I go to class.
StAC needs saving. It has become an institution where students and people fear for their jobs - thanks to the administration and "leadership" of the school killing off those that point out problems. The lack of transparency is strangling StAC, nothing can be improved because people fear their jobs or education. The beauracracy is slowing the school to a crawl so any changes take forever. The biggest change though is the lack of accountability by the administration and board - whose fault is it? Yours ultimately - fix it!
1) Allow criticism of the school and remove gag orders - by revealing your mistakes more people will be willing
to help you fix them.
2) Transparently make sure everyone knows what is going on - especially how the structure of the school works -
publish documents.
3) Restore many of the administration's teaching roles - this promotes a sense of camaraderie.
4) Hire and make full-time deans with an absolute minimum of teaching classes - their job is to navigate the
bureaucracy on behalf of students and get results for them - not to refer them on to other people.
5) Give students freedom - especially seniors. Self-appointed lunch and study leave, remove tutor-period for
them - it is a middle admin thing.
6) Create a fully independent student body, one that has actual power. Have student representatives sit on
committees and boards around the school.
7) Involve the students in the running of the school - such as the IT dept, PE dept, science dept. There will
always be students willing to lead if you give them the opportunity. This will in turn motivate the gifted students.
8) Restore the rector, admin, teacher, parent, old collegian and student communication.
Again, make sure they know where each other stands.
9) The rector shouldn't be part of everyday administration - the rector's job is to make sure everyone is happy.
10) Actually make the pastoral care system relevant - act on what students are saying and show them progress. The
same goes for handling staff too.
11) Implement banding/streaming and reduce class sizes - learning is much more effective with fewer numbers and with
people of your own ability.
12) Create a culture - lunchtime and social events are important, don't regulate things like sausage sizzles or
lunchtime activities let the staff and students have their fun.
13) Most importantly - BE HONEST.