Bruce the Goose, Reader's Comment, The reality of teaching 'in the trenches', La

This page contains cleaned historical text recovered from the former Bad Apple Bullies website. Character encoding, punctuation, headings, lists and obvious extraction errors may have been repaired for readability. The underlying claims and opinions remain those of the original author and have not been independently reverified. Listen uses on-device text-to-speech — no audio files are stored.

Bruce the Goose, Reader's Comment, The reality of teaching 'in the trenches', Lachie Gaylard, The Drum, ABC, 25 January 2012: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3790748.html Historical link preserved from the original page.

Sacred Heart Parish School, Sandringham: Catholic Education Melbourne finds repeated incidents that appeared to create a risk to teachers' health and safety.

Sacred Heart Parish School, Sandringham, Victoria, is facing the loss of about half its full-time teachers.

A school parent said the departures included some of the school's most respected teachers.

Sacred Heart deputy principal Anne Reed, who left the school in 2010, has launched a worker's compensation claim against the school.

John Salanitri, a principal of Maurice Blackburn Lawyers http://www.mauriceblackburn.com.au/our-people/professional/john-salanitri.aspx, said Ms Reed's claim was listed for a Magistrates Court hearing in April 2012. Historical link preserved from the original page.

''It's a stress-related WorkCover claim related to alleged bullying, intimidation and harassment our client experienced at the hands of the principal at that school, '' said Mr Salanitri.

More allegations, this time levelled by at least six staff against the principal, Erin Macdonald, surfaced in 2011.

Catholic Education Melbourne (CEM) conducted an inquiry, which was overseen by WorkSafe.

The CEM inquiry found there were repeated incidents that appeared to create a risk to health and safety for the staff.

But it concluded that Ms Macdonald's behaviour was not unreasonable and therefore stopped short of bullying.

Several staff members said they were dissatisfied with CEM's role in the inquiry.

One described the school as a ''toxic'' work environment, with ''a constant air of intimidation'', saying: ''The teachers that are leaving are of the highest quality. I'd be happy to have any of them teach my children. ''

In a letter to parents last month, Ms Macdonald said she and the school had been subjected to an orchestrated, vexatious campaign by a minority of staff to undermine her and to frustrate the progress of educational programs designed to improve school life.

This included allegations to WorkSafe.

''Following a series of independent investigations, these allegations were found to have had no substance or basis for a claim, '' Ms Macdonald wrote.

School plagued by bullying claims faces the loss of half its teachers, Ian Munro, 23 December 2011: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/school-plagued-by-bullying-claims-faces-the-loss-of-half-its-teachers-20111222-1p79m.html Historical link preserved from the original page.

Angry teachers - apply for your documents. Find out what is really going on.

My advice for the many angry teachers and ex-teachers in Australia: start filing Freedom Of Information ( FOI - now called Right to Information or RTI ) requests.

Ask for copies of all your personal information is FREE.

Send them to DET in general but also to individual people in DET ( and TRB ).

You are legally entitled to access EVERY Government worker's email records in which they name you or discuss you.

I'm sure there are many people writing things about you that they don't want you to see.

Do it now.

Tell your friends.

Fight back!

Editor's Comment: This is really good advice.

My own experience suggests to me that the Queensland Labor government's Department of Education (for example) had a practice of 'blaming the dead man'.

If you got a transfer or retired, falsified documents could be put on your official records.

Any problem could be attributed to you.

It seemed to be a quick and easy way for departmental administrators to deal with problems.

Any problem with a casual teacher, a scripture teacher, any complaint by a parent, an allegation totally fabricated by a malicious principal or a principal with a mental health problem - all could be secretly placed on your file to create the impression that the documents concerned you.

And, after you have resigned or retired, you can't make any response to the allegations contained in these falsified documents.

That's the official policy.

And the falsified documents can never be removed from your file.

That's the official policy.

Because the official policies are written by the abusers.

But will the Freedom of Information / Right to Information documents be free?

I am not sure.

In my own experience, if there is a huge mass of falsified documentation on your official records, the department will release your FOI / RTI documents very slowly and very reluctantly, presumably because they are trying to figure out which documents are falsified and which are real.

And then the FOI / RTI documents will be free because of the long delay.