A Sydney private school principal has served parents with a lecture on how to properly interact with teachers after staff experienced verbal abuse and threats.
St Andrew’s Cathedral School principal Dr John Collier said in a recent school newsletter that “gracious engagement” between staff and parents had been on the decline lately in the “minority of parents”.
However, Dr Collier added that he thought an “increase in parental anxiety” may be a problem across society.
And at his school, he said (the upwards of $30,000 in) fees parents are paying have meant some see their relationship with teachers as “master/servant relationship”, entitling them to make “extravagant demands”.
“I am having to interact with too many parents who have verbally abused, physically threatened or shouted at a staff member,” Dr Collier told parents in his impassioned newsletter address.
Teachers cop a lot of abuse so we thought we’d call our favourite teachers just to say thank you. Post continues.
He continued, “People who do this should engage in some role reversal: if someone behaved in this way towards you, would it be helpful and would it motivate you to assist them?”
Top Comments
Who are these parents who go and argue with their child's school? Can someone who has done this explain why you got involved and how you felt about it afterwards? Just trying to understand.
It's time some parents took a step back and looked at their children objectively. Most kids are gorgeous but EVERY child does the wrong thing sometimes. I'm a mum and grandma and I know it's easy to be objective when you're older but if you give your children over to the school for six hours a day, you just have to trust that the school knows what it's doing.
My father was a school principal and when parents came to the school, Dad would discuss their problems so calmly. Dad was the calmest man I ever knew. He even had a situation once where a child fell in the playground and was killed instantly. He dealt with those grieving, angry parents so well that they sent him a thank you card. Teachers are trained to handle parents with problems but they're only human. Whenever Dad had resolved a situation he told me he used to smile, shake the parents' hands and say 'If you believe half of what your child tells you about us, we'll believe half of what your child tells us about you.'