Are Your Children Safe
As a community we invest a great deal of trust in certain institutions. We trust the Police to be scrupulously honest and law abiding. We trust Hospitals to be diligent, competent, and caring. We trust Schools with our most precious gifts, our children, and in doing so we trust that the public servants who have the privilege of caring for them during school hours will do all in their power to ensure they do not come to harm while at School. We trust the institutions which administer schools to enact appropriate legislation policies and protocols so that a culture of care and safety can be instilled and maintained to protect children into the future. We trust that politicians and governments will place safety and security above the expedients of budgets and party-political objectives in the enactment and prosecution of that legislation to realize and preserve an ethos of safety and security.But one of the primary challenges to maintaining a safe environment anywhere is the capacity to recognize hazards. In the case of corporate entities, such as government departments this is more than simply a process of education and legislation. Education is useless without wisdom, and legislation is futile without a commensurate personal ethic that can impel individuals to conform to the aspirations of legislators. For Legislation to be effective in preventing any adverse conduct it must appeal to a moral faculty within the average citizen and inspire rectitude, without which all threat of sanction is useless. Therefore legislation alone, including procedures and protocols, cannot prevent hazards or maintain safe environments without compliant individuals within corporations and government departments.
The Western Australian Education Department wrote protocols regarding the use and handling of asbestos, including the clear instruction that asbestos was not to be introduced into Schools. The aim was instead to phase out all structures which incorporated asbestos over time. This did not prevent staff at Bunbury Senior High School from importing more than 2000 cubic metres of asbestos contaminated building waste to their school, apparently without the permission of the School Principal. For whatever reason, the staff involved did not feel compelled to comply with this instruction, or existent legislation specifically written to control the disposal of asbestos.
Perhaps they were ignorant of it. Perhaps they felt the needs of the school for a larger sports oval over-rode questions of safety. Perhaps they were offered a bribe by the earthmoving contractor to provide a more convenient dumpsite than that approved for the disposal of asbestos, because it would avoid the additional dumping costs and was less than two kilometers from the demolition site. Perhaps they simply didn’t care.
The Minister of Education and Training at the time, the Hon Alan Carpenter, in a letter to a concerned resident, said that it was due to “unfortunate circumstances” and explained that the staff concerned “thought it was clean fill.” He did not explain why they were entitled to think it was clean fill when they knew the material was coming from a highly visible demolition site nearby the school.
Nor did the Minister acknowledge that the incident where asbestos and ammunition were dumped at the school was not the first such event. The school had acquired similar building waste material from the demolition of the Surf Lifesaving Club on Bunbury’s back beach some ten to fifteen years earlier, and had apparently not been censured either publicly or internally for doing so, despite the fact that it is unlawful to use such material as landfill and it was allowed to trespass onto a public road. They could no more offer the excuse then that the material was “clean fill” since it contained broken slabs of concrete, broken sewerage pipes, and reinforcing rods, visible on the roadside to this day.
If the most recent dumping was indeed due to "unfortunate circumstances", then those circumstances have obviously existed for more than ten years, and not solely at the school, but within the Department of Education generally. As in the recent incident, the material was pushed out from the school oval so that it trespassed on the adjacent road, which happens to be a breach of the Police Act. This suggests an ongoing and evolving culture of reckless conduct at the school, rather than an isolated incident . The failure of Education Department authorities to act to redress the first event of trespass on public land invited and encouraged a culture of indifference to legal responsibility and the duties of institutional carers, which doubtless contributed to the second and mores serious incident.
If anything positive can be found in this sad affair, it is perhaps that the local residents and neighbours of the school have suspended their trust in regard to the school’s administration, and the conduct of the Education Department in response to a litany of safety issues at the school. They no longer assume that all is well, and take a greater interest in the activity of contractors in and around the school, hoping to assist the beleaguered Principal in ensuring that the safety of his students is not threatened by similar lawlessness and complacency in future.
But if it could happen at our school, it raises questions about safety at every other School in Western Australia. It would be foolhardy to assume that there is not evidence from other schools of this apparently adverse culture within the Education Department of “unfortunate circumstance” in relation to legal responsibility and to safety . Are you confident your children are safe at school?
posted by kwoll @ 7:04 PM
0 comments
