Educating Ethos

Bike Stand or Toaster?

2006-08-13T11:42:00.000-07:00

It is more than a year since a report that Western Power had declared a chain gate at our school illegal because it was attached to a pole forming part of their electricity distribution network. At the time a spokesman for Western Power said they were sending a crew out to inspect the gate.

Instead, staff at the school removed part of the gate themselves, something they were unqualified and unauthorised to carry out. A year on and the remainder of the gate, a chain which proved too rusty to conveniently remove, is still attached to the pole, and still presenting a hazard.

The illegal chain has invited use as a convenient point to secure bicycles, despite a serviceable bike stand provided by the school only 20 metres away. It is hoped that a crew from Western Power will eventually attend and remove the illegal fitting before someone uses it as a toaster.

A similar stay pole securing a nearby pole caught fire following a pole top fire in December last year, because the stay wire did not have an insulator to isolate it from electricity which leaked from the network. The fire was caused by wires carrying 23,000 volts fell after the wooden bearer supporting them burned through, allowing high voltage power to travel across the stay wire to the school side of the road with sufficient current to set alight to the stay pole opposite.

Four by Four Syndrome

2006-04-04T10:30:00.000-07:00

It is common knowledge that the suburban drivers of 4 wheel drive vehicles think they are bullet proof. What is less well known is that they think these cars make their passengers bullet proof as well.

This allows them to pull stunts like this driver, seen parked in the no-standing zone outside our school at approximately 8.45 this morning. Not content with ignoring the no standing zone active at that time, they stopped in the intersection of Haig and Withers, to drop their child for school.

If this driver is your parent, perhaps you could suggest some driving lessons, or a new bike, so you can take yourself to school in relative safety.

In the interests of public safety, the vehicle was a metallic silver Mitshubishi 4 wheel drive and the personalized number plate started with the letters LEE. If you are walking or driving near Bunbury Senior High School while the school zone is active, keep a sharp lookout for this vehicle, keep at a safe distance, and expect the unexpected. The driver may have an undiagnosed brain injury.

Police Blitz on School Speed Zones

2006-03-24T14:44:00.000-08:00

Bunbury traffic Police have reported carrying out a blitz on school speed zones in the Bunbury area, and observed that most drivers comply with the speed restriction. However an independent survey of traffic through the school zone on Upper Esplanade last week indicated that 42% of northbound vehicles were traveling at more than 5km/hr over the limit while the zone was active. The main offenders were taxis, and commercial vehicles such as utilities and vans.

Adding to the hazard is the lack of centre road markings adjacent to the bus stop, which encourages south bound traffic negotiating buses to clash head on with northbound traffic. Police acknowledged that the blitz reported in the South West Times of March 16 had not included our school, and admitted the level of compliance indicated by the survey was unacceptable. However the position of the zone presents problems for Police because there is no suitable area to stop offending vehicles.

Meanwhile, there is still no word from the City of Bunbury of a commitment to provide footpaths to service the school pedestrian traffic. After more than 85 years in existence, the City Fathers are yet to gazette a pedestrian crossing on any of the roads surrounding Bunbury Senior High School. This remains a significant issue because students regularly leave the school to attend sporting activities at nearby facilities, and outside the times when the school speed zones are active.

School Expansion Makes Progress

2005-10-14T08:37:00.000-07:00

Our school has taken another bold step on its program of expansion at the expense of its community. More than 30 years of adverse possession of road reserve has been consolidated for the exclusive use of the school with the erection of a permanent fence. The installation of the fence followed safety concerns about school signage erected on the road reserve, and in a manner which posed a hazard to pedestrian traffic.

City of Bunbury officers investigating a report that the fence and the sign trespassed into public land confirmed that the fence protruded more than two meters onto a road bounding the school, but could not give a more accurate assessment without a formal survey being carried out.

The erection of the fence was consistent with an unlawful barrier previously erected by the school to close off part of the road from public access by the use of pine bollards, and an illegal chain gate which had been attached to the Western Power electricity grid. At the time this was investigated by Western Power staff at the school had boasted that it had been in place for more than thirty years without causing injury.

The fencing contractor, when asked whether he had followed surveyed plans while erecting the fence said that he was only following marks painted on the ground by school staff, and of course the existing pine bollards. He viewed any trespass which might arise from the fence as a problem for the School and the Department of Education, since he was only following their instructions in good faith.

Look out Below

2005-06-27T18:33:00.000-07:00

Despite the ongoing adverse safety record of our School, this reporter was shocked to see the manner in which two workmen were repairing tiles on the second story of the School this morning. The work involved securing tiles already disturbed or damaged during the recent tornado.

As the photos make obvious, there is a risk of tiles slipping off the roof, and therefore an obvious danger to anyone below. Note the students in the quadrangle by the flagpole. But despite this, the work was being conducted without benefit of a single barrier or notice to pedestrians approaching the main entrance to the School that the work was taking place overhead.

A tile falling from the height of the second story roof, a distance of more than 10 metres, would have sufficient energy to inflict fatal injury to anyone walking below.

Tuck Shop for Vermin

2005-06-21T11:08:00.000-07:00

The Tuck Shop for local vermin is always
well stocked at our School.

The students at our school regularly win awards for their involvement in environmental activities, but they seem unable to persuade staff to follow their example. While the students are planting trees to protect the delicate coastal heath between the school and the Indian Ocean, staff are providing a smorgasbord for local vermin by regularly overloading the waste bin.

An Environmental Health Officer with the City of Bunbury explained that Council was powerless to act against the School in the matter because the relevant sections of the Health Act 1911 do not bind the Crown. "We can only appeal to their sense of civic duty in the interests of public health," she said.

And despite a tornado having hit Bunbury just a few weeks ago, there is no sign that staff at our school have any idea about securing materials that might become missiles in a high wind. This is despite the fact that a house immediately adacent to the school was almost completely destroyed by the recent twister, and the school itself lost tiles in the same event.

After passing the school, the recent tornado inflicted irreparable damage to the Catholic Church by lifting it from its foundations. A similar wind would have no difficulty picking up the palettes and lumber left lying about the school yard, and projecting them as potentially lethal missiles into adjacent dwellings.

Risk Management by Lottery

2005-04-01T04:57:00.000-08:00

The idea that effective legislation can be drafted in plain English is a relatively new concept, and one which is viewed with great skepticism by some less enlightened members of the legal fraternity, who see no benefit to their industry in educating the public to have a good understanding of the law and their legal responsibilities. The Western Australian Government deserves to be applauded for developing clear, readily understood policy documents in plain English for many of its Departments, and for making them freely available on the internet.

Not only does this mode of publication conveniently inform the public, but it makes clear and accessible the duties, ethical standards and responsible conduct required of public servants employed in this jurisdiction. Administrators uncertain about a particular issue can, at the touch of a mouse, find and read the procedures and protocols relevant to a particular set of circumstances, allowing an informed decision to be made and instruction on a lawful course of action to be transmitted to their staff.

But at our School it seems that legislation and policy documentation might as well be written in Latin, since it has no discernable influence on the way the School Administration responds to issues of workplace safety, student safety, risk assessment or hazard management.

The other day a local resident and neighbour of our school noticed something which was inconsistent with his prior experience as a section manager in a Government Department. He observed that the School had installed a chain, attached at one end to a stay-pole of Western Power’s electrical distribution network, and at the other to a tree growing on the road reserve of the street bounding the School. His recollection was that such installations were illegal, and so brought his concerns to another member of the community group monitoring safety problems at the School. A phone call to Western Power confirmed the installation was unlawful and unauthorised, and curiously, Western Power suggested the neighbour bring the matter to the attention of the School, while it undertook to dispatch a work crew to investigate.

The School Principal was unavailable when the neighbour called the school, so contact was made instead with the District Office of the Department of Education and Training. Two weeks later the District Office advised that the letter reporting the unlawful installation had been passed to the School Principal, and that following an inspection of the installation it was intended to make some modification as an interim measure until a permanent fence and gate were installed. The letter did not say whether Western Power had served notice on the School to remove the illegal installation. The neighbour noticed that the chain was still in place, and was still being secured each afternoon by staff at the school, and that the serious hazard posed by the chain was being allowed to continue.

Puzzled by the failure of either the School or Western Power to act on the reported hazard posed by the illegal gate, and concerned that the school was still using the chain in the same fashion, the original informant made further enquiries. Western Power undertook to serve notice on the School immediately, but was unable to say when a crew would be able to attend to its removal, due to demand upon personnel for higher priority tasks, including a large number of pole-top fires following the first rains after a long and dusty dry spell. The District Office of the Department of Education and Training declared the matter the responsibility of the School Principal. The School said that the Principal was unavailable, but acknowledged that discussions about the gate had taken place. Neither the District Office or the School would acknowledge that the installation was unlawful, or that it was hazardous.

The decision by the School Administration to allow the hazard to persist following the report from the public was not due to a failure of risk assessment procedures at the School. In this circumstance risk assessment was obviated by prevailing law and regulations controlling use of Western Power’s distribution network. These regulations made the installation illegal and therefore all staff at the School had a duty under the Public Sector Code of Conduct to cease the unlawful conduct. An additional duty fell upon the Principal under Section 63 of the School Education Act 1999 to ensure that it was safely removed in the interests of student safety. The fact that the installation is not on the school grounds but on the road reserve immediately adjacent to the school does not absolve the school, but rather compounds its culpability by adding trespass to the list of unlawful conduct. The road reserve is under the control of the City Council, and the school’s decision to install an unlawful and hazardous installation on a public road also gives rise to a dangerous public nuisance. The same section of the School Education Act also charges School Principals with responsibility for “promoting co-operation with the community” which is not served by persistent misuse of public space around the school.

Then at 3.30pm in the afternoon during persistent light rain following a long period of dry weather, and following notice to our School from Western Power that the structure was both illegal and hazardous, a staff member was seen padlocking the chain in place according to the School’s established practice. The School could no longer be excused as acting in ignorance. It was choosing to flagrantly ignore the notice already served upon it, and blatantly ignoring not only its duty of care to the students and the public, but also to the staff member who was allowed to once more handle the chain and operate the gate, this time in wet weather, and in environmental conditions where failure of insulators and the potential for electrical arcing to ground was greater than normal. Worksafe was duly notified.

During a telephone conversation between the neighbour and a School staff member following the intervention by Western Power, a telling insight into the safety culture of the school was offered. On being asked why the school was still allowing the illegal installation to be used as a gate, the staff member explained that it was necessary to protect the school oval from trespassing vehicles prior to the School Carnival the following week. “Besides, we have been using that chain for more than thirty years, without incident.”

As long as a culture remains at the School which allows staff to imagine that they can interpret risks arising from hazards according to such perverse reasoning and complete ignorance of the laws of probability, preventable safety issues at the School will continue to arise, and a serious and entirely foreseeable accident is simply a matter of time, not a matter of luck.

The Anatomy of an Accident

2005-03-09T20:39:00.000-08:00

Certain industries make it a practice to painstakingly dissect accidents and incidents to determine their causes. They know it will not bring the dead back to life, but they hope that by doing so, something that will protect the living may be learnt. One such industry is Aviation, and many pilots and passengers owe their lives to lessons learnt at the expense of others misfortune, through the systematic reporting of accident investigations in publications affectionately known as “Crash Comics”.

The majority of aircraft accidents arise from pilot error, and not from structural failures of airframes or aircraft systems. This is partly due to built in redundancy in aircraft systems, where key instruments are duplicated to provide backup in the event of one failing, and because airframes are built to withstand substantially more stress than that expected from normal operation of the aircraft. It is also partly due to the variability of human capacities over time, and the tendency for complacency to gradually erode trained response to critical events. This is why the performance of airline pilots is constantly reviewed through inservice training and testing, often involving simulators.

A key finding from aircraft accident analysis is that accidents seldom arise from a single cause. They usually require the failure of multiple systems before an accident occurs. The reports often show for example that clear warning signs were ignored by either engineers or flight crew in certain critical decisions, then perhaps compounded by an environmental factor, while the pilot was distracted by a systems failure. No single element would have given rise to an accident, but because all three contributing factors arose in conjunction, an accident became inevitable. This implies that any risk assessment must take into consideration not simply the risk posed by a factor in isolation, but also its potential to contribute with other factors within the same environmental context to produce a compounded hazard.

This practice of review and publication within the aircraft industry not only creates a culture of learning and adaptation, but it also allows hazardous practices and dangerous equipment to be identified and corrected by other operators in the same industry, or within the same organization, before an accident occurs. Much of this activity is precautionary, and is probability based, rather than evidence based. This is partly because airframe faults can be difficult to detect without partial disassembly, or specialist testing, with x-ray equipment for example. Operator errors might be dealt with by changes to methods of pilot training, or if necessary, the redesign of cockpit ergonomics.

The important feature of this culture is that it actively seeks to learn from experience, even if that experience is adverse and painful. It does not seek to protect the public reputation of the industry by hiding the causes of accidents, although there have been incidents where individual corporations have falsified records in the attempt to hide company errors or omissions from investigators. The result of this willingness to acknowledge and learn from past mistakes is an industry with an excellent safety record, and one which generally enjoys the trust of the public.

This contrasts sharply with the safety practices at our school, where it appears the reputation of the School and the Department of Education and Training takes priority over potential improvements in safety that might be gained from the objective analysis of accidents and incidents, and the development of a transparent culture, willing to learn from adverse experience. Instead we appear to have a culture of denial, selective reporting, and misreporting of incidents and accidents which allows breaches of contract by service providers to go unreported, misconduct by staff to go unchallenged and corrected, substantial damages to arise, while potential causes of catastrophic outcomes remain intact and undisturbed.

A Culture of Unfortunate Circumstance

2005-02-28T19:35:00.000-08:00

There is a tendency within institutions for a culture to develop which is self-serving and inconsistent with the original mission and corporate objectives of the organization. The change is insidious and can be difficult for managers to identify, let alone deal with. Once established, an adverse culture within an organization can be difficult to transform because it becomes entrenched in routine practices, and tends to justify itself on the grounds of custom and tradition, discouraging reference to fundamental purposes and responsibilities. Superior benefits are seen to derive from the new culture, allowing it to obtain greater loyalty from staff than the original corporate vision.

From a management point of view it is easier to avoid such a culture altogether than to correct it once established, but the apparently inspirational mission statements of organizations can be forgotten almost as soon as they are written, and can be relegated to a vacuous public relations tool, if not regularly revisited to maintain a positive culture focused on the primary goals and responsibilities of an organization. Adverse institutional cultures also tend to persist despite the intervention of enlightened administrative practice simply because it usually outlives the tenure of individual managers and executives.

This appears to have been what happened at our High School. While the Minister for Education attributed the unlawful dumping of asbestos in the school grounds to “unfortunate circumstances”, implying that it was a one-off occurrence due to the unauthorized conduct of an individual staff member, an historical view shows otherwise. The staff member who invited the dumping to take place may have been conforming to a culture which was already established more than twelve years earlier, as evidenced by a similar dumping incident, and which was never corrected, despite being characterized by unlawful conduct and involving the introduction of hazardous materials to the school. Both dumping incidents shared the same innocent purpose, which was to extend the school sports oval, a goal of certain staff members which appears to have grown to overshadow other considerations and responsibilities, such as the identification of hazards and the provision of a safe environment for students at the school.

Local residents and neighbours were puzzled by the school’s response to the dumping crisis. In correspondence with concerned residents the school principal vehemently denied knowledge of the dumping, despite the fact that more than 200 truck loads of material had entered the school. He also denied giving permission for the dumping to take place, yet the school administration did not subsequently declare the dumping a trespass to the school, nor did they demand that the earthmoving contractor in question remove the offending material. Instead they paid the same company to cover the hazardous material with additional clean sand.

In a later public meeting of the City Council to consider the transfer of the affected road reserve to control of the School, the Principal spoke in favour of the move and explained that a larger sports oval was needed in order to attract students to the school, but available space within the existing grounds was limited. Was this the “unfortunate circumstance” to which the Minister for Education and Training was referring, that the school grounds were too small for the school to have a sports oval of suitable size?

It appears that a culture had developed over time at our High School, one which encouraged the belief that parents judge a school primarily on the size of its sports oval, and this had become the primary motivation in some significant decisions affecting the school and the wider community. No adverse consequence had apparently been identified as arising from the first dumping. The City Council had not noticed the trespass onto the road reserve, and the Police had not brought a prosecution under Section 96(16) of the Police Act 1892 for improperly casting building waste onto a road, nor had there been any disciplinary action taken by the Education Department authorities.

The staff conduct may have appeared tacitly sanctioned by the apparently harmless outcomes of that first event, and the culture of size over safety had entrenched itself for more than a decade before the second opportunity came along; an opportunity apparently too good to refuse. No one in authority paused to assess any hazard which might arise, and both events were precipitated by material being offered to the school by third parties with a vested interest in disposing of the waste in the most economic way, and regardless of the fact that it was not approved by building regulations as landfill, and certainly not as part of a School sports oval. It is quite likely that, were it not for the asbestos being identified by a local resident, the second dumping would also have gone unnoticed by authorities and would have fed the culture of unfortunate circumstance for another decade.

The challenge in any safety conscious corporate culture is to replace individual complacency and indifference with a trained approach to hazard recognition and a systematic method of dealing with the risks identified. Unfortunately this transformation has yet to happen at our High School. There is an irony in all this, at a time when P plate drivers are attracting so much criticism for their reckless conduct on the road. The question has been raised whether, in the light of their accident rate, they should be allowed to carry passengers in their cars. An expert recently offered the explanation that young people lacked the ability to identify risk in their driving control decisions. A school like ours, with almost a thousand students, is very much like three jumbo jets full of passengers, all seeking a safe journey into adulthood. If we apply the same expert advice to the school situation we might conclude that the present quality of hazard identification and risk management qualifies the school administration for P Plate status. Given the long term health effects of exposure to asbestos, the full consequences of their actions may take decades to be revealed, but the failure to comply with existing statutes has already cost the Department more than $100,000 in earthmoving expenses, with no resulting benefit to the school.

Child Safety or School Reputation

2005-02-15T08:32:00.000-08:00

In recent years within Australia there have been some glaring examples of conflict between the duty of institutions to individuals in their care, and the perceived risk of public scrutiny or litigation. Nevertheless, it might come as a surprise to parents to discover that the safety of their children must compete with risks to the public image of Schools and the Department of Education and Training in Western Australia. The Department’s policy is illustrated in its Risk Management Manual, which gives equal weight to risks involving child safety, and risks involving the reputation of a school and the Department, allowing the possibility for the two to be in direct conflict in the mind of any decision maker. Instead of arbitrarily prioritizing child safety, the manual invites school safety officers to judge the reputation of the school as having the greatest priority in a particular set of circumstances. An example at our local High School illustrates the point quite dramatically.

A contractor had been employed to cut down and mulch several trees in one corner of the school grounds, adjacent to the main entrance. Work commenced at approximately 7.30am on a normal school day, and the contractor parked a truck and chipping machine at the curbside with the chute of the machine aimed in the direction of the school entrance. The tray of the truck was partly covered with a canopy, but this was insufficient to capture all the chips being expelled at high speed from the machine, and the chipper was spewing chips on both sides of the truck and directly over the truck a distance of up to 23 metres. The operation continued in this fashion for more than two hours until a missile from the machine struck the windscreen of a car passing on the opposite side of the road.

The motorist brought the apparent hazard to the attention of the operator, who denied the flying chips posed any risk, and chose instead to question the motorist’s right to complain. It was only when the motorist advised the operator his intention to report the matter to Worksafe and Police Traffic Branch that the operation was halted. The operator immediately instructed his staff to clean up the chips which had scattered over the road. The motorist also brought the problem to the attention of the school administration, and questioned why the contractor had been allowed to operate in an unsafe manner for several hours that morning.

The School Principal chose to pass the query to the Department of Education and Training District Office, which eventually responded by denying that any unsafe operation had taken place, and claiming that the inspection by Worksafe had found only minor operator error, which had been corrected. The reality was that Worksafe had found the operator in breach of the relevant legislation and had issued an improvement notice on the machine. The truck canopy had been found inadequate to catch the chips generated by the machine, resulting in them being projected past the truck tray and scattering all over the road.

The first response of the School and the Department was not, how could this have happened, and how can it be prevented from happening again? It was to deny that any problem had arisen, even to the motorist whose vehicle had been struck, who had witnessed the event first hand. They also claimed that it was the responsibility of the operator to conduct the contract in a safe manner, and was therefore not the responsibility of the School or the Department, despite the fact that the tender was let by another government department on behalf of the School, and the operation was being conducted in and immediately adjacent to the school during school hours. This behaviour appears irrational until viewed in the light of instructions in the Risk Management Manual. Then it appears that the risk to the reputation of the school and Department was judged greater than the risk to safety from 5cm wooden missiles being projected at high speed from a chipper onto a public road in a School Zone.

Nor was it simply a matter of the Department being unaware of the outcome of the Worksafe investigation. They chose to misrepresent the outcome of that investigation to give the false impression that no hazard had arisen from the manner in which the chipper was operated. In doing so they either negligently or willfully failed to acknowledge the work order which had been issued, and instead claimed to the motorist that it was merely a case of operator error. The only reasonable explanation for these falsehoods was the intention to deny any wrongdoing on the part of the contractor, and consequently any failing on the part of the Department to supervise the conduct of the work. They were foiled in this subterfuge by the prompt action of Worksafe in attending the worksite after receiving the motorist’ complaint, and the fact that they documented their findings in the form of a work order. Details of the workorder were transmitted to the School before the misrepresentations were made by the Departments regional office.

The willingness of the Department of Education and Training to misinform a member of the public in this fashion, by denying the proven and verifiable facts of the situation also implies that the Department may remain in denial that their systems for recruiting and supervising work at schools need review. Their willingness to claim in correspondence with the motorist that responsibility for the safety of the operation rested entirely with the tree servicing contractor also suggests that they are not fully aware of the legal implications of their duty of care, both to the students and to the public. Instead, they suggested that the tender process by which contractors are “accredited” is in itself a safety procedure guaranteeing the competence of operators employed through that process. But as long as the Department remains unwilling or unable to feed back into that selection process any subsequent unsatisfactory conduct or performance by accredited contractors, there is no reason to assume that someone operating in a dangerous manner at one school might not be hired to conduct similar work at another, particularly if their adverse conduct is denied by the first school.

A disturbing feature of this example is not that the machine required modification, but that the operator was incapable of recognizing the hazard he was creating by operating the machine in that fashion, and despite being accredited to operate large and dangerous machinery in and near school premises. The other disturbing feature was that the Department in this instance was content to rely on this process of “accreditation” to ensure that the contractor conducted the work in a safe manner.

The fact that the Department does not distinguish risk assessment for the purposes of safety and risk assessment for the purposes of public relations fallout is a serious concern to anyone interested in natural justice and the well-being of children in the care of the Department of Education. The potential for the purposes of both to be in conflict is clearly illustrated in the case of the chipping machine accident, and doubtless played a role in how the Department of Education dealt with the dumping of asbestos and live ammunition at the same school. Regrettably, in both these instances, the Department appears to have prioritized the risk to public relations over any safety concerns, and dealt with each hazard accordingly. The real risks to health and safety then became a secondary issue.

School and Community

2004-04-22T15:06:00.000-07:00

I notice that our local High School has been in existence for more than eighty years and is located immediately adjacent to the central business district of the Town, yet it is not serviced by footpaths of any description. This lack of pedestrian facility seems plain evidence of the value the Town Fathers place on the education and wellbeing of a new generation of citizens. Had the school been a Hotel, a Tourist Resort, or even the Offices of the Chamber of Commerce, it would have been well serviced long before now. Is it any wonder then, that teachers at such a neglected school might resort to unlawful means to improve it?

Despite being build on the highest point of land in the town, with a magnificent view of the Indian Ocean only three hundred metres to the west, and a football ground three hundred metres to the north, the staff felt that in order to attract students, it was necessary to enlarge the sports ground. To this end one of the staff enlisted the assistance of an Earthmoving Contractor to extend the sports oval, using waste from a building site in the Central Business District. This might have appeared a win-win situation to both the Teacher and the Contractor, since the material was being provided at a reduced cost to the school, and the Contractor was avoiding the cost of otherwise dumping the waste at a site approved for the purpose, more than 40 kilometres away.

In this fashion some 2000 metres of building waste was transported to the school and spread out to extend the sports oval to the west. The work involved more than 200 truck loads of material being delivered over a period of two weeks. Yet when it came to the attention of local residents that the fill contained asbestos, the School Principal denied knowledge of the scheme and claimed the Teacher in question had acted without authority. In an email to concerned local residents he bewailed the fact that he did not have the same control over his staff as he had over his students.

The Local Town Council Engineers pointed out that not only was the soil contaminated, it contained building waste and was therefore unlawful for use as fill. In addition, the material had been pushed out past the boundary of the school property to trespass onto the reserve of the adjacent public road, which was an offence under the Police Act.

Yet nothing was done to have the offending material removed. Instead, the school enlisted an independent Engineering Consultant to take some core samples and provide a report on the material found. Without making the results of this report public, the School Administration then declared that it indicated the asbestos contamination was confined to the upper 10 centimetres of the fill, which would be removed and replaced with clean sand. This was done, and then the School entered into negotiation with the Local Council to have the land on which the fill had trespassed transferred from public use to the control of the school, so that the problem might disappear with a stroke of the pen.

Meanwhile winter storms had set in and erosion from uncontrolled storm water at the site exposed further asbestos from the deeper layers of the fill, and undermined the findings of the independent survey. This time a contaminant of another order was also exposed. Live blank 7.62mm military rounds were found by local residents, which were duly reported to the Police. The Police declared that since they were military rounds, and despite the fact that they were littering a public road, they were the property and responsibility of the Army. The Police also recalled that several thousand rounds of identical ammunition had been found at the site from which the building waste had been extracted. The Army had been called to that worksite after workmen had expressed concern about safety and the risks posed by such a large amount of explosive material. The Police subsequently assumed that all of ammunition had been safely disposed of by the Army. In the light of these complications the Local Council chose not to endorse the agreement to transfer the land from the road to the school, and instead asked the Department of Education and Training to remove the offending material.

There seems to be a developing culture within government departments generally that they are above the law, and that the law applies only to the private citizen. Any sense of duty toward public interest appears to have been replaced by self-interest and expediency. Given that the School community is in a sense a metaphor for the adult society into which the 1000 students attending this school will soon be moving, it must be hoped that the theories of social order instilled in the classroom might prevail over the example given by the School's Administration.

Unfenced and Unsafe

2004-02-07T15:15:00.000-08:00

The excavator was left parked immediately adjacent to a 3.5 vertical face cut in unstable material, and despite the fact that the site was a school, it remained unfenced for the duration of the work.

Having abandoned their plan to excise the High School’s waste dump from their jurisdiction, the City of Bunbury felt obliged to ask the Department of Education to remove the offending material and rehabilitate the road reserve on which the trespass had occurred. But the standard of supervision at the site did not improve during these remedial earthmoving operations.

The contractor employed denied having been formally notified that the site was contaminated with asbestos, and as a consequence, failed to instruct their employees to wear suitable protective clothing, and to control dust at the site.

Despite the fact that the earthworks were taking place at a school, no site fencing was installed to exclude the public, and on Friday, January 30, 2004 the site was left in a patently unsafe condition, contrary to Worksafe’s published code of practice for the conduct of excavations.

An inspection of the site that afternoon by local residents revealed a 20 tonne excavator which had been left parked at the top of a 3.5 metre face cut in soil which had been dumped there less than a year earlier.

The condition of the site was reported to Worksafe, but their inspector did not attend the site until the following Tuesday, by which time the work had proceeded, the vertical face on which the machine had been parked was no longer in existence, and the inspector made no enquiry as to the condition of the site at the time of the complaint. A condition which persisted at the school grounds for the duration of that weekend.

This grossly inadequate investigation by Worksafe then allowed the Department of Education to deny that any unsafe condition had existed at the site, since Worksafe had not reported any problem. Another extraordinary admission by the worksafe inspector first contacted regarding the unsafe condition of the site was his ignorance of the Code of Practice published by his own department. This raises questions about whether he was even aware of what to look for, had he promptly attended the site, or had he taken the trouble to gather evidence from witnesses.

The hazardous condition of the machine is obvious from the photographs taken at the time. A house brick (220 x 70 x 100mm) is in the shot for the purposes of scale, and shows clearly that the 3.5 metre unstable face was within one metre of the machines downslope track, and risked toppling onto any passing bystander if the bank gave way.

Parking Hazard on Sports Oval

2004-02-07T15:10:00.000-08:00

The heavy clay layer of recently disturbed soil had been dumped on a sloping dry sand base, making the whole structure more unstable.

Principal Bewails Undisciplined Staff

2004-01-15T13:29:00.000-08:00

The public could be forgiven for thinking that there are two Senior High Schools which include the name of Bunbury in their title. One is described in the corporate literature of the WA Education Department as a model school with "a consultative mode of decision-making... to ensure the needs of the school are addressed." The other is the one Principal Paddy Guthrie has to deal with day to day, where teaching staff act unilaterally and without authorisation to introduce more than 2000 metres of contaminated building waste into the school, on the pretext of enlarging the sports oval.

In an email dated November 19, 2002 addressed to local residents concerned about the asbestos contamination Principal Guthrie commented, "If I could control my colleagues as effectively (sic) I can work with many of our kids, it would not have happened."

The email acknowledges that the School had been put on notice by City of Bunbury Engineers regarding the tresspass of the building waste onto Council land, but then goes on to say that the question of School boundaries is still in dispute, several months after the event.

"There is some dispute over this however, ...as to exactly where our boundaries lie" reports Principal Paddy Guthrie's email. So not only did the School fail to check the boundaries before earthworks commenced, but when the unlawful conduct was challenged by local authorities, some staff preferred to enter into a belated and futile dispute rather than admit the error which had already arisen directly from gross omissions and neglect of duty by at least one member of staff.

This is not the conduct of a responsible corporate citizen, much less a standard of conduct suitable for a School providing care to a thousand students. The boundaries should have been checked so that clear instructions could be given to the earthmoving contractor about where to locate the material. The direct consequence to the tax payer from this so far has been the cost of more than $100,000 in remedial earthworks.

In a letter to Giacci Brothers, the contractors who introduced the material to the School, Mr Guthrie is unequivocal about his position on the matter, and the fact that the dumping was unauthorised. "Earlier this year a member of my teaching staff invited someone from your company to deposit some fill on the south-western boundary of Bunbury Senior High School. His action was taken unilaterally and he was not authorized to make this invitation. At no stage either at the time or subsequently, was my authority sought to carry out this activity and nor was Council approval obtained."

Thanks to this clear and forthright description of events provided by Mr Guthrie early in this debacle, later attempts by the Minister's Office to fog over the gross misconduct by staff which led to the dumping also becomes apparent. But the question remains why, if no authority was given for the dumping, did the Department not simply instruct Giaccis to remove their rubbish from the School. Without lawful authority to dump the waste on the School grounds their conduct was unlawful, and there are relatively straightforward remedies at Common Law for such tresspass. If Giacci's failed to provide a remedy, presumably the Department could have exercised their own right to abate the nuisance and then billed Giaccis for the cost. Instead, as Mr Guthrie's correspondence reveals, the school chose to pay Giaccis to clean up the mess they had unlawfully caused by failing to obtain formal approval before commencing the waste dumping at the School.

What makes the question of delegated authority more disturbing in this case is that it happened at a School, where authority is specifically reserved to the Principal by the Schools Education Act 1996, yet despite this legislative basis for a clear vesting of authority, a hazard arose simply because someone without authority persuaded someone else to simply dump 200 truck loads of building waste into the School grounds. What could have led to such a bizarre and incredible outcome when the Act itself is so clear and unequivocal about how authority within Schools is to be delegated? Did the staff member concerned misrepresent their authority to Giaccis, perhaps by claiming to be Acting Principal? If so, we must add a breach of section 87 of the Criminal Code to the list of staff misdemeanors in this incident.

Whatever the actual reason, the result was the introduction of several dangerous and unacceptable hazards to the School, which should never have happened, and would not have happend had Mr Guthrie's authority as Principal been respected, and supported by the full weight of the Department of Education.

Are Your Children Safe

2003-12-20T19:04:00.000-08:00

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?

Lethal litter on Sports Oval

2003-12-19T15:50:00.000-08:00

The discovery of live ammunition amongst the building waste at Bunbury Senior High School sparked fleeting media interest. (Photo South West Times, August 28, 2003)