#82 on cowardice

Current mood – bemused
Current music – ‘Die Another Day’ by Madonna

So I get to work and check my pigeon hole for paper work etc. only to find a page from my blog printed out – the last entry ‘#80 on meetings’ to be precise – and the words ‘YOU ARE SO OUT OF ORDER’ scratched across the top in biro. It’s the first page of seven in the print out and so I can only assume that someone has printed out my blog and decided to comment upon it in a not so hi-tech fashion as posting a comment on line.

Now I’m a glass half full guy. In fact I would say that the glass is twice the size it should be. I trawled around my friends on the staff who read my blog and none of them said they wrote it – not as an ironic comment nor as a serious criticism of my actions in bringing alleged misleading declarations by the head teacher to the attention of the Chair of Governors. So whoever it was – friend or foe – someone was trying o tell me something.

So my response takes two forms to cover all the bases…

(A) If you wrote the note and you were having a laugh (and I must confess my initial reaction was to laugh) then please let me know who you are and we can share the joke.

(B) If you were making a genuine comment please have the balls to post your comment publicly in the same way that I post my comments publicly to allow free and open debate. This, of course, assumes that this was your intention. Some of my friends think it is bullying and harassment.

I am not ‘so out of order’. Firstly, I did not betray any confidences in bringing to light the information that I did. Everything I told the Chair of Governors was information in the public domain; not a single jot of it was confidential. Secondly, I have not done anything illegal. I have not incriminated myself in this plot and claimed ‘I was only following orders.’ I had nothing to do with the Head Teacher’s actions. Thirdly, I had a moral and ethical duty to advise the Chair of Governors of what I did. Is it right that allegedly false declarations of interest are made for me to turn a blind eye if I happen to chance upon the information? And fourthly, I may even have had a legal responsibility to report what I did. I’m no lawyer but if you think something illegal has occurred am I not bound by the law to report it?

I have acted properly throughout the whole of this sorry business. I have no personal agenda, no axe to grind – I’ll not even be working for the school or the local authority beyond August 31.

All I want to see is a proper investigation carried out, the findings made public for the whole school community to see and the appropriate course of action taken so that the school is seen by the whole community to be publicly preserving it’s integrity. And if by my taking up this little piece of cyberspace I have made more people aware of the alleged wrongdoing at my workplace then so much the better. I do not force anyone to read this blog, and I certainly don’t demand that anyone believes a word of it. Free thinking people in a liberal society have the right to make that decision for themselves, they don’t have to scratch a comment on a print out and stuff it in a pigeon hole.

If I’m ‘so out of order’ you might want to reconsider your own motives for scrawling the note. What are you scared of? That the truth might actually come out? That people should be held to the highest professional standards of conduct especially when the education of children is at stake?

Post a reply if you dare or care. Or else shut the fuck up and go and look up integrity in a dictionary.