Schools oppose strike
Schools are threatening to mark students as truant if they strike for climate change, with one principal calling it ‘‘wagging’’ that won’t make a difference.
Thousands of students plan to strike across New Zealand next Friday as part of a global campaign urging politicians to treat climate change as a crisis, and act now to protect students’ futures from its effects.
Christchurch strike organiser Lucy Gray, 12, said students were striking for their future.
‘‘Teachers, they strike all the time to get what they want and that’s just money. We want our future; I think that should be allowed.’’
But Secondary Principals Association president and Pakuranga College principal Michael Williams said students’ impact on climate change would be ‘‘probably zero’’.
‘‘If my environmental council students came to me and said they wanted to strike, I’d say ‘What’s it going to achieve?’,’’ he said. ‘‘We’re concerned that students are wasting good learning time.’’
Christchurch principals said the strike should have been held on the weekend, not on a Friday afternoon.
On advice from the Ministry of Education, they have adopted a unified stance that students must have parental permission to attend, and those that do will be marked ‘‘unjustifiably absent’’. Anyone who attends without their parents’ permission will be marked as truant.
A template letter sent to local parents said schools ‘‘do not support students attending this event’’.
‘‘Our understanding is that the event has no recognised, official body organising it. Plans for management on the day, if they do exist, have not been brought to our attention.’’
Gray could not be reached for comment about principals’ concerns yesterday.
In an earlier interview with Stuff, she said the strike was a
way for students who weren’t able to vote to have a voice on issues that mattered to them.
Canterbury West Coast Secondary Principals’ Association president Phil Holstein said schools supported students’ commitment to the cause.
But approving a student strike would set a worrying precedent, he said.
‘‘On the list of things we can justify [student absences for], a strike is not one of them.
‘‘We would have liked to have some kind of notice before it was just imposed on us. Just on the basis of health and safety for students . . . we couldn’t take responsibility for that.’’
Steven Mustor, director of Ao Tawhiti Unlimited Discovery in Christchurch said the school would be ‘‘100 per cent supportive’’ if its students wanted to attend the event, although he wasn’t aware of any who did.
‘‘We would make it into a learning opportunity for them.’’
However, any ‘‘more serious action’’ would not be sanctioned, Mustor said. The school learnt how to deal with student activism when several Unlimited students chained themselves to a fountain to protest the redevelopment of Cashel Mall in 2007.
‘‘We didn’t take any action against those guys – the police did.’’
The Strike 4 Climate Change movement started with 16-yearold Greta Thunberg from Sweden, who skipped class to sit outside government buildings for three weeks last year.
Following Greta, children across Europe and Australia held their own demonstrations, and the worldwide strike next week involves youth from more than 50 countries.