The reality is worse
The speech is appalling. The reality is worse.
Virginia Crawford has been vilified for speaking truth into a dimly lit room that many of us would prefer to remain ignorant of. And New Conservative stands with the heart of principal Crawford’s words.
Truancy is not usually a cause of the pain and misery we see within the lives of our rangatahi. Truancy is an indicator for us, whether parent, teacher, or youth worker. Truancy loudly proclaims that ‘something is broken or hurt inside me.’ For every truanting child who has managed to become successful, there are far too many who have endured further damage and subjected the community to that same damage.
If we do not listen and react to such a cry, then we cannot delude ourselves later with the common lament of ‘slipped through the cracks of the system.’
Once the emotional offence has subsided from principal Crawford’s honesty, then the real work can begin, by focusing on an activity that is accepted by both academics and those on the front line to be an indicator of future success or failure.
And the fact that over the last two years, Maori and Pasifika students came in at just over 50 per cent regular attendance in school, should be a wakeup call in itself.
Instead of spending millions of taxpayer dollars on talking conferences, New Conservative stands for putting those valuable dollars into the hands of those on the frontline of pulling children out of truant behaviour.
We will reinstate charter schools, which had excellent levels of student attendance due to operational freedom. We will also bring in tradestreaming, from Year 9 if desired, and our justice and family policies will ensure that the building blocks will be stronger and repaired from the damage caused from more than 30 years of social experimentation.
This is one of the times where the frontline and academia are in agreement: ‘Longitudinal studies of Christchurch and Dunedin children have found absence to be a strong predictor of violence later in life, and anticipatory of delinquency, substance abuse, suicidal risk, unemployment and early parenting.’ SASR report 2018.
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Fraser High School (Hamilton) principal Virginia Crawford told an assembly that truants were already the statistic of the worse kind, highly likely to go to prison, commit or be a victim of domestic violence, be illiterate, be a rape victim, be a suicide victim, be unemployed for the majority of their life, have a major health problem, die at an early age, have an addiction, gambling, drugs or smoking.
“When I . . . see groups of students sitting outside the dairy, fish and chip shop, bus stop, some of the things I am thinking is that is another group of students without a future. That is another student who will end up as a statistic . . . ” she said.
“You and I know the only way to fix this is to do the mahi now, to do the work now. School is not easy, but it is a lot easier than having no hope and being cast aside without any worthwhile future.”
" Instead of spending millions of taxpayer dollars on talking conferences, New Conservative stands for putting those valuable dollars into the hands of those on the frontline of pulling children out of truant behaviour."