St Leonard’s is Famous!
Unfortunately, it’s famous for having really stupid kids.
Just the other day, the news broke that the Valedictory Dinner had been cancelled by the principal, Dr Hayward. Apparently, about thirty students were involved in trying to put a big banner up on St John of God’s tower next door to the school. I’m not entirely sure how thirty people can be involved in putting one banner up. Were twenty of them standing around cheering people on? Or are we counting those who helped paint the banner as implicated?
What hasn’t been reported as much is that apparently the kids were banned from the traditional walk from the beach to school on Muck Up Day, which seems a bit dumb. If you’ve got students doing something safe and stupid on the traditional being-stupid day, why would you ban it?
And then there’s the matter of the 150 or so students that didn’t put the banner up. Why do they get punished, exactly? It’s not like it’s hard to work out which kids are the dicks and which aren’t. Better for one or two students to get away with something than to punish 150 unfairly. Especially since one of the prime reasons for the Valedictory Dinner is to give the prizes to the clever kids.
But even after this embarassing story, today we get the news that St Leonard’s Year Nines were caught by teachers buying marijuana in Fiji, as reported in the Herald-Sun and The Age. Good move, kids. You watch the news, you know it’s safe. Hayward’s quotes actually sound reasonable in these stories, even if the Herald-Sun did plaster a picture of him grinning alongside theirs. In their initial story, The Age mentioned him defending the staff’s decision not to submit the children to the authorities, though this aspect is not as strong in the story as it stands currently. Presumably because not many people would read that story and think “those fifteen year olds need to feel the full force of the law, hanging’s too good for them.”
(The Age‘s story mentions, presumably as corroborating evidence, that the year nines were “rowdy” on the plane home according to talkback callers. Shit, really? Kids rowdy? On a plane? Let us also take into consideration that talkback callers are amongst the most intolerant, self-important people on the planet.)
So, Hayward is in favour of excessive punishment, except when it might kill the students! Hah! Oh, alright, that’s actually consistent. In any case, this has got to be the worst publicity St Leonard’s has had since it allowed those stinky boys to start attending back in the seventies.