hot chestnut

Dean’s Blog 'Dare I comment on an old chestnut?’

Dare I comment again on an old chestnut, I wonder? Will it cause as much aggravation as reassurance? Who knows? But it is worth drawing your attention to the new, attractive rainbow lockers the students now have, that brighten up the hallways of the Main Building. Maybe you saw them at the Back to School night. They have an internal lock so that you do not have to provide Fort Knox calibre padlocks. There are two keys and the Secondary Office retains one in case of loss by the locker owner. Now, I write ‘loss’ rather than ‘theft’ on purpose. And this is the point of this Blog and the potential area for aggravation. For we do get allegations from students and sometimes from their parents that the key has in fact been stolen from bag or wallet. However, on closer investigation, in the majority of cases the key was later found (in the locker itself, or in a pocket, or underneath something else in the bag, or even at home.)

A sports shirt or pair of trainers
In a previous Blog I have commented on how quickly the word theft will be used to explain a situation of mystery that is actually a situation of ‘Help! I cannot find it.’ Blame shifting third person (‘someone has stolen my key!’) replaces personal responsibility first person (‘I lost it.’) What disturbs me is that the implications of the words theft and stolen are, often, not apparently fully understood. ‘Stolen’ means that another student at ICS or visiting or an adult who works here or was visiting, made a deliberate, antisocial and illegal decision to appropriate what clearly did not belong to them, for their own pleasurable purposes. And then they went ahead and acted out this decision. Put like this, I expect you, too, would question whether we have amongst our constituents, which include your children, as many who fit my definition as keys that go missing. I believe we do not, for the majority of these keys turn up again and some are genuinely mislaid as they fall from a jeans pocket or are swept unnoticed with a sports shirt or pair of trainers from the bag.

Safe necklaces for the key
What shall we do? Well, we are already doing it, a good deal. I went into a registration at 8.35 recently where students were in the process of making safe necklaces for the key to hang on. In Tutorial the issue of property and its security and loss have been discussed and will be again. The need to place valuables, if they must be brought to school, in the lockable rainbow locker or turned in to the Secondary Office for safe keeping or placed in the PE lock boxes: all these ideas are stressed and discussed and explained and revisited. Eye catching notices are put up with this advice, sometimes designed by the students. Assemblies are used for reminders about securing belongings.

And in the Personal Development Programme
Of course, it is not just keys. And so in the Personal Development Programme there are presentations, role-plays, discussions and evaluations on pertinent topics such as the wider context of the meaning of community together with the need for us to respect its members, on responsibility and integrity, value and cost and so on. The idea of removing temptation is broached and the mundane fact that it is often carelessness or laziness that results in something precious being in an unattended coat of bag in the first place.



The management does not accept responsibility
Children learn from adults – we are their role models. And in the society we have prepared for them we have placed policemen and safes and CCTV and bank deposits and lockers at SBB stations and notices that ‘the management does not accept responsibility for items placed on these shelves’ in almost every restaurant. We do this because we acknowledge that some people do steal. At ICS we take very seriously indeed our responsibility to strive to put an end to this as far as our community is concerned. And if we do not succeed this year we will continue to try next year and the year after, too.

Perhaps that wasn’t such a hot chestnut afterall.