For God’s sake man, take control of the situation!
You simply cannot accept that a school system that requires you to send your child to school, under pain of sanction of you do not, in what is declared to be a secular system, has the right to force your child into an optional offering.
That makes it non-optional, yet it is not a curriculum offering.
Sue the bastads, and make ’em pay. Get a class action going. Stop accepting what they tell you and start to challenge them. Sue the principal, and the department.
There’s pro bono scalp hunters out there, there’s squillions ot squeeze out of ACCESS and the state on this.
When I read the departmental documents and policies they stated quite clearly that when a parent had once indicated a preference either way, then that preference was to stand year-in-year out unless revoked by the parent.
From the beginning of this year it is a “opt in” policy,any unreturned forms should be viewed as “opt out”.
I had a conversation with my childrens principle about this just yesterday.
Interesting – at my son’s school if no form is returned its an automatic OPT OUT policy! This is the “new’ policy that the Dept of Education has agreed too in the lead up to the VCAT case late last year!
I think Lucy is right but it doesn’t seem to work that way in practice. My youngest is now in Year 11 and her brother is 5 years older. He didn’t attend RE after the first few weeks of school in Prep. I didn’t even know about it until i got a note home with the opt out/in requirement and a request for fees. Then I looked for the worksheets that he was doing (completely inappropriate – the Principal told me they were hearing Bible stories etc but they were in fact direct from the US and full of dogma of a particular form of Protestant Christianity) The school couldn’t show me the curriculum that was being followed (they did eventually get a copy weeks later at my insistence but it bore no relationship to what was actually being delivered in classrooms) so I withdrew him. Most parents had no idea what was being provided and when i opted out some others did too (not that it helped the kids who were given busy work etc etc!) The school, it turned out, was even subsidising the fees as many parents never sent in the $8 for the work booklets used in RE (this didn’t happen for excursions!) The Principal eventually told me that it would be very inconvenient if many parents opted out so it was discouraged (where would they put the kids, who would supervise etc etc) The option of holding it after school and seeing how many turned up wasn’t considered! Eventually myself and other parents on school council managed to get the RE fee added in to one fee structure so at least the school wasn’t wasting money on it any more and I always paid fees less the RE component but was still expected to return a note every year opting out – despite my views (and others) being well known. These notes often did not turn up until after RE had begun for EVERYONE. I am disturbed to see that so many years later people are still fighting the same battles over and over individually. I hope that as a group we can achieve the removal of legislation allowing untrained volunteers espousing who knows what peculiar ideas access to our classrooms.
Sue’s experience appears to be common – it’s 10 years since I retired as Business Manager of my school and back then these RE people were always putting pressure on successive principals to fund the glossy work booklets used in their ‘lessons’. They had a couple of parents on the school council to plead for them but I always said that our budgets were so tiight that there was no way we would pay for them. My last principal got so sick of them that he did what Sue says and added it into the fees with the option not to pay. They still brought pressure to bear on the school because many parents didn’t pay. I too am disturbed to find that this is still going on in 2012.
“The Principal eventually told me that it would be very inconvenient if many parents opted out so it was discouraged (where would they put the kids, who would supervise etc etc)”
“…these RE people were always putting pressure on successive principals to fund the glossy work booklets used in their ‘lessons’.”
What a shabby little arrangement this whole thing has turned out to be and the only party to apparently benefit from the whole thing is bloody Access Ministries. Is it any wonder they regard their current set-up in schools as a god given opportunity – there certainly seems something other worldly about the way they gained access in the first place and the how the whole absurd system seems to work in their favour once in place.