My call from God to Christian school-teaching (Part 1)
I started teaching back in 1974 after completing a 3-year tertiary qualification in Education (majoring in Maths and Educational Psychology), followed by a 3-year BA degree at Melbourne University (majoring in both Pure Maths and Statistical Inference, plus Psychology and Music added on as submajors). Much of my teaching began as headteacher of small rural schools, plus some time in larger school classrooms. I was saved in May 1969 after calling upon Christ to save me as per Romans 10:13.

I attended churches near where I lived until I settled in a house on a small farm in western Victoria. We attended a small Baptist church in a nearby town where I took on many tasks such as secretary, occasional preaching, study-group leader, organist etc. In 1993 I was headteacher of a small rural school near our farm. The school was ordered to close at the end of 1993 due to govt spending cutbacks which required that small rural school populations be added to larger provincial town schools, allegedly saving funds. Rather than travelling to a local town school maybe 20km away, I decided to resign and go into Christian school teaching. I was appointed principal of Benalla Christian School, a two-teacher school, at the beginning of 1994.

At first I had thought that it would be nice to be in a school where my Christian values were not belittled (as they had at Cobden school in the mid-80s). But, as I was to find out, allegedly Christian parents were more picky and unreasonably demanding than the more secular parents in a state school. I was expected to be the perfect Christian, accepting of all difficulties, while getting paid around half of what I would have been paid as principal in a state school. It was still a ministry and I sought to be as Christian as I could manage under the circumstances.

One family of two girls in upper primary almost immediately decided to test my authority, especially after I made it clear that I, as their principal and teacher, was in charge. They were disruptive, even more so behind my back where they stirred up other pupils to cause trouble in my classroom. Their previous principal and teacher had had a serious disability, lacking mobility, and had let the older students basically run the school. Now, when I claimed my authority over them, some (especially these two girls) decided that they had to get rid of me. In fact, that’s exactly what the older one (in Year 6) said: “We’re going to get rid of you.” How? “By making so much trouble for you that you’ll leave or maybe get sacked.” Why? “Because we run the school, not you!” This was around the middle of my first term there! However, soon after the beginning of second term, the family decided that they’d send their two girls elsewhere. In spite of losing a family so soon after taking over, I felt that things were looking a bit better from then on.

I soon found out that the school had serious financial problems, possibly due to an inability to budget correctly. Often the school would get a reminder in the mail about unpaid accounts. I handed these over to the treasurer (a registered accountant no less) who simply said he’d deal with them. Yet, almost as often I’d get a phone call soon after asking what was happening to their payments. The school also had almost no text book resources (and no funds to buy any, either), requiring me to make up all my worksheets and fill the chalkboard with daily Maths for Yr 3-6. My day commenced there around 7am and often only ended well after 5pm, with more work required once I arrived home. I also had little or no time for any breaks during the day with constant monitoring of the school as principal.

I had bought a house in Benalla because when I arrived, I found out that there was no long-term rental available due to so many houses being flooded by a swollen river the previous year and still awaiting repairs before being used again. The housing loan interest rates at that time were around 10% and I ended up paying $500 out of a fortnightly pay of $900; this left $400 per fortnight for all other expenses. I had some savings but these depleted rapidly while I was there.

However, our numbers, which at first struggled because of our lack of facilities and equipment, gradually improved. When I first arrived there, the school had a bad reputation educationally; it was perceived by many, it seemed, as a place of last resort for students who struggled elsewhere in Benalla. By the beginning of my third year there (1996) we (the two teachers) had improved the school’s image in town; at our school’s Open Day in Term 2 we had a lot of local interest (and numbers were already now steadily rising, albeit slowly). But storm clouds were appearing on our horizon. The school’s financial difficulties were accumulating, in spite of the low wages being paid to the two teachers.

We had a Registered Schools’ Board (RSB) assessment in 1995 which approved our teaching and school facilities in general (largely due to the efforts of the teachers), but the wages issue arose. While the school could get away with paying me less than award rates (being a principal on an agreement), the other teacher had to be paid award rates; this significantly increased her wage (to more than my wage!). But the extra drain on the school’s finances led to urgent meetings where the school was forced (so they said) to reduce wages rather than increase them. They then put us to work for 4 days each per week, with each teacher taking the whole school (all 7 levels from Prep to Yr 6) together one day per week with parent assistance as teacher aides. The parent assistance was a nightmare with some parents demanding (as parents) to have some measure of authority over the teachers. Legally this was not permitted, but some parents still tried to bully the teachers. One parent had a young son running screaming around the other teacher’s classroom while the teacher tried to keep control of her class. In the end she told the parent to control her son or else the both of them to get out. (The teacher does have this right due to the teacher being legally responsible for discipline in the classroom.) The parent came to me and complained about the other teacher. I told her that the other teacher was within her rights to do so and that I supported the teacher’s action here. The parent was not very happy at all!

During the 2^nd half of 1996 there was a bad feeling in the school parent body. I was told by one family that they had been forbidden to talk to the teachers or else there’s be trouble. The school board did its best to isolate the teachers from contact with the parent body, probably fearing losing families if they learned what was really going on. Rumors abounded; when mud is thrown sometimes it sticks! The teachers copped a lot of gossip behind our backs. One rumor said the two teachers were having an affair; then when it seemed that this rumor wasn’t believable, a rumor a couple of weeks later said the two teachers weren’t able to work together without hostility. These rumors did seem to originate in Wangaratta where one of the board members was working; we did suspect a connection.

From then on the school board looked for a way to take increased control over what it apparently saw as the rebellion of the teachers. In term 3, after the two teachers had been reinstated to full-time duties, the school board had another meeting at which they decided to dismiss both teachers at the end of that year (1996) and in 1997 appoint just one teacher in place of the previous two, with parent assistance as teacher aides in the classroom. Because the other teacher was a local and had been at the school much longer than I had, I decided to resign and apply for a position elsewhere. But when the school board found out that they were left with the other teacher, they told her they wouldn’t employ her and that they’d advertise for a replacement teacher for 1997. Obviously they had some sort of vendetta against the other teacher. She was a good teacher, and, with the previous principal being somewhat disabled, had done much of the principal’s duties in the years before I arrived. I assured the school board that she was well able to take on the principal position, but they refused to listen. So by the end of 1996 both teachers were effectively dismissed (without any dismissal payment arrangements or anything. In fact, while I was there they hadn’t paid much of my legally-required super payments; all in all, it was probably best for me to leave if I wanted to earn a reasonable wage again. By now I was “broke”.  And the school board appointed a woman from interstate as principal for 1997. The school board chairwoman announced that God had given her Bible verses to demonstrate that the replacement teacher had been chosen by God for the principal position.

I was employed by a Christian school in Werribee as a Yr 6 classroom teacher (not principal but now earning 50% more than I had earned in Benalla. I bought a house in Hoppers Crossing near the school (and near most of our combined families, too) and paid for it by selling most of my farm which I still owned in the west of Victoria. We kept the farmhouse and 2.5 ha land but were never to go back to live permanently again, finally selling the rest of the farm at the start of 2002. I had kept some communications with some parents in Benalla and, while visiting them in 1997, was told that the teacher who had been chosen by God to replace me at the Christian school was now facing dismissal at the end of her 1^st term there. I was told that the teacher would like to see me if possible. I then visited that teacher; she said that Yes, she had been told that she was God’s choice to be principal, but they’d had so many problems with parents in the classroom trying to run the school for her that she’d found the task impossible. And thus, now she had been told that God had changed his mind and didn’t want her there anymore!

One of the school parents (who was a trained and registered teacher) took on the principal position, but left allegedly after a nervous breakdown in the middle of the 3^rd term, taking her children from the school to homeschool them. Another teacher was found and appointed for the rest of 1997 but allegedly left at the end of 1997, with another teacher appointed for 1998. And, by the end of 1997, one year after I left there, I was told they had only 8 students enrolled. How the mighty are fallen! And later on I was told that for many years they struggled to get into double figures and then dropped again, and eventually, after those many years of struggles, sold the school to another school body. I just so often wonder what they could have done if they had just tried to better support the two teachers instead of trying to make the teachers pay for all their financial mismanagement. They were so eager to cut our wages but those who could afford to increase their fees continued to see the teachers as people who would work for less because it was our “ministry”! Far too often this seems to be the case, that “ministry” people often can be talked into working for less than others simply because it’s their ministry!