I make no case for the literal accuracy of these accounts, and my memory has almost certainly filled in the blanks with verisimilitudinous detail. Nonetheless, they are in every other respect accurate.
It’s November, 50 years ago, Quesnel Secondary.
A group of girls has assembled in Mr. Havelaar’s room. They are organized by a girl in Mr Havelaar’s class, a mouthy spark-plug of a girl called Enid Goodman and are clearly agitated and unhappy, looking for a solution to their problem.
But it’s not Mr Havelaar they are unhappy with; it’s the school’s dress code. Mr Havelaar has expressed an interest in their dilemma.
This is the gist of their complaint: Quesnel becomes very cold in winter, and over 60% of the students who attend Quesnel Secondary arrive by school bus. That involves waiting for the bus in temperatures that occasionally dip as low as -35 degrees fahrenheit (the temperature at which the buses stop picking up students) You don’t do that wearing a skirt or dress, as required by the school’s dress code for girls. So what happens is that the students are dropped off, the girls go to the girls’ washroom to change, and there isn’t room. So they wait until there is. If the bell for the start of classes has already gone, they then have to go to the office, pick up a late slip, and arrive in class late.
All of this could be solved by simply allowing girls to wear pants in school. The girls have tried the normal channels without success.
This is curious, because the change has already happened in much of the province, including schools in Victoria, which obviously has a much less-severe climate.
But the rules have yet to change in Quesnel.
You may well ask why that would be, and Mr Havelaar, although he is a teacher new to the school and therefore hasn’t been through these wars before, has a theory:
Quesnel Secondary is unusual in the province, maybe unique, in that nearly 50% of its staff comes from overseas, particularly Australia and the UK. These teachers, admirable as many of them are, were educated and trained in very different systems; some of the women on the staff are particularly single-minded in their determination to “civilize” the girls of the Cariboo. They are quite convinced that school uniforms would be an answer.
Add that to the fact that the principal is a new arrival and that therefore the school’s administration is still finding its feet, and you have the root of the problem.
So, what to do?
What would Saul Alinsky do?
Here a brief digression:
One can read all about Saul Alinsky, American “community activist and political theorist” in the extensive Wikipedia article, but for our purposes the fact that in 1946 he published a tract called “Reveille for Radicals”, which I read sometime in the mid-60’s, is the salient point. In it he describes a number of apparently intractable social issues which were solved by using the vulnerable points of the offending bureaucracy against that bureaucracy in creative ways. I was much impressed, and have kept the advice close ever since.
Anyway, back to the girls and the dress code.
The plan we come up with, when we do, is the very essence of elegance and simplicity. We ask:
Who do we need to influence? The administration.
Who holds the keys to that influence? The secretaries, who sit outside the office, have to deal with the girls and their late slips, and who the administrators will hear from if they’re unhappy.
Solution: the girls will wait until the last minute before changing. The girls’ bathroom will be even more plugged than usual. There will be a very long line-up for late slips. The school will be seriously disrupted, and the secretaries will become seriously annoyed.
All that was required was that the girls had to organize themselves to follow the plan, which they did.
There was some blowback, but very few days later the administration capitulated, and pants were permitted.
Score one for Girl Power, and note that the bureaucracy got the peace it wanted, as well.
My other illustration of bending the bureaucracy is from Timberline, only 20 or so years ago, and I had almost nothing to do with it.
From the time Timberline opened, student smoking was an issue. I believe we first tried a “smoking room”, but that quickly proved to be unsatisfactory. And then the space was required for a classroom. There was a “smoking area” just outside the back doors of the school. The art-teaching staff, who had their classrooms in that part of the building, were less than enchanted with the mess and ambient smoke, and there were pretty-much constant reminders that duty staff had to be more vigilant in patrolling. Finally the smoking area was banished across the field, with the attendant and predictable mess, strife, and patrolling problems.
The staff absolutely hated student smoking, but knew it would happen regardless, particularly due to the joint-occupancy of the facility with North Island College. So we made the best of a bad situation.
And then the government of the day went on a smoking crusade, and declared that all public institutions had to ban smoking on or near the premises.
The Board and Superintendent had no choice but to declare that schools would be smoke-free, and that included Timberline. Student smoking was banished.
Of course, that didn’t prevent students smoking.
They merely moved off school property, onto the sidewalks on Dogwood and Rockland. And into the adjoining Beaver Lodge Lands.
Teachers were asked to patrol these venues (and this is where I do play a small part) but the staff absolutely refused. Our position was that if these areas were to be patrolled, other people would have to do it, teachers having no authority off school property.
The administration briefly tried to control the problem, but it soon became obvious that, in order to get any handle at all on the situation, they would be spending much of their day policing smokers.
And then the calls from the public started to come in, not just from people who were upset and offended by students from Timberline, but also those from Carihi. And the mess built up, without any way of dealing with it.
Eventually, and without any public declaration, the smokers were unofficially re-admitted to school property, where they were at least out of sight.
Alinsky would be proud of them!
