Thank you Bill Sutton, Thorndon Primary School principal
Bill Sutton, the principal at Thorndon Primary school, retired last month after 45 years in education and over two decades at Thorndon School. New Zealand has about 2500 schools and principals are appointed and leave every week, so why is this retirement worth commenting on?
It’s because he’s just the principal you want your local school to have if you have a child who is autistic, or even just ‘different’, or a free spirit, or if your family does not fit the ‘norm’. Bill became principal about the same time as the 1989 Education Act which brought in community governed self-managing ‘Tomorrow’s Schools’, and also had the landmark Section 8 which meant that every child had a legal right to attend their local school. This has been problematic for many schools, but not Thorndon. School camp - no worries. All the kids went and anxious parents were welcomed to go, but some (like me) subtly encouraged to stay at home. Swimming lessons and swimming sports – all had a go, and in our last year I remember watching as a teacher carefully carried a small autistic child into the pool and walked through the water with him to complete the race.
We were lucky that Bill was principal of Thorndon School even before my own little ’special needs’ boy started school. He was already attending the speech therapy clinic next door and it was recommended that he move onto Thorndon School with its unique ‘language unit’ which had evolved at the school. Children from all over the Wellington region with significant speech/language issues enrolled at Thorndon as ordinary students. They each had a half hour daily withdrawal for one to one speech therapy, although sometimes it involved working with small groups of ‘regular’ children to model appropriate behaviour. There was also a speech language therapist who worked across the classrooms to reinforce teaching and learning. Of course this model did not survive the National Government’s 1996 policy of Special Education 2000, but by then my son’s language and associated skills such as turntaking had vastly improved with this targeted and skilled intervention. For Years 1-8 he couldn’t have had a better educational environment.
I had a child who was different (the autism diagnosis didn’t come till many years later) and he didn’t have much language or interaction when he started school. He walked on his tiptoes, spoke occasional phrases referring to himself in the third person and was often echolalic. But the school had multi-level classes and for his first three years he had the same teacher – the wonderful Margaret Rogers.
Many years later I heard about ABA and realised that Margaret was a natural at it, gently but firmly reinforcing the desired behaviour and discouraging the unwanted. I also remember her sensible advice about encouraging reading, at a parent teacher evening. She told the parents that school can teach the basics but it is up to them to show their child a love for the written word and reading and model it whether by reading the newspaper every day, a weekly trip to the library and bedtime reading. She resisted sending reading books home which then became a tedious homework chore, although school library books chosen by the children were encouraged.
Thorndon School under Bill’s leadership was genuinely child-centred and the children all equal regardless of their background or abilities. When my child was stressed it was OK for him to run out of the classroom to watch the school caretaker sweep the leaves, while another child in his class preferred to do her learning standing on her head. My child was a runner and there were three school entrances onto busy inner city streets but there was never a mention of requiring a fence - somehow they all seemed to look out for each other, and what was happening in the classroom or playground was rather interesting and worth staying for.
Extensive research shows that that there are three things that make a good school:
- effective leadership
- good community/school relationships
- high expectations of successful achievement for all the students.
In my experience this all happened at Thorndon. So what is it about Bill that is special (although he would probably hate that identification as much as ’special needs’ children do)?
Firstly, he’s an enthusiast for education. He was always on the lookout for new ideas and was prepared to try them. Before Bill’s time the school was one of the first in Wellington to have on-site after-school and holiday programmes and a Maori immersion class. In his time it was one of the first to embrace on line learning and become a networked school. There was flexibility so that opportunities could be taken up. So when Nelson Mandela visited parliament, the Thorndon children walked down the road to chat to him. Bill got cheap tickets to take the children to the International Festival of the Arts (my son went to many events) and even the young children went to the opera. They all regularly walked to the city library, participated in the fringe festival and other local events.
He had a knack of employing enthusiastic teachers and particularly good teacher aides. They also seemed to like the school and stayed.
Bill always seemed calm – whether a child broke their leg in the playground, had a meltdown, or in one case threw a rubbish bin at him after smashing a window. Bill told me once that when he graduated from teachers college the male teachers were all given a leather strap to hit the kids. Of course he never used it (although corporal punishment only became illegal in the late 1980s).
He was also not beholden to compliance requirements from the Ministry of Education (which was just across the road) or when ERO came. His attitude seemed to be to do minimal compliance and get on with the real work of teaching and learning. This infuriated some officials and board members, but good relationships were soon restored. What he did show was that inclusive education was possible, practical and of benefit to all participants, and all those who experienced this first hand at Thorndon have hopefully taken it into their own future.
So thank you Bill, for helping give my son such a good eight-year educational start. I hope that other autistic children find such inclusive schools with other Bill Suttons in charge. I imagine your retirement will be as creative and child centred as your educational career.