Saturday, April 15, 2017

I thought the name rang a bell ...


Well, well. In 2010 I wrote this:

When the schoolyard bully is a principal

Today I saw this:

Kawakawa School principal shared hard-core pornographic images with his staff

As an old friend is in the habit of saying: interesting, eh? And I see Witana's good mate Pat Newman is sticking by him.

2 comments:

paul scott said...

Ok, I'll say it.
What has he done wrong, [ in this instance].? Is it
1) Using the school computer for personal use 2) Sharing the stuff with his teachers
3) Being interested in sex 4) Being interested in sex in the day time
5) School teachers are not supposed to be interested in sex
6) Some vague combination of all of this

Karl du Fresne said...

I’m not sure whether you’re serious, but in case you are:
What Witana does in his own time and in the privacy of his own home is, strictly speaking, his own business, provided it’s legal. But this involved having 1522 pornographic images on his school-issued laptop. Some of the images were likely to be illegal, according to the auditors. They were shared with other teaching staff, increasing the likelihood that they would be seen by children.
In any case, setting questions of legality aside, we are entitled to form our own judgment as to Witana’s character – and we will.
Add pornography to the other things we know about Witana – for example his dodgy financial management (pre-signing blank cheques and treating school funds as a personal loan facility), his participation in a gang-up with Pat Newman against a fellow principal for apparently ideological reasons and his apparent psychological instability (judging by Duncan Garner’s TV interview in 2010), you have to wonder how this guy could be allowed within 100 metres of a school.
But he’s apparently okay to continue teaching because his mate Newman says so. To which I can only say: pfft.