Just a rough draft, will finish it soon 29 July 2009
If you are foreign, live in The Netherlands and send your children to school in the Dutch school system, you probably have at some point in time had problems ragarding the school that they go to. I often hear it from my fellow "immigrant" friends, They said "that my child is stupid" or the teacher told me "my son must have a Nederlands passport not a British one". Lots of unbelievable stuff that would have any British school teacher sacked should they even come close to voicing such opinions, not that they would. All I can say is all is not well with the school system here. They seem to hate it if children can speak two or more languages, this for us or more so, them, it has been a major source of contention. They can't handle different cultures.
I sent my two British born daughters to St Michaels RK Basisschool in Hazerswoude-Dorp. At first all was great. Girls happy with lots of friends, a wonderful headmaster with a great character. When he showed me around the school it was a mess as they had a big party but the atmospheer was great, I believed they would be OK here. Unfortunately he retired to be replaced by the new headmaster, Ad van Disseldorp and from the beginning all was not well. He treated us differently, always greeting the other parents and children and never us, always shifting around uncomfortably should we get too close upon arrival. Even at their young age, my girls noticed, "He never says good morning to us, Mummy."
They moved though the school and from Group 4 the eldest started falling behind in maths. At Christmas I learned that she was a little slow so I asked if I should worry and the teacher said "No." Around four months later I get a call from an Annelies van Katwijk, the start of an acrimonious hate/hate relationship. Brash and agitated, she informs me that my daughter has fallen a year behind in maths. A year! Hold on a minute but it was only four months ago she was a little bit behind. How can that be?
The end result was that Annelies van Katwijk reported us to the AMK (to the outside world that is social services, child abuse department, etc). She must have really been smiling. My difficulty with the language, struggling to be in several places at once on her beckoning call and making complaints about her to the somewhat unprofessional headmaster, handed me, my partner and my children to her on a plate. The system allows it as it was only recently on the news that the social services were grossly overstretched because of the mass of bogus complaints.
We're now stuck in this situation, an eternal loop of the authorities determined to find something that is not there. In all the 18 months that we've had to deal with this there's not one thing that has changed from our end, we still eat together, we still read stories at bedtime, we still go on walks and holidays and we still do a lot of sporting activities. As far as the AMK / GDD is concerned, they've done nothing either apart from nosey around our lives, send us one report after another, regurgitating the same rubbish time and time again and generally cause a unsurmountable amount of stress all in the good of what.......? Well I don't know. Statistics, yes that's it. They love statistics oh and absolute control!
But now enough is enough. Like the brave Iranians desperate to get their voices heard in the outside world, I'm going to fight back. I'm going to lay down the story as it has played out over the years since I first had run ins with St Michaels Basisschool in Hazerswoude-Dorp.
