I met Janelle Rowe recently. I had every reason to expect a hard-done-by, fire-breathing campaigner. Instead I met a warm, measured, highly capable and articulate educator, wholly committed to her calling and the children at the heart of it. Janelle is a woman who had to leave the profession she was made for, who is shell-shocked and inwardly grieving at what her beloved vocation has become, and who is still, in every way that matters, a principal. She devoted 34 years to helping children learn. When she talks, what comes through is her passion for reading, writing and financial literacy, and for seeing children flourish – far more than any appetite for a fight. As principal of an ACT public school, she proposed swapping Wear It Purple Day for Bullying No Way Week, a national anti-bullying week that falls the week before and covers every child, whatever the reason they get picked on.
The Education Directorate called her to head office. She was handed a list of allegations she had to guess at, was told that half of her staff were ready to quit and was subsequently placed under supervision. One of those staff came to her privately and admitted, ‘I completely agree with you, but I would never say anything.’ Janelle wrote three pages in reply to the Directorate. One pointed question came back. Would she take part and wear purple? Following further pressure, and seeing where it was going, she resigned. Resigned, not sacked. The people I’ve seen online insisting on that distinction are right. But it is worth asking what kind of process leaves resignation as the only open door for a principal the Directorate’s own file, obtained under Freedom of Information, call ‘outstanding’, ‘highly capable’ and ‘the best leader I have ever worked with in my 40-year career’.
Her objection was never about the colour. In a school, an awareness day is a lesson. Teachers walk children through ANZAC Day and what it means, and they would have had to do the same with Wear It Purple Day. Janelle did not want her staff explaining to children as young as four what each letter of LGBTQIA+SB means, under a code of conduct that tells them not to and child-safe standards that class sexualised content shared with children as reportable conduct. She was applying the policy she had been trained on. Wear It Purple’s own organisers say participation is voluntary by design, for students and teachers alike. It was not voluntary for Janelle. The best case against her goes like this. Some children in every primary school have two mums or two dads, and a few will grow up gay. Wear It Purple Day, at that age, is simply a way of telling those children they belong and telling the others not to use their families as an insult.
Bullying No Way Week says exactly that to exactly those children. It just does not require a four-year-old to be taught the acronym. And if the day really were only about belonging, replacing it with a week about belonging would hardly have been a disciplinary matter. That is what this was – an agenda dressed up as policy and procedure. Our education bureaucracies have become chameleons of convenience – purple when a principal objects, manila when a journalist asks. Bad as the process was, it is not the worst of it. The worst of it is the people who should have stood with her and didn’t. The Directorate, which had ‘outstanding’ in its own records, was asked what ‘underperformance’ meant and cited privacy. The Minister, asked the same, said inclusion is at the heart of ACT schools, which was not the question. The union, which by her lawyers’ account became a lever for the agenda rather than Janelle’s shield. And lastly the colleague – the one who agreed with her and said nothing.
That last one hurts the most, because most of us have been that colleague at some point. We chose to be, through our silence. Inside the public school system she had faithfully served for 34 years, Janelle was left standing alone. But she had her faith, and a principled lawyer. So she spoke. More than five million people read, saw, or heard her story over two days, and the room full of people who agreed with her started talking. A serving school principal said he stands with her. A teacher of 38 years said she was not surprised, and that this is why the experienced ones are leaving. A serving ACT teacher who wore purple that day still said Janelle had a point. And several politicians made public declarations of support. Parents wrote that they only understood this week what their child’s school had described as a day about diversity and harmony. A lesbian mother of a four-year-old, a gay man, a woman who says plainly she is not a Christian – all with her.
Janelle says she was told, during the process, that she was only doing this because she is a Christian. Faith may well explain Janelle’s convictions. It does not explain theirs. Her own test of whether it was worth it is modest – one parent empowered to speak, one child protected. On that test it has already passed. In Ephesians 6:13, Paul writes of ‘having done all, to stand’. Stand is a defensive verb. Janelle was not trying to take ground; she declined to give any up. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the spiritual world – ground we vacate does not stay empty, and through years of quiet passivity good people have let the roots of this ideology grow so deep into policy and law that removing them will be neither quick nor simple. Recently the High Court closed the last legal door on the 2013 amendment that wrote ‘gender identity’ into the Sex Discrimination Act – the change so much of this traces back to – and ordered Sall Grover to pay costs for having tried.
That is what dissent costs now. Not a rebuke or a bad reference – a legal bill, or a career. Ask Sall Grover. Ask Janelle Rowe, who after 34 years is no longer running a school. Only parliament can rewrite the law, which is why Janelle may soon be telling her story in its corridors – not because she sought a cause, but because people responded to what she said. Some have – two parties have said plainly that she was right, and a federal senator has asked what is going on in our schools. The leadership of the major parties has not, and that silence is what ACL exists to break. The pendulum does not swing back on its own. But it is moving. When the country’s most-listened-to radio breakfast host – nobody’s idea of a Christian conservative – spends an entire segment defending a primary school principal against his own co-host, something has shifted. He put it more plainly than anyone – she wants to tell four-year-olds ‘don’t bully each other’. Something they can understand.
Which brings me to the church. Earlier this year the Australian Christian Freedom Index, which ACL co-authored, surveyed more than 10,000 Australian Christians. Seventy-three per cent said they keep their faith private – at work, online, in public. Ninety-two per cent said speaking openly is riskier than it was five years ago. ‘I completely agree with you, but I would never say anything’ is not one teacher in Canberra. It is three in four of us. This is not a call to anger, and it is not a judgement on that colleague – what happened to Janelle is exactly why people stay silent. It is a call to make silence unnecessary. If enough of us say out loud what we already think, nobody has to say it alone. And a word about where the hope is, because it is not in Canberra. Paul writes in the same breath that we wrestle not against flesh and blood. The Directorate is not the enemy. Nor is the Minister, or the union, or the colleague who stayed quiet. None of that excuses what was done to her.
But the battle is older than any of them and it is already won – not by a parliament, and not by us, but by Him. That is what lets Janelle speak without bitterness, and it is what lets us stand without fear. The outcome is not in doubt. Only our part in it is. Pray, most of all, for the children – the ones in primary classrooms, from four-year-olds up, who are being handed questions no child should have to carry, and who deserve to be left alone long enough to grow into them. Pray that common sense returns to those who set policy for our schools – that a child in kindergarten should not be introduced to adult questions of sexuality and gender by the state. Pray for Janelle – for a way back into education, for healing from what she has called significant psychological harm, and for open doors in Canberra. Pray for courage among those who agreed with her and have not yet spoken. And pray for parents who found out this week what they had not been told.
Source: Australian Christian Lobby