I’d urge people to think very, very carefully before going to the media in this sort of situation.
The media’s agenda is not yours: it’s to create as much interest as possible. Sure, you might get a media outlet interested in publicising wrongdoing: that might make a good story. But other outlets (or even the same one later when the initial interest has faded) will be interested in ‘monstering’ the complainers: that might make a good story, too. The school administration and their friends will be highly motivated to help in this endeavour. If you make a sufficiently large splash, every detail of your and the child’s life will be raked over for something that can be distorted to appear scandalous or wrong.
Almost nobody likes whistleblowers, and they (almost?) never prosper afterwards, regardless of the merits of their case. (I think this is a big problem for society, but hard to resolve.)
If the school administration is so committed to not seeing the problem, I’d expect that it’ll be more in the child’s interests to take them out of that school than it is to go to the media.
The hope is that the threat alone will suffice. We now enter decision theory territory when we ask if the threat becomes less credible if the follow-through is not performed.
In the abstract, general, idealized case where the threat fails, I would consider switching schools (to actually solve the problem) AND leaking the story to the media (partially out of spite, partially to provide an impetus for change benefiting others, and partially to maintain the credibility of one’s threats). In any actualized scenario, my advice might differ.
I’d urge people to think very, very carefully before going to the media in this sort of situation.
The media’s agenda is not yours: it’s to create as much interest as possible. Sure, you might get a media outlet interested in publicising wrongdoing: that might make a good story. But other outlets (or even the same one later when the initial interest has faded) will be interested in ‘monstering’ the complainers: that might make a good story, too. The school administration and their friends will be highly motivated to help in this endeavour. If you make a sufficiently large splash, every detail of your and the child’s life will be raked over for something that can be distorted to appear scandalous or wrong.
Almost nobody likes whistleblowers, and they (almost?) never prosper afterwards, regardless of the merits of their case. (I think this is a big problem for society, but hard to resolve.)
If the school administration is so committed to not seeing the problem, I’d expect that it’ll be more in the child’s interests to take them out of that school than it is to go to the media.
The hope is that the threat alone will suffice. We now enter decision theory territory when we ask if the threat becomes less credible if the follow-through is not performed.
In the abstract, general, idealized case where the threat fails, I would consider switching schools (to actually solve the problem) AND leaking the story to the media (partially out of spite, partially to provide an impetus for change benefiting others, and partially to maintain the credibility of one’s threats). In any actualized scenario, my advice might differ.