It has taken me quite a while to decide what I wanted to post on my blog this week, but here it is. I probably should have written this earlier, but the idea came to me after reading an article posted on Stuff.
Recently a story has been brought to my attention from a teenager from New Plymouth, New Zealand, Kyle Wadsworth who I have known from the Outrageous Fortune Fan Forum for a year or so now. He first mentioned the issue on his blog.
Kyle attends the New Plymouth Boys High School who recently ran a charity event (a ‘mufti-day’) to support a charity called KidsCan as part of a TVNZ Telethon event (much like our Good Friday Appeal). According to him the school decided to distribute the majority of funds amongst it’s school sport and IT programs rather than to the charity that it promised to give to itself.
The issue has caught the attention of many people, which is mentioned in the news article:
Commenters have joined Kyle’s chorus and he said he had received messages of support from as far away as Australia and from fellow-students to Telstra Clear executives.
The school has responded to this issue rather poorly. A response from the school was mentioned in the news article:
“While it was usual school procedure to give $200 after each fundraising day to a charity, it had been decided to give $500 this time. “The kids know that, they’ve been told that.”
Mr McMenamin said the school council would not be giving more of the money raised to KidsCan as it was “just not an issue”.
To rebut the first point, Kyle claims on his blog that the statement was:
INCORRECT TOTALLY. I’m sitting here in my class, and these guys had no idea! One said “They never tell us that s***, I didn’t know until I read it this morning”. Students had no knowledge at all that not all funds were donated.
Second, it is an issue when the school is going behind the back of contributors who were under the presumption that the money was going to charity. How did the school even get the right to keep 4/5 of the money raised for themselves? Are they so low on funds that they need to do such a thing? Whatever happened to their allotment of Government Funding? NB: I do not know how much funding the school received from the Government, but based on what happens here in Australia even the elite schools get funding of some sort…
The school has a responsibility to the students involved to give a larger portion of the money to charity. It is a matter of human decency, which these school directors seem to lack. I sincerely hope that this issue is resolved for the sake of those involved, and that by me posting this it will increase the exposure of this.
