Faith and unreason: The headteacher hounded from her job.

[IndianaGreen]

This is the story of how a vocal religious minority can terrify a community and coerce an educational establishment into submitting to its will.

Faith and unreason: The headteacher hounded from her job

Erica Connor took a failing school and turned it into a beacon of academic achievement and racial harmony. So why was she driven from her job by religious extremists and misguided officials? Tim Walker hears her story

Monday, 6 April 2009

On a Friday afternoon in September 2005, just two weeks into the new school year, Erica Connor walked away from the job she loved. The head of the once-thriving New Monument school in Woking, Surrey, Connor had borne the brunt of an unpleasant and unrelenting three-year campaign, conducted by a handful of local activists, to turn her non-denominational state primary into an Islamic faith school.

She had been attacked in the small print of a widely circulated petition demanding her removal; insulted in a rare graffiti scrawl across the front of the school; verbally abused by two of the school governors; and advised, for her own safety, to carry a personal police alarm at all times. Connor, who had always regarded herself as an optimist, was suffering from loss of sleep, loss of memory, loss of weight, loss of confidence. She was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed anti-depressants.

Yet her repeated attempts to enlist the aid of her local education authority were in vain; it had decided instead to take up her opponents' cause. Despite support from her staff, parents and the community, Connor and her school were investigated – twice – by the LEA following accusations of racism and Islamophobia. Last month, at the High Court, she finally won £407,781 damages for negligence from Surrey County Council.

But this isn't really a story of racial or religious strife. Throughout her ordeal, Connor remains convinced that the vast majority of the local community stood firmly in her corner, regardless of religious affiliations. Instead, it's the story of how a tiny minority used the fear of such conflict, and the terror inspired by phrases like "institutional racism" or "Commission for Racial Equality", to paralyse local government – and persuade the education system to abandon a gifted headteacher and her dedicated staff in their hour of need.

"It's changed me for good," says Connor, who is 57. "I hung on in, trusting the natural justice of the system – and that trust was totally knocked out of me. I can still hardly believe it could happen, that nobody at the LEA would stand by me. The court case has brought back some of my confidence, but I'll never be quite the same again."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/schools/faith-and-unreason-the-headteacher-hounded-from-her-job-1663187.html

[Rosa Luxemburg]

1. Woking Surrey

Surrey is a rather inflexible place

[Adsos Letter]

2. "Islamophobia"

the same type of cry we hear from Christian fundies who can't get their agenda into the public schools..."the school hates Christianity"...

Outrageous that the folks who should have been defending her didn't.