The principal's office

Kia ora, Principal.

Mate, I don’t envy you. Every man and his dog has an opinion - and now some random 47-year-old lady is adding her reckons to the mix. I’m not going to tell you how to do your job either: it’s a tough role, and I wouldn’t know where to start. But one thing I do know is that, like you, I used to be a teenager - same as the Freyberg High School students in your care.

I was politically engaged too, or as best a teenager could be in a small town before the internet. I watched the news, followed current events, tried to decipher the cryptic meanings behind politicians’ words. I got patronised for being a silly little girl. I’m not saying I still hold all my ideas from back then - but I admire that I had them, found the gumption. Those ideas were seeds, sown with a good heart, and I like what they became: a social conscience that grew with nurturing and time.

I was politically engaged, but I was never hungry. I got lucky, historically speaking - squeezing through the door just as it shut in the faces of younger kids. It was hard for working class families in the early 1990s, in that moment of upheaval, our dads getting laid off as we studied for exams - but we could not have foreseen what happened next. The hunger of children was about to become as commonplace as our leaders’ bullshit excuses for it.

As I got a little older, I did activist stuff. I went on protests, yelled and chanted as I stamped down George Street in Dr Martens. I helped block doorways and streets. I joined an occupation of the university’s registry building. I did everything those Freyberg kids did, and more, except spit at someone’s feet - probably because I never learned to spit that well.

I did stupid stuff, too, like roaming with a bunch of mates, one of whom took spray paint to the faces of right-wing politicians on election signs. It was the sort of thing a brown kid could've got in trouble for - but we were Pākehā, and tertiary students, so our defiance always came with the comfort of unlikely consequences.

Your kids, the kids of Freyberg High School, will face consequences. A disciplinary process awaits them on Monday. When they come to your office, Principal, I hope you can talk it all through, hear their ideas. The profound meaning of the haka they performed. Their insistence it was peaceful. How they, too, have been patronised. Their fears that their culture, their reo, stand to be taken from them. The prospect that free school lunches will go too.

And maybe, as adults, we can in turn reflect on our own ideas - what is wrong when protesting children’s hunger is a greater transgression than inflicting it.

When I watched the students’ haka, I saw seeds - seeds quickly becoming saplings. With nurturing and time they will be tall kauri, standing side by side as we look up in admiration.

All they need to grow is the cover of the forest.

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