Why I made a Freedom of Information application in September 2003.
In 2000 I was employed as a specialist teacher in a Queensland State School.
Groups of Grade 7 children at the school were missing from their classrooms, roaming unsupervised around the school.
I discussed my concerns about the situation with the acting principal of the school.
The acting principal advised me to speak about it to the staff at the next staff meeting.
She put it on the agenda for the meeting.
But, directly before I spoke, the acting principal spoke to the staff at some length about "a person" on the staff who was humiliating children.
One of the other teachers later told me that I was this "person".
The shock of the acting principal's seemingly irrational and deeply unprofessional behaviour made me ill.
I was advised by the QTU, the staff welfare officer and two specialist advisory teachers to ask the principal for a mediated meeting.
At the meeting the acting principal told me that "a lot of allegations" had been made against me and that she had "lots of pieces of paper to prove how things may have happened".
This statement was recorded by the acting deputy principal and secretly placed on my Department of Education official record.
Two days after this meeting the acting principal gave me a letter to advise me that she and the usual principal - who had not discussed the situation with me - had decided to put me into the Diminished Workplace Performance process the next year.
This letter was also placed on my official Department of Education file.
These letters remain on my Queensland Department of Education official record to this day.
Since September 2003 I have been making FOI applications for copies of the "lots of pieces of paper to prove how things may have happened".
To this date I have not found any document that answers that description.
But I have found a loose scrap of paper on which the acting principal has scribbled that she made her statements to the staff concerning me because of allegations that were made concerning me in "notes to L---- (one of the Grade 7 teachers) from D-----".
These "notes to L---- from D-----" were never discussed with me at any meeting.
I knew nothing about them till I found a copy of this loose scrap of paper in FOI documents that were released to me on 27 October 2005.
I only know two people called D-----, and they have both assured me that they know nothing about this situation.
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