Santa Sabina parents fight back after gender row

THE Catholic school now has parents in uproar after discovering pages cut out of students’ diaries — that should have contained prayers and hymns — were error-free, writes Miranda Devine.

ALMOST two months after a row erupted over gender fluidity at Santa Sabina Catholic girls’ school, parents have started to remove their daughters, frustrated at what they say is the school’s failure to address their concerns.

Crisis managers were called into the school in March to defuse parent complaints about principal Maree Herrett’s comments linking gender fluidity to a uniform change, her promotion of a book on gender theory, and the emphasis on Islam in religion classes.

Santa Sabina principal Maree Herrett’s tweet on the book Gender Reckonings. Her Twitter account has since been deactivated. (Pic: Supplied)

Herrett dismissed their concerns as “cowardly, intellectually vacuous and bullying” in a leaked letter to staff, and parents say the school board has not allayed their fears about the decline in Catholic values.

And now there is the deepening mystery of the 2018 student diary given to girls with eight pages neatly sliced out of every copy.

The pages contained hymns, prayers, the college song, a statement of Dominican values, and the words to the national anthem.

When parents raised questions about the missing pages, Herrett claimed in a newsletter on March 28 that they were removed from the diary “because they contained typographical errors, spelling mistakes and incorrect information about room numbers for classes.”

But, during the school holidays, a group of parents ordered an intact copy of the diary from the Victorian printers and last week went though it with a fine-tooth comb. They found only one error on one page: the word “before” missing in the college song.

There were changes found in the missing pages of the 2018 diary. The page titled “Our Tradition”, which, in previous diaries, told the history of the Dominican nuns and its founder Dominic de Guzman, had been rewritten. “All it references is justice, a contemporary and innovative school … and no reference to the Dominican tradition at all,” say the parents.

There also were changes to the “Prayers” page in the 2018 diary: Ecclesiastes 3:1-11 has been replaced by “A prayer for Human Solidarity” and “Prayer for the Environment”.

Since seven of the pages contained no errors, why did the school go to so much trouble to physically slice them out of 1000 diaries?

Something doesn’t add up, and for many parents it is the last straw.