'You better be proud!'

WHEN principal Chris Sarra arrived at Cherbourg, he found a school with no hope. When he left, it was a national success that inspired a new way of thinking.

chris sarra

ON my first day as principal of Cherbourg State School it was freezing and windy. I decided to wear a tie, thinking that if kids at other schools see their principal wearing a tie, then these kids deserve to see their principal dressed up nice, too. I parked my car in the designated spot and took a few breaths, sizing up the situation that I was in charge of now. There were some kids sitting around in the sun trying to get warm, while others were running around and playing cricket.

During the game they would sometimes hit the ball up on the roof of a double-storey building. As soon as the ball was up there at least two or three kids would shimmy up the drainpipe and run along the top of the building to retrieve it. "Holy shit!" I thought. "I will be in deep if any kid falls off there!"

I was also struck by the unbelievable amount of rubbish lying around on the ground. The place was filthy. Amid this chaotic scene a young guy drove in the school gate in a bomb of a car, pulled up at the front of the children's play castle and sandpit, flung the door open to ditch his kids, and then planted his foot to do a complete lap of the play equipment, spinning the wheels for good measure. This seemed to excite the kids who were playing in and around the sandpit. The worn car track around the equipment made me realise this was a regular route for many parents dropping their kids off by car.

The teachers greeted me in the car park and made me feel welcome. It was very nice of them, yet they seemed oblivious to the mayhem surrounding them. This would never happen in a "normal" school.

Cherbourg, 250km northwest of Brisbane, has an extremely rich history, with its origins as one of the infamous "dumping grounds" for Aborigines who were rounded up from all over Queensland and northern NSW. It was started as Barambah Mission in the early 1900s and had grown over the years into a permanent town of disparate peoples whose languages and cultures were eroded by the destructive policies of white administrators over the decades.

Despite the difficulties they faced, there were many Cherbourg residents who had a strong sense of community and who were working for change. But the school was depressing; there was rubbish everywhere, broken windows and kids ran all over the place. The former principal and her staff would sit down with teacher trainees and tell them why it was like this and how hard it was to teach the kids at Cherbourg, that it wasn't a normal school and that we had to have different expectations for these children because they were so different.

Something was telling me that it didn't have to be this way. I knew from personal experience that if you have low expectations of people then they are most likely to deliver on that; and that if we have high expectations, children respond to that, regardless of how impossible things might seem.

I had arranged for an assembly on the morning of my first day as the school's first Aboriginal principal in August 1998. "My name is Mr Sarra. You will refer to me as Mr Sarra. When I say 'good morning' to you, I am acknowledging you and being respectful. I want you to be the same with me," I explained. Once this was established I wanted to get on to the main message.

I took a deep breath and cast my eyes across a sea of curious black faces. "The most important thing you will learn from me is that you can be Aboriginal and you can be successful. Just because we are blackfellas, that doesn't mean we have to be on the bottom."

As I scanned the room I could tell they had never heard anything like this before. I doubt the teachers had heard anything like it before either. Having articulated my focus I explained that I wanted to visit every classroom just to sit in and get a sense of what was going on around the school.The thought of me visiting and sitting in classrooms to observe lessons seemed to unsettle some of the teachers. "So ... what will be your plan of attack with all of this?" one of the senior teachers asked. Looking back, I'm not sure why I had such clarity at this moment but I responded by saying, "I'm not here to attack you. I'm here to work with you to offer a good education to the kids of Cherbourg. If we are going to work together then I feel like I should be spending some time in classrooms."

That early moment of uneasiness would be a sign of things to come. I really struggled to build a positive relationship with the team I inherited. My relationship with most of them was strained, and they were right in some ways about what I thought of their methods. I could not feign appreciation for their efforts in a school where children in Year 7 could not read. I also despised watching on as each non-indigenous teacher had the latest and greatest computers in their classrooms while the Aboriginal teachers had the old computers, or no computers. I could not value a situation in which senior teachers on staff had little or no serious lesson, term or semester planning for their classes.

On challenging teachers about why the data on student performance or attendance was so poor, they would often lay the blame on parents, or the home life of the children, or the community for being so dysfunctional, or the tests for not being relevant. The list of people or things to blame went on and on, but there was no point where we could put up a mirror and ask: what needs to be changed? How might we be contributing to the endemic failure?

As I said to the students on the first day, I wanted them to know they could be Aboriginal and successful. Having read just about every review into Aboriginal education, I used this knowledge as the basis for crafting a new vision for the school. I took to the council, parents, elders and staff that aim, articulated as follows: "The aim at Cherbourg State School is to deliver academic outcomes that are comparable to any school in Queensland, and to nurture a strong and positive sense of being Aboriginal in a contemporary society."

The school aim was good, but it was too much of a mouthful to sell to the kids. I had to sharpen it to really catch them. "Academic outcomes that are comparable to any other school in Queensland": Smart! "Nurture a strong and positive sense of being Aboriginal in a contemporary society": Strong!

"Smart! Strong!" I said to myself. "No, wait a minute," I thought, "it sounds better the other way around: strong and smart!" That was it.

The kids took to it. They got what it was about. On school parades I would take them on with this new school motto: "When we leave this school, what are we gonna be?" "Strong and smart!" they would scream out. Feeling a bit like some kind of zealous preacher - and I was a zealot when it came to things like this - I would explain to the children, their parents and the elders: "This is about power! Education is about power! When we learn to read we get power! When we learn to write we get even more power!"

Even to the six-year-olds: "School is not just about learning to read and write. It is the place where we bring out our power. This is not the kind of power that white people 'give' us. It comes from inside us. From our hearts! From our spirit! From our land! This is our power! Nobody gives it to us and nobody can take it away from us! Not unless we let them. So don't let anyone take it away from you!"

On some days I would say, "Hands up if you're Aborigines!" Their hands would shoot up immediately. "Keep your hands up if you think that's great. Keep it up if you are really proud to be Aboriginal!" Some would try to push their hands in the air even more. I would stare back at them, with my hand held high also, and simply say, "You better be proud to be Aboriginal!" There was something euphoric and spiritual about the connections we made in those sacred moments.

Then we'd talk about what it meant to be strong and smart, and their hands held high matched my enthusiasm. Their eyes lit up with their gorgeous black faces beaming as they yelled out their answers. "Coming to school every day!" "Being nice to the teacher!" "Respecting our elders!" "Working hard for the teacher!" "Putting our rubbish in the bin!" "Being nice to our parents!" There were moments when I could have cried with joy at what I was hearing.

The strong and smart mantra not only helped shape the thinking and attitudes of the kids, it was a message that permeated every aspect of our school culture and way out into the community. It meant the groundsman had to keep the school looking strong and smart; the tuckshop lady had to speak to the kids in a way that was strong and smart; teachers and teacher aides had to turn up to work looking strong and smart; classrooms had to look strong and smart. I had to be strong and smart.

After about a year in the role, I decided I had to start making firm decisions about what was the right thing to do for the school. Instinctively, I had held off from making judgments about those staff members who still seemed to collude with low expectations. I kept asking the hard questions with a genuine interest in what people thought the answers were. I'd ask why we had to endure failure and such endemic disengagement; the answers coming back were not good. "The kids come from really rough home lives." "There's a lot of domestic violence and alcoholism in the community." "The council doesn't support us." "District Office doesn't support us." "The tests are not culturally relevant." "The parents don't value education."

The Cherbourg community was rallying around the school, which made a lie of the perceptions that Aboriginal parents did not value education. In my time as principal I did not find one parent who said they did not want their child to have a good education. It was one of those things that was easy for people, especially teachers, to say in a way that inflicted a sense of blame on parents and the community.

There was a sombre mood in the staffroom on the afternoon I called a meeting. I took a deep breath and steadied myself to articulate to my colleagues what I thought was a more honourable direction for us as a team and a school. "What I believe, what the parents and elders believe, and what we should let our children believe ... " I paused and took another deep breath. " ... is that our children can leave our school with academic outcomes that are comparable to any other child in any other Queensland school. They should also leave here with a very strong and very positive belief and understanding about who they are as Aboriginal people."

I paused again because I wanted them to focus so that they would be crystal clear about what I had to say next. "If you don't believe this ... then you shouldn't be here!" There was a gasp from a senior teacher but everyone else was silent. The response was reasonably swift. Most of the Aboriginal teachers and teacher aides were excited. Some white teachers beamed as well because they finally had a sense of direction that would be anchored by integrity and professionalism. Within the next three weeks, six of the 12 teachers on staff applied for a transfer.

By 2000, the school was receiving excellent and positive coverage in the local, state and national newspapers. People were attracted to a positive story. Real attendance was to jump from 63 per cent in 1998 to 94 per cent in 2004. Clearly, as the children's attendance improved and expectations rose, their academic performance was destined to improve. Year 2 literacy improved 62 per cent within two years. For the Year 7 reading diagnostic test in 1998, all children were rock bottom. By 2004, 17 of the 21 children in Year 7 would be within the state average and the remaining four children were just below average.

It was an honour to receive many of the awards given to us. Some of the awards were given to the school as a whole, some to the kids individually, some to teachers, and some to me. The NAIDOC Community Person of the Year Award in Cherbourg that I received in 2000 was pretty special. At the end of 2003 I was given the 2004 Regional Local Hero Award for Queensland in the Australian of the Year Awards. In 2004 I was ecstatic to receive a Deadly Award for my contribution to Aboriginal education. And then, as the winter of 2004 kicked in, I was advised that I was a finalist for Queenslander of the Year. I remember feeling stunned when Quentin Bryce, Queensland's governor at the time, made the announcement and I was handed the very big, flash medal. With all of the awards I received, I felt awkward with the implication that the success at the school all came down to one man. Me. I wanted people to understand that it really was a team effort, which saw the teachers working in partnership with the teacher aides, the parents and the kids working in partnership with the school, and the community council working with the school.

But there were bound to be some people wanting to try to cut us down and to take a swipe at me personally. I still find it hard to comprehend one particular person who became malicious in her personal attacks on me. She went to the District Office, the Central Office, to the education minister's office and, ultimately, the premier's office. In a letter to Peter Beattie she launched into a tirade of accusations that I had physically and verbally abused the kids at the school, encouraged them to be abusive to each other and, to my absolute disgust, had fabricated the data showing the school's remarkable improvements.

I was certain that people would get what was going on if I could just tell the public I was being investigated because I had chased some boys who were throwing rocks into a classroom where other children were sitting, had caught them and grabbed them while they were telling me to get f..ked, and carried them back into class. I then growled at them while I was banging my fist against the wall and against the desk, telling them to shut up and get back to work. If only I could have told them all of this, and that after I'd growled at them, after a few sobs, the boys actually did shut up and get back to their schoolwork.

At the completion of the investigation it was considered that some of the claims made by some parents should be dismissed and some upheld. For those claims upheld I was counselled to consider dealing with them in a different way. It was a very fair process in which there were some well-founded lessons for me about how I conducted myself at school. The questions raised about fabricating the data were dismissed.

It did raise some profoundly interesting questions about the difference between abuse and discipline. I believe my actions were borne out of a sense of love and commitment to the kids and a desire to see them understand the difference between what is right and what is wrong. To me this was discipline, not abuse. By the end of the week, it had all blown over.

By 2004, the school was starting to attract more and more visitors and we were inundated by academics wanting to do research in the school. I really loved going out and telling the story of our school because it was inspiring; I was inspired by the kids. They had risen to the challenge. The next step was to get the whole country to understand what we had done.

Around this time I was starting to wonder if it was time for me to hand over the baton. By then I had completed my PhD and this would allow me to think even more broadly about what the next step should be. Whenever I was confronted by a complex challenge I would always go back to that ever-reliable source of wisdom, my mentor Dr Gary MacLennan. It was Gary's idea to establish an institute to focus on packaging up what we had learnt from the Cherbourg journey to share this knowledge, passion and hope with other school and community leaders throughout Australia and, potentially, the world. I talked about this concept with the education department's director general Ken Smith and he could see a great deal of merit in it. In February 2005 I got a call from Gary Barnes, the director of human resources in the Queensland education department. He told me that Ken Smith didn't want to wait until the end of the year; he wanted the Indigenous Education Leadership Institute to be up and running by Easter.

I was never sure how the kids would react when I told them that I would be leaving the school. I wasn't even sure how I would react. In some ways I believed I wouldn't be leaving entirely because we had designed the institute in such a way that it would be based in Cherbourg and still have a connection to the school. Launched soon after Easter in 2005, it would be the first institute to be based on an Aboriginal community so that we could have an ongoing relationship with the school as the living laboratory of the stronger smarter philosophy.

The question everyone asked me at our leadership programs and on my travels around the country was, "What happened to the school after you left?" It was a valid question but one that would always cause me grief to reflect upon. I had to give up quite early the initial concept of having the school as a partner in our venture as it seemed to me that members of the school staff were threatened by my presence. It was a shame in many ways, as the people who came in for our leadership programs were desperate to see the school in action. I was keen to show them, but as time unfolded I was losing confidence in the school as a model of the strong and smart philosophy, where high expectations were at play and where locals were embraced as fundamental to the school's success.

It was impossible to just switch off and move on for many reasons. The emotional investment I'd made in the school over six and a half years was substantial and to make matters even more complex, my wife Grace was teaching at the school and our children Ezra and Talia were enrolled as students.

As a parent at the P&C meetings I would challenge the new principal about her expectations. At one meeting I recall an exchange with her as she tried to justify what was occurring with the parents. "Most of these grade seven kids are not going to have the same literacy levels as other kids. You just have to accept that!" she tried to assert with some authority. I was fuming inside and working extremely hard not to swear or raise my voice in front of some of the elders in the room. "Well, no actually. We don't have to accept that! But you have to explain to us what you intend to do about it!"

Today the school is back on track and is being led by an old school buddy of mine, Peter Sansby from Kepnock High. He is working hard and doing a really good job. Other people question the sustainability and value of the stronger smarter approach by looking at the progress of former Cherbourg students when they got to high school. Many did well, but many not so well, following the trajectory expected of them from some teachers at the high school.

Stepping back, I realise the success or failure of students at Cherbourg after my departure, or their success or failure at high school, does raise questions about the validity of the stronger smarter approach. It raises profoundly more questions, though, about the quality and integrity of the people who followed me or who were at the high school. There is no doubt that if our children had been met in high school by a team who got what strong and smart was all about, then who knows what exciting trajectory those students might have been on after another six years of stronger smarter schooling?

Chris Sarra is the executive director of the Stronger SmarterInstitute, which undertakes leadership programs and research to enhance the teaching of indigenous students.

Edited extract from Good Morning, Mr Sarra (UQP, $34.95), out on Monday.