It was 2018, and Tracy Tully was only at the doctors to get a script filled when they decided to check her blood pressure while she was there.
“This can’t be right, are you a bit stressed?” the doctor asked, after seeing the sky-high reading on the screen.
“Yeah… a bit,” Tracy said with a laugh. A bit stressed was an understatement, to say the least. She’d been stressed for decades.
Not believing the number before their eyes, the doctor did the test again. He then walked out of the room and called an ambulance.
“Left unattended, I would have had a stroke,” Tracy told Mamamia. “The heart specialist said to me, ‘we see this all the time in the education department. You need to resign now or it will kill you’.”
After 38 years as a Queensland principal, Tracy did just that.
WATCH: Half of Australian principals have been threatened with violence. Post continues after video.
She’d spent her career working in tough state schools – both primary and secondary – in regional and rural Queensland, and as the 59-year-old tells Mamamia, “There’s nothing I haven’t seen at a school.”
Research released this week from the Australian Catholic University and Deakin University found that one in three Australian principals have experienced physical violence and threats from parents and students.
Top Comments
I did my Grad Dip in Education at a Queensland State High School with a hopeless principal and the weak leadership created a cesspool that could barely be called education. The school was filthy, rubbish everywhere. The kids continually smoked in the toilets, with the pungent stench of cigarette smoke wafting around the scool. Children spent lesson time in the library researching assignments (they were easier to control in the library), research that should have been done in their own time. No homework was given. Mobile phones permitted in classrooms. Children would spend entire lessons drawing "ink tattoos" on their arms, (only one teacher made them wash them off prior to the lesson commencing). The police did a daily truant pick up run.
The principal was so weak the teachers nicknamed him "The Jellyfish".
On my last day of prac work, the kids were smoking something definiteley not tobacco. Not one staff member wanted to investigate.
No wonder the government doesn't want NAPLAN testing in Queensland schools.