During the first chapel after Christmas break, a student stood up in front of the entire Upper School, including faculty, students, and administration, and delivered a public apology, an unprecedented event in recent school history. This student apologized for an off-campus altercation, which injured a Haverford School student.
While some argue that this speech, given a month after the incident occurred, helped the student move past the mistake, the Scholium staff believes it exacerbated the situation by bringing it to the attention of many who were previously unaware. Furthermore, the apology was unnecessary and detracted from what we believe should be the main goal of our disciplinary system, which is helping students learn from the mistakes that will undoubtedly occur during adolescence.
From the beginning of Head of School L. Hamilton Clark’s introduction, Clark implied that this particular incident was somehow morally worse than the countless other mistakes punished by the disciplinary council each year. That simply is not the case.
In this introduction, Clark emphasized that this incident strained his relationship with the Headmaster of The Haverford School. He feared the altercation could jeopardize our historic rivalry with Haverford and future EA/Haverford Dayc competitions. He also suggested that this public apology would perhaps appease the Haverford community. We are unsure how Haverford students would be aware of this speech.
The main point of Clark’s introduction seemed to be that the off-campus incident for which the student was apologizing marred the reputation of our academic institution. While this is true in some regard, we believe there have been many other incidents during our tenure at Episcopal which have painted our school in a negative light, arguably jeopardizing our school’s reputation in a more grievous way than this incident did.
To our knowledge, this wrongdoing was not publicized by local media. It was not covered by NBC10, the Delaware County Times or even the Marple Newtown Patch.
Recently, other highly publicized incidents in the Episcopal community, such as the post-prom party of last summer, did not result in anyone being asked to stand up in chapel and apologize.
In the past four years alone, multiple students have come to school and school-related functions, such as dances, under the influence of alcohol or drugs. While some of these incidents have resulted in expulsion, and in those cases a public apology would have rendered useless, some of these students were not asked to leave the school. Needless to say, these students were also not asked if they would like to apologize in front of the entire Upper School.
This particular student clearly made a mistake, but making mistakes and learning from them is a crucial part of adolescence. Standing in front of more than five hundred people (many of whom, particularly underclassmen, may not have been previously aware of the incident for which the student was apologizing) does not help a student learn from a past mistake. There is no merit in this course of disciplinary action.
The consequences that come from off-campus mistakes should be handed down privately by the school administration or, in some cases, the law. We believe this is punishment enough. We strongly urge the administration to never again ask a student to publicly apologize for a youthful indiscretion.