THE administration of St George’s College was silent on the issue of the recently cancelled sixth form school-leaving ceremony, even as news of an internal investigation surfaced.

Members of the press were barred from entering the school campus on Monday, and it was left to the security at the gate to inform reporters that school principal, Margaret Campbell, had no comment on the issue.

“She (the principal) said no press. She has no comment,” the security officer told the Observer minutes before 1:00 pm on Monday.

Sixth form students last week criticised the administration’s decision to cancel their school-leaving ceremony, which for the female students – the first such set to attend the traditional all-boys school – had promised to be a historic occasion.

“We thought since we came in with the cameras [news coverage], at least we should have gone out in the same fashion. We shouldn’t have been shrugged off and our ideas considered irrelevant,” Rushell Kenlock, student council secretary and co-editor of the school’s yearbook, The Lance, told the Observer at the weekend.

Information from at least one staff member was that the decision to cancel the June 28 ceremony, was made on grounds that sixth form students had behaved badly throughout the year. The last straw, according to the teacher who spoke on condition of anonymity, was the circulation of a string of defamatory e-mails containing highly personal information about staff and some students at the school.

“Sixth formers had something on the Internet where they scandal everyone – who is sleeping with who and who left who,” the teacher said.

But the accused students have argued that it was unfair to punish the entire class of 2007 for the few who had failed to abide by the rules of the institution. Instead, they said the framework put in place to weed out the non-conformers to the rules should have been applied.

Their grouses with the decision – said to have been made by the principal and her administrative team comprising the bursar, the dean of discipline, the two vice-principals and the guidance counsellor – were aired in the unauthorised publication of the school newspaper, The Blue and White Editorial last month. It is the same newspaper which had its December/January publication cancelled by the principal after changes to the content she was said to have recommended were not implemented.

It is those articles that are now at issue for the school administration, which has threatened disciplinary action for those students involved in its publication.

“It is my intention to pursue an internal investigation of its production and distribution, and to take an appropriate course of disciplinary action,” a statement from board chairman, Father Peter McIsaac said Monday.

“The boys leave our institution with a fine education. Unfortunately they leave without the gratitude and respect that is the hallmark of Jesuit education, and the general character of St George’s Old Boys,” he added.

But editor of the paper, 18-year-old Basil Williams, has maintained that the students meant no disrespect by the paper’s publication. Rather, he said that they felt they had been left with little option to be heard.

The paper’s publication followed a failed attempt, he said, by members of the upper sixth form class to make a case with the principal and her administrative team to rescind the decision to cancel the ceremony for the entire 2007 class.

“We understand that the tone of the articles seem rather emotive, but it was an impassioned plea to authenticate the realities at our school. I really want them to understand that this is not an attack. We are basically just voicing our concerns – concerns I am sure a lot of the teaching staff also have. But for purposes of diplomacy, they don’t come out with what they have to say,” Williams said.