The Balloon Release

The proposal

Two hundred biodegradable balloons, released from the school field at eleven o'clock on the anniversary, each carrying a small card with a message from a pupil and a return address.

Proposed by the PTA. Approved in principle by the head. Costed at £340.

The objection

Raised by Vincent Oyelaran, site manager, at the planning meeting, in the following terms:

"No."

The meeting

The PTA chair asked Vincent to expand.

Vincent said that latex balloons described as biodegradable take between six months and four years to break down, that a proportion of them come down at sea, that he had been to a meeting about this in 2011 at a different school and had heard all of the arguments and could save everybody some time.

The PTA chair said the balloons were certified.

Vincent said certification covered the material and not the outcome.

Somebody said it was only two hundred.

Vincent said that was also what they said in 2011.

The escalation

It went to the head, who is new and who did the thing new heads do, which was to ask for both sides in writing.

The PTA submitted a page and a half. It is a good document and Vincent has said so. It makes the case that the release is symbolic, that it involves every pupil, that the return-address cards generate replies from as far as the Netherlands, and that the school has done it four times without complaint.

Vincent submitted eleven pages.

What is in the eleven pages

Nothing about the environment for the first four.

The first four pages are a chronology of what happened at the school in 2011.

They released two hundred and twenty balloons. Eleven cards came back, which everyone agreed was lovely.

And in the following January a farmer four miles away came to the school with a bag.

He had lost two lambs. He had found, in the field, a quantity of balloon material and ribbon. He was not angry — that is the detail Vincent puts in bold — he was apologetic about bringing it up at all, and he said several times that he was sure it was not the school's, and he left the bag at reception and went.

Nobody ever established whether it was theirs. Vincent is explicit about this. It is the entire reason the story is not usable as an argument and it is why he has never told it at a meeting.

He put it in writing this time because he is sixty-three and retiring in July and has decided he is going to stop being careful.

Pages five to nine

The environmental material. Sourced, referenced, and — the head noted — better referenced than most things that cross her desk.

Pages ten and eleven

The alternative.

Vincent has costed it. Two hundred paper lanterns on the field, not released, arranged in the shape of the school's founding year, lit at dusk, photographed from the roof of the sports hall with a borrowed drone.

£210. Reusable frames. Every pupil still writes a card; the cards go into a box that gets opened in ten years.

He has attached a sketch. It is not a good sketch. He has drawn the drone.

The decision

The head approved the lanterns.

The PTA chair was, initially, extremely unhappy, and said so, and then read pages one to four, which she had skipped on the first pass because she assumed they were about balloons.

She rang Vincent at home, which he did not enjoy.

She asked whether the lambs were the school's balloons.

Vincent said he had no idea and never would, and that this was exactly why he had not raised it for fourteen years, and that the only reason he had raised it now was that he was leaving and would not have to sit in the meeting in 2039.

The anniversary

Two hundred lanterns. Dusk. The founding year, four metres high, on the field.

The drone footage is on the school website and has been watched about eleven thousand times, which is more than the population of the town.

The box of cards is in the entrance hall with a date on it.

Vincent is in the drone footage for about four seconds, on the edge of the field, doing something to a frame that has fallen over.

He has not watched it.

His daughter has shown it to him twice.