Page 2234 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 3 August 2016
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But it did not, and so we had Taylor Primary School found to be riddled with dangerous asbestos and the school forced to close for almost a year while repairs were done at a cost of almost $13 million. Remember this was only a few years after education minister Barr did a major slash and burn in closing 23 schools because he said this would provide more money for older schools and for new schools to be built.
Minister Bourke was followed by Minister Burch who refused to realise the importance of nurses in special schools, who thought it quite appropriate for students to sit in classes during heat waves and freezing winters without appropriate cooling and heating systems because older schools did not need money spent on them when we could talk instead about the new school at Gungahlin.
This is the same minister who claimed shock and horror when her own directorate’s failed policies led to the caging of a student and the sacking of a principal. Responsibility should always rest at the top but it was a principal who lost her job when a crisis in our schools in dealing with students with challenging behaviours and complex needs was exposed so sadly, even though there had been calls for additional professional support for such students from teachers and their union.
After Minister Burch chose to retire to the backbench, in an interesting move, the Labor government decided to appoint a Greens education minister. Given the crisis in accommodation in our schools, perhaps this was the best way for ACT Labor to distance itself from 10 years of failure to plan and predict school populations, failure to manage and maintain older schools and failure to support students with challenging behaviours.
Earlier this year in a motion in the Assembly I spoke about the crisis in our schools. I said at the time that by March this year there had been a series of interesting reports, the first an ABC story headlined “Garran Primary School bursting at seams”. The article had used public school enrolment projections, extracted from the ACT Education Directorate’s own modelling, to highlight a number of schools that would, most likely, be facing overcrowding difficulties this year.
The second was the publication of the February 2016 schools census which outlined actual enrolments for each year in each school throughout the ACT. At the time I called on the government to publish their own projections for school enrolments. Minister Rattenbury did his usual “on the one hand and on the other hand” type of speech, sort of acknowledging that there were some schools a little under pressure, but he was quick to assure us that there were strategies in place to manage them: moving enrolment areas and the like.
He refused to accept the fact that the ACT public school system was facing any crisis of capacity. He effectively challenged my claims that schools like Harrison Junior School had potential enrolments of 1,099 with enrolment capacity of only 1,050, that Hawker Primary School had enrolments close to their maximum and that even Gungahlin College, which opened in 2011, has now had to restrict enrolments for 2017 as it is over capacity. I understand Macquarie primary is not far behind. Remember, Macquarie was one of those areas that Minister Barr said only 10 years
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