26 March 2013

Designs finished for Canberra College to help out the teen mothers

| johnboy
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design drawing

Joy Burch has sent forth information on the designs for a $14.5 million facility at Canberra College for pregnant teenagers and young parents:

ACT Minister for Education and Training, Ms Joy Burch MLA, today welcomed the designs for the new $14.5 million CCCares facility at Canberra College in Phillip.

The designs signal an important milestone towards fulfilling ACT Labor’s 2012 Election commitment to invest $14.5 million for a new purpose built CC Cares facility at Canberra College (Phillip campus) that will house expanded educational and support facilities for pregnant and parenting students and their children from across Canberra.

“The CCCares program has offered education and support services for pregnant teenagers and young parents in the ACT since 2005, and I look forward to delivering this wonderful new facility for this program that has cared for so many young parents in the ACT in the last four years,” Ms Burch said.

“The new CCCares complex will include learning spaces for students, such as vocational learning spaces, a hospitality studio and an arts studio, an adjunct childcare centre for children and a range of parental and medical services.”

The program is currently delivered at the former Canberra College site in Stirling but will join the main site in Phillip in 2015. The new facility will accommodate 80 students, 80 children and 12 teaching and ancillary staff with an allowance for 15 additional visiting adults.

For those wanting to know more there is an information sheet.

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childcare_worker said :

This program is for both gender males and females

How insulting!! “

Both genders,” how Benny Hill is that!!

Won’t someone think of the gay/lesbian/transsexual/transgender/undecided/bit of this bit of that/half rice half chips community?

childcare_worker10:58 pm 30 Mar 13

This program is for both gender males and females

gooterz said :

Women only?

No, young fathers too.

Pork Hunt said :

That is a serious amount of money for a fetus frightening room. Is a machine that goes “bing” included?

It’s a school, I don’t think they have give birth there, well at least not on purpose.

gooterz said :

Women only?

Nothing in the documentation says “women only”, there is an effort to talk mostly in a non-gender specific way. But which ever way you look at it, the cold hard reality is that this is overwhelmingly an issue which affects women, right from the part where just being pregnant interrupts their schooling in a way which it doesn’t for the male who provided the sperm, through to the part where they are the one most likely to end up with primary caregiver responsibilities. So of course some of the facilities are specfically targetted to women.

I remember at high school in Woden in the early 1970s our principal begging the editor at The Canberra Times not to publish a story that four girls were pregnant. One of the girls was a friend of mine and I used to hang around with her and her girlfriend. I didn’t know she was pregnant at the time.

When I went to Phillip College a year later someone told me how I was almost framed as the baby’s father. The real father had left Canberra and couldn’t be contacted. Her parents wanted her to have the baby and for me to pay maintenance. It was a silly idea because I was openly gay and the whole school knew about it.

Abortion back then was illegal and shameful but there was a doctor in Belconnen who did backyard abortions and she went there to get fixed up. She had to leave school and start work to pay for it in instalments.

When I read about initiatives such as this it is easy to forget how far we’ve come and how attitudes toward teen mums have changed.

gooterz said :

Women only?

It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.

/Python

I benefited from this program (or an early incarnation of it) back when it was still Philip College. This was about 20 years ago now and I don’t remember enough to comment on it’s usefulness, but my mum might I should ask her.

Women only?

That is a serious amount of money for a fetus frightening room. Is a machine that goes “bing” included?

An excellent program, great stuff

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