Kids locked out at Tharwa

Wooden briges are just shite

They weren’t 100 years ago.

About 15 years ago they spent a lot of money on the bridge. I knew the engineer in charge. It was white anted then. Wooden briges are just shite.

They could not have spent too much “good” money

There is only so much money you can throw at a 100 year old bridge that was never designed to cope with heavy traffic.

Tharwa will just have to wait until the new bridge is constructed.

They could not have spent too much “good” money or trucks and buses would be able to cross the bridge.

emd, don’t forget that under the Education Act you have to register to homeschool with ACTDET and have checkups done on what you are teaching your child.

re the bridge, they spent good money getting it usable again, just weight limited. But people just had to drive overweight vehicles across. A cement truck was mentioned. The final straw was a bus that got itself stuck. Blame the selfish drivers for the failure of the bridge.
Sorry, I forget the Hansard link.

I believe the whole Towards 2020 thing was just a conspiracy to make us all homeschool. Witness the fiasco that is pre-school for 2007.

Well, they should quit whining when there are viable alternatives – school of the air, for example, as Mael mentioned.

Education is one of the critical things in society which I think government should go out of their way to fund, even if it is remote and not economically efficient.

Unfortunately, while the majority of us urban dwellers continue to demand priority for public expenditure – like our ever increasing urban sprawl where clearly higher density living would be more appropriate, our ever increasing public infrastructure in roads and not to mention our ever increasing demand on the public health system) – EDUCATION is going to continue being one of the competing sources for public funds, instead of being a standalone priority.

So while we urbanites continue to drive our cars to the local shops to get our donuts and cans of coke and proceed to clog up our health services with our endless list of lifestyle related illnesses – we’ll be happy to tell those demanding education services in rural areas to get real and quit whining.

Sign up for School of the Air and Correspondence Education like everybody else.

Bemuse yourselves at the ability of educational departments of Canberra not being able to service a school child who lives 40 mins drive from their school ? I think not. Move to Sydney and you’ll be in a queue to get into the f**ing school carpark for 40 mins.

Well done the ACT Government for not bowing to the wishes of every minority group that comes scraping for money.

Yes, but living a rural lifestyle is a luxury, not a necessity and not something that we should necessarily expect the public purse to be subsidising.

I understand some people would love to live in a semi-rural community – but they have to pay the price for it. Which includes not having as many goods and services nearby.

You can’t decide to be remote becuase it suits you and then want everything to come to you – that’s flat-out illogical.

Plus out of the city, you play your bongos as loud you like.

Fairly easy Sammy,
Some people would prefer to live in a semi-rural area. Considering that a large proportion of the ACT is National Park, with the odd rural/residential zone in it, if some poeple prefer to live in small communities to them, best of luck to them. I am sure that they too have to pay the taxes and levies that the rest of us complain about on a more than daily basis. Plus, when fire, drought and the general angst of Moses et al come, they usually are the first to alert us to the impending doom.

The fact remains that we should be protecting and enhancing our small rural communities

Why?

Having not thought about it at all, I have no opinion either way, so i’m more than willing to listen.

The fact remains that we should be protecting and enhancing our small rural communities – in the ACT’s case we only have a few and one is Tharwa.

Who cares? The school was a drain on my taxes. Go to Conder primary.

Pandy if it makes you feel any better, all of your tax money went to the 300k given to Summernats.

Pandy, so what if they were from NSW?

The NSW Govt PAYS the ACT Govt for taking those students.

The ACT Govt actually gets money for said enrolments i.e. Lyneham High takes kids from Yass, Sutton, Bungendore and Braidwood.

Bubzie, I can assure you that not all schools look like a scene from “Prison Break”.

Im pretty sure all high schools in tuggeranong look like prisons..

Lanyon High looks like a prison block

I’d wager that Chisholm High (& Primary) is worse. I’ve joked to the wife that the ACT Government could make some extra cash renting out Chisholm High as a movie set during the summer break. It’d make a great prison movie set.

Who the fark designed these buildings?

Well OK Nyssa, that means the hundreds of kids in the Conder Valley are dead beats and/or their parents are.

However, a majority of kids that went to Tharwa were from outside of the enrolment area and I bet that a majority of those were from NSW.

Pandy, I’ve worked in both systems so I know how it goes.

As for the negative reputation being spread by Tharwa parents you are sorely mistaken. It’s is by the Conder Community. The joke is that there is a reason Lanyon High looks like a prison block. (Not my joke)

The Govt ignored the research that supports smaller schools and denied the parents the right to continue on with the school after its closure.

Of course it is a longer trip than normal as Nero has failed to fix the bridge cutting the village’s most important lifeline to Canberra (kimba).

How much longer does it take to drive via Point Hut? I’m guessing it might be 32 minutes to the city via Point Hut, versus 31 via the (closed) bridge?

The only issue I see is if the Murrumbidgee floods and Point Hut Crossing becomes impassable in a standard car. And that just isn’t going to happen anytime soon (though i’d love to see it).

Big Al – And there is an opposition in Canberra that will do this?

I think Vic’s pint is essentially valid. The role of Governmnet should be to provide services that are sought or required by the community that the private sector cannot provide for a profit – these would fall into the “just because we need them” catagory. A good Governmnet – as opposed to the bunch of class-A areswipes we presently have – would manage tax revenue in a responsible way to ensure the cost of providing these services would be met. Instead we get Standope and his rable of B team players running the territory into the ground.

I bet all 12 of tharwa students are thoroughly disappointed.

Well Vic that is a different arguement.

Does everything have to come down to a cardigan wearing bureaucratic economic nationalist’s decision?

What about keeping services and facilities open for local residents simply ‘because’? Where does our local history (not that we white fellas have much of it) fit into these decisions? How much in the big pot of tax dollars does closing Tharwa School represent?

How many more sculptures of al grasby will heil stanhope be able to commission, cos of Tharwa and other school closures?

Roll on election day.

OK Nysssa poroof? What proportion of ACT residents went to Tharwa? I heard Mr Barr say some very harsh things about Tharwa. I also know that Tharwa campaigned heavily but were unable to convince the Government. So why did it close?

Most “non” government schools have parents paying 100% of the fees and other excursion costs. I know lots of parents who sacrifice more than $10,000 a year on school fees.

And negative reputations would off course be spread about those Conder Valley residents who wanted to send their kids to Tharwa because of its smallness.

Pandy, Tharwa scored well with ACTAP. A few schools north of it didn’t.

As for it being a drain, where are the “non” Govt screwed up figures to back up your statement?

Most schools in the ACT can’t get more than 40% of parents to pay voluntary contributions or practical fees. Imagine the savings to the Govt system if parents only paid 1/2 the amount asked for.

If you want to bag out small schools “believing” they are a drain, then please, continue to live in your dream world.

FYI, the school you mentioned has a negative reputation whereas Tharwa always had a good one.

Well I think politicians’ cars and pay rises are a drain on my taxes. They don’t seem to have attracted good contenders anyway – maybe we should vote for some productivity gains, like . . . make them get buses home after late Assembly sessions . . . do reading assistance one morning a week at a different school each time . . .

Well Al, Tharwa WAS a drain. More inefficient than most in fact.

It’s the breathtaking hypocrisy of it. In one breath, parents are told they can ‘choose’ any public school (indeed this in encouraged), and that schools are viable when they operate at ‘capacity’; yet Tharwa, at capacity and clearly a school of choice, well utilised by the locals, was closed.

Pandy, anything that the Government spends money on is a drain on your taxes – the trick might be to target inefficient use of that money rather than grandstanding and closing down services that can be ‘sold’ as inefficient to shit-bags who think just ’cause they pay 30-40K a year in taxes they get a ticket to sprout off about it.

Who cares? The school was a drain on my taxes. Go to Conder primary.

The way I read Kimba’s post was that the kids were locked out on returning from the excursion with the implication that they still had their stuff in the classrooms, etc even if they returned slightly outside normal school hours.

Anyone read anything about this in the CT? this is hte sort of local story junior jurnos should be cutting their teeth on.

It is my understanding that the Tharwa schools enrolment of 28 was on average with it’s previous 100-odd years of enrolments and that that figure was also close to the schools capacity. That said it may not be the case that the ACT Government can afford to continue operating such a school.

The real crime here is the fact that the festering little maggots we otherwise know as the ACT Labor government amended the relevant legislation to make it harder for the community to run the school as a going concern. This is just another case of Stanhopes government being too scared to let some mums and dads show the community that they can easily do what the Government cannot – exert some basic fiscal responsibility and deliver some basic services that are needed (as opposed to what we’re told we need).

I’ve done shits with more nouse than Stanhope, Corbell, Barr and the other arse-wipes in the ACT Government.

small communities should be supported. It isn’t Tharwa’s fault that Canberra landed just north of them.

But Sammy, all those poor wee kiddies in Tharwa shedding tears because their school is closed will provide plenty of water.

I’m going to recommend Tharwa as the site of Australia’s first nuke power station.

Nuke stations need to be next to a viable water source, and the Murrumbidgee is rapidly falling out of this category.

They should have sprayed the kids with pepper spray, just to show them that the Govt isn’t prepared to take any shit.

I’m going to recommend Tharwa as the site of Australia’s first nuke power station.

Security guards? Try insecurity guards.

I shudder to think at the paranoia leading to such a sheer and heartless disrespect for constituents.

Did the gubbmint get a credible threat of some sort of closure retaliation?

Indeed, is it true that something like 25 of 28 students at Tharwa Primary came from the suburbs of Conder, Gordon and Banks?

Of course, securing public assets such as school buildings and equipment would not possibly have been the reason behind the security guards.

While many people in Canberra would readily sympathise with the Tharwa residents and their loss of a local school especially to ‘nero’s guards’ – very few would readily like to see their rates increased to the actual level needed to maintain the over serviced infrastructure in a place like the ACT with it’s small population. This place has infrastructure that’s dispersed over a greater area than the mere 300,000 would ordinarily warrant. Either we’re going to cop the costs even more (regardless of which flavour of government is in power) or schools and other public services are gonna have to be rationalised (aka closed).