Stanhope flings the brown stuff around in his fight with the P&C

I used to go into Cook PS when I was on leave studying to team teach with a friend who was employed at the school. The principal is an amazing lady and so are the staff that work there. They actually care about each child and work well as a team to educate the children of Cook.

I’ve seen first hand how the school runs and the numbers wouldn’t actually drop. They are turning people away!

Macquarie and Aranda are apparently at capacity so where would the children from Cook go? Would ACTDET instal the demountables from Gilmore? I also worked at Gilmore as a relief teacher and know several teachers there who are doing a great job.

If school land is sold for housing, then more families (if housing – or even renting – is made more affordable) will move into the suburb and thus negate the closure of the school.

The whole policy is a load of shite and those who wrote the policy either 1) have never taught or 2) haven’t been in a classroom since Rosemary Follett was Chief Minister.

Thanks for your response, nyssa.

If they were to open the other side of the school, surely the school’s % capacity would fall. There’s only so many kids in the area.

Rather than running 2 1/2 schools at partial capacity, wouldn’t it make more sense to close the 1/2 school and allow the 2 remaining schools to run closer to full capacity, with better resources. Don’t economies of scale also apply to education?

I agree that school sizes over 1000 start to fracture any sense of community a school might have – but once again, adding 70 kids to Aranda and Macquarie will not bring either school close to that number.

In a few cases, kids will benefit from smaller peer groups. But would it be unfair to say that some kids will thrive in a bigger peer group?

Also, I’m no psychologist, but from what I’ve seen, kids are a pretty resilient lot.

May I suggest that some of this stems from parents’ genuine concern over their children’s eduction, but most of the indignation is a simple case of the Cook parents not wanting their cheese moved.

Plenty of schools are set to close for no logical reason – eg Gilmore, which is a well-resourced school, almost at capacity, 78%, (except the dept won’t move the demountables as it would cost to move them and they are too crappy to be relocated to another school, and to add insult to injury the dept is counting them as empty desks) and has a full preschool – the stats on the DET site are way off and they won’t correct them. And even the Dept website says it has low per-student costs (under What’s new). But they just want to force the kids who live in Gilmore to go to the intended soup-er school at Chisholm. So what all this tells you is that the numbers that everything is based on are unreliable at best. This is no way to treat kids, their families and their local communities. And I am pretty pissed off at all this ‘choice’ rhetoric – where is Tuggeranong’s flash new 7-12 high school????! (yes I am being facetious). Personally though I think scrap the choice factor and go back to zoning, which is what works for NSW (I used to live in Central Coast before returning to good old Canberra once I had kids – it WAS a great place to raise the kids).

oops, will excel….shouldn’t type an e-mail and post at the same time. My bad.

Mr Shab, Cook is at full capacity. ACTDET won’t open up the other side of the school – now being used by others because of a leasing issue.

The classes are small and well resourced. The reasons Cook can’t expand it because of ACTDET and the Govt and now the Govt wants to close it because the school can’t get the numbers ACTDET and the Govt want.

It’s a circular argument and the death knoll for smaller schools who are doing great but can’t meet the BS decisions made by the Govt in Towards 2020.

“I say this; small schools mean small peer groups, and peers can be a critical element in learning. So if your child only has a small pool of peers and is not fitting it where do they go then?”

It’s a parents choice to enrol their child in a school that their child will excellent. However, if their choices are limited by a crap policy then what chance to students have who need a smaller school in order to excell?

seepi is right re: Dickson College. Charo, do you prefer those students to go to Hawker, Lake Gin or the future Gungahlin College?

If there can be 3 colleges in the Belconnen area + Gunghalin, why in the hell can’t there be ONE College in the inner north?

Charo what about Dickson College? It is suggested that students catch 3 busses to NarraBundah, which will take an hour. And I don’t see a sense of inner north community growing in Narrabundah.

I don’t understand the extreme reactions to school closures. My loyalty lies with the public school system not individual schools, the ACT Public school system is overstretched and needs to regroup to regain it’s capacity.

There are some points I want to make:

1 Public consultation can take many forms, putting up a proposal and seeking comment is a legitimate way to consult. This proposal is attempting to examine and make decisions about a complete restructure of a school system, it may be radical but it’s timely and necessary. Unless you want the government to spend years talking to every school and every parent and never actually achieve anything and let the system collapse. Then of course they’d be accused of stalling and being indecisive. By all means engage with the consultation and have your say but just saying no it won’t work and the sky will fall in isn’t going to help.

2 School closures are no novelty to Canberra, in Weston Creek former governments have closed Fisher and Holder Primary, Holder High and Stirling College. It hasn’t reduced house prices in the area, far from it. The sense of community still exists it just moved with the students to new schools. If the parents of Fisher and Holder students screamed as loudly as the Cook parents they’d still be open and with 15 students between them.

3 In response to the comment that “Some parents actually like sending their children to a smaller school as they believe the “community” links are far greater and that the kids learn more when in smaller classes with a smaller population”, I say this; small schools mean small peer groups, and peers can be a critical element in learning. So if your child only has a small pool of peers and is not fitting it where do they go then?

Small schools also mean limited access to speciality teachers to extend students. There is no real evidence that small schools provide higher educational outcomes. A small school needs more parent volunteers to be involved in maintaining and fundraising for the schools. As a parent with kids in public school I can tell you that it is a real challenge to get parents to volunteer in schools. They’re usually stay-at-home parents and the numbers who can do that are dwindling, or they’re working parents stressed out from a job, child-rearing and volunteering at the school. As for sense of community, all schools big and small have community spirit and if you find a school without one, create it, school communities are not a product of school size or location.

4 There is an ideal in Canberra that all children should be able to walk to school, I ask you to stand outside a school in the morning and watch how many cars there are. Only a few? Hardly. A school bus system could be used for primary school children to do a round of the surrounding suburbs and take them to the nearby school. I caught a school bus in another state to my ‘local’ school, it took 30 minutes and was no big deal. Actually it was a sort of mini community. Teaches kids to consider using public transport too.

Can’t speak for other people, but my agenda is pretty simple:
1) Make sure there’s decent pre and primary schools for my children to start attending in the next three years.
2) Make sure the wholesale routing of public education doesn’t destroy my nice suburban community in the process.

at a belco communist council meeting one of the save our schools peopel bored us all with his 7 oint plan – except for the two old farts in the audience who took umbrage when he said that (paraphrased) ‘as an educator for 27 years it is clear that students in private schools are less able to cope with the real world than govt school students’. The guy with the obvious toupee really went off.

Im not sure that his point was relevant to the school closing argument, but it certailnly alienated possible supporters.

There are several agendas running here.

Ian Morgan from “Save our School” in a media release titled “More Signs of Govt. in Crisis” wrote “The Chief Minister has chosen to misinterpret Jane Gorrie’s call as asking for immediate closure of schools, in an attempt to score a cheap political point. This is clearly non-sense, and the Chief Minister is not fooling anyone – except perhaps himself.”