Page 2610 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 8 August 1990
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out how you are disrupting a whole range of people. If that is of no concern to the Government, let it be noted.
Let me mention the paediatrician I heard at one of the meetings who already is having to deal with children who are under severe stress because of school closures. I am sure the Government has heard the same sorts of stories. I hope it takes note of them. I hope that some action will result.
Let me again raise the question of Rivett school. It is a traditional school in the sense of its architecture - single classrooms. Now it is being closed. While there are other somewhat more distant schools of traditional design, for the most part the children who are going to be relocated will have to go to an open plan school.
I find that no problem myself, but there are parents who moved their children to Rivett, from Chapman, for example, because they believed that that traditional design was better for their children. Now these children will have to go back to Chapman. In the overall context of things, this is no great problem. But what I am showing is that there is a compilation, a growing list, of how children, parents and teachers are so much concerned.
There is a women's refuge close to the Lyons Primary School. It is not by chance that that is close to the school. You would expect that when refuges are established, when sites are being sought, those close to the schools are chosen because, inevitably, there are children. That refuge that has a firm bond with Lyons school will now have to undergo the very much more difficult task of sending children to another school. The refuge was not put there accidentally.
Let me tell you about teachers. There are introductory English centres - intensive language teaching centres for newly-arrived migrants - at the Curtin North and Higgins schools. Curtin North has 101 students and 12 teachers in nine classrooms. That is no small operation. In some sense, it is not as severe a disruption for those children because they come in for a relatively short time - about three terms of the year. So relocation is not as severe in that sense as it is on the general student. But the teachers are concerned. They are more interested in planning than is the Government. They cannot begin to start organising for the beginning of next year, which is not so far away, because nobody has yet given any thought as to where to house them. It will not be easy to find nine classrooms in one spot for all these children. Higgins is about half that size - it has six classrooms, I think.
On its own, each of these examples I have given is not, perhaps, the most significant matter in the world, but multiplied over and over and over - and think of that enormous number of mainstream children who do not want to
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