Page 4017 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 24 October 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
take a stance against the Government on the school closures issue. One of the reasons for that is probably that he remembers the debate about the education policy of the Residents Rally and how it came to be in the actual wording, which is:
The Rally remains committed to the idea of neighbourhood schools.
If you refer to the planning document that was obtained under the freedom of information legislation and the Estimates Committee, you will realise that the first page of that document reinforces the idea that primary schools are the basic building blocks of the neighbourhood. In the Residents Rally planning background, it recognises its commitment to neighbourhood schools as part of a suburb, part of the neighbourhood and part of the planning concepts for Canberra. The policy states:
The Rally remains committed to the idea of neighbourhood schools. The Rally believes that no school in the ACT should close ...
I must continue, as I do not want to misrepresent it, but the "no" is in capital letters for emphasis. That is where we ended the debate. At that stage the members of the Rally who were putting this policy together debated for a long time what would happen if somewhere like Hackett decided that it wanted its school to close. We could perceive that being a possibility. Under those circumstances we felt that it would be appropriate for the community to allow its own school to close, and that is why this extra bit was added:
... until all alternatives have been considered and the school community -
The school community, as we discussed it, was the local community for that local school. So, if the Weetangera school community in this case decided that it has only 50 students coming to the school, that the quality of education is suffering and that the school should close, the Rally left itself an out, so that the community could effectively close a school under those circumstances. The Rally policy reinforces "the school community" by stating that it is the students, parents and teachers. Quite clearly, we are not talking about the broad school community; it is referring quite specifically to that individual school community.
That was the nature of the debate; but, because we were not framing things in legal terms, now we can have a debate about the term. I am sure Dr Kinloch remembers that. I have spoken to other members of the then Rally executive, who were vitally interested in education. They recall that that was the flavour of the debate. Teachers have had an opportunity to discuss the proposal and make recommendations on future ramifications. Those future
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .