KINGSTON HIGH SCHOOL ASSOCIATION Inc. MEDIA RELEASE 20th December, 2006

The Kingston High School Association is seeking an urgent meeting with Premier Paul Lennon to reaffirm the Government’s commitment to build a much needed new high school.

Representatives of the Kingston High School Association last night gave a report to the school’s Parents and Friends Association on their meeting last week with the education Minister, David Bartlett.

The President of the Kingston High School Association, Mr Lex McIndoe, said last night’s meeting endorsed the proposal to seek an urgent meeting with the Premier.

“Given the current uncertainty, the Parents and Friends agreed with the Kingston High School Association that this issue needs to be cleared up before the start of first term next year to give everybody confidence about the future,” Mr McIndoe said.

“The new school was promised in the State election and funding was announced in the State Budget and endorsed both by the Premier and by the Minister for Education in their budget speeches.

“The existing school is old, has had next to nothing spent on it for more than a decade, is in a poor location for students and will not meet the future needs of students.

Mr McIndoe questioned the wisdom of Governments continually patching up inappropriate school facilities.

“Governments and educational administrators all over the world are acknowledging that education is the economic engine of communities and that existing school facilities are totally inappropriate in the shift from teacher-centred to learner-centred education”, Mr McIndoe said.

“Professor Brian Caldwell, Managing Director of Educational Transformations Pty Ltd and previously Dean of Education at the Universities of Melbourne and Tasmania, said on the ABC’s 7.30 Report earlier in the year that Australia had hundreds of schools built 30-40 years ago that should be bulldozed and replaced with schools that are suited to learning in the 21st century.

 “This is the time for the Government to take a leadership role and build on the successes of Reece High School to demonstrate the educational and community advantages of a contemporary education complex, integrated with community cultural and recreational facilities.

Ends

Last night I attended a Kingston High School P&F meeting and was able to report on my meeting with the Minister for Education David Bartlett held on Friday last week. The Minister was very positive when talking about his desire to ensure the best possible educational outcomes for the youth of Kingborough, however he stopped short of actually stating that the new school will go ahead as promised by the Premier and the other Labour members for Franklin. What the Minister did say was that he "is committed to the current process". Unfortunately he would not elaborate on exactly which process he was referring to or any of the detail of that process, so we were left to assume that he was referring to the current process of relocating the children from Kingston High School to a new state of the art educational and community facility on the grounds of the Kingborough Sports Centre by the year 2010. This was after all the reason why we were there so no other conclusion could be drawn.

This morning's Mercury carried another story that quoted a representative from one of the other Southern Schools opposed to the new High School at Kingston. Taroona Association Chair Yeutha May (is that the same Yeutha {and Doug} that I knew from quite a few years ago? If it is then Hi and merry Christmas to you and your family.) is asking the Premier for a full cost benefit analysis of the new school. Whilst it is becoming very annoying to see one side of the discussion being given far more real estate in the Mercury than the other (Yeutha managed to have 95 words from her press release quoted, however the press release issued from our Association last week only had about five words quoted and a previous one only 47), I agree that the Premier needs to make a firm statement about the future of this project as soon as possible. The current "school versus school" situation is very bad for the community as a whole and we haven't seen any signs from the Government that they intend doing anything about it. If the orchestrated campaign by a small handful of other Southern schools is successful in stopping the new school then that will set a very unfortunate precedent for any other school that attempts to go down the same path in the future, and it will send a very clear signal to the voters of Tasmania about the Lennon Labour Governments commitment to the youth of Tasmania. 

Tasweb has never been on holiday before. It's always sat in my garage in the dark and the dust toiling away without complaint. I didn't think this was very stimulating and there wasn't much of an opportunity to meet others and socialise so I've sent it on a road trip. It's currently in the beautiful art deco city of Napier on New Zealand's North Island. I didn't send the whole PC away, I've just relocated the software and stuff that makes it sing. It might seem strange that moving the web site to New Zealand has made it load faster, but the Napier site has much better Internet bandwidth than my garage and the guy that runs the server knows a lot more about all that techy stuff than I do. Thanks TiM for your generous offer, and thanks also to Tony!