Students want to stop the rot
18th February 2010
http://www.geelongadvertiser.com.au/article/2010/02/18/147031_echo_news.html
Students want to stop the rot
Joel Cresswell
February 18th, 2010
FUNDS once promised for the redevelopment of Apollo Bay's dilapidated school should be re-instated, the region's MP says.
Fed-up students at Apollo Bay P-12 College are demanding overdue upgrades to their "ancient" classrooms, which bake through summer and flood in heavy rain.
The students are calling for action on leaking roofs, rotting walls and classrooms without cooling in an open letter to the State Government and media.
"We want new buildings for this school, these ones are unacceptable and any sort of work we try to do is compromised," school captain Findlay Burns-Fabb said.
Polwarth MP Terry Mulder said yesterday the State Government had failed to live up to its decade-long promise to redevelop the school.
Stage one delivered a new science block in 2005, but stage two has been suspended with funds missing in government budgets since. "I've never seen frustration boil over to a point where students have taken this sort of action," he said yesterday.
"Quite often the Government can come down and threaten school principals and they can intimidate school boards but they won't want to take the students on."
The school narrowly missed on securing $2 million in the Federal Government's so-called education revolution funding, due to low student numbers.
The school is due $850,000 under the same program, but Mr Mulder doubts whether it is enough to continue the postponed works.
Apollo Bay principal John McConchie questioned the value of the second available option - using the funds to renovate.
"Given our school was assembled out of secondhand stock in 1953, should we be renovating it?"
The Government highlighted the $2.5 million budget for the science block and said a further $450,000 was spent on a multi-purpose room in 2007.
The school will also receive emergency funding to repair recent flood damage if it applies, in addition to its $34,000 annual maintenance budget.
Heavy rains last week saw flowing waters up to 20cm deep block access to the library where rotting walls have been patched with wooden boards."They're (the government) really ignoring us - students don't get to vote in the election, if they did I suspect they'd vote maybe against it (Brumby Government)," Findlay said.
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Martin Dixon MP
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