It’s lunchtime at Mooroopna Park Primary School, and lamb roast is on the menu, with gravy, mash and vegies, chased down by chocolate bliss balls and fresh fruit for dessert.Hot lunches are served daily at Mooroopna Park Primary, Victoria’s most disadvantaged school.Tania Bryant, the school’s chef, cooks a hot lunch for the school’s entire cohort of 120 students every day, as well as breakfast for 50 or more each morning.
The children have high needs, and the school provides a high level of intervention. Its wellbeing program includes speech therapy, play therapy, eye and ear checks, and regular visits by a paediatrician. Yorta Yorta elder Les Cowan says Mooroopna lost a critical part of its identity when the secondary school was closed.Yorta Yorta elder Les Cowan went to school in Mooroopna in the 1960s, in what he calls “the bad times”. He recalls having to sit with his back facing the blackboard. “Only the Aboriginal kids; it was hard to learn,” he says.
The regional city’s four state secondary schools, Wanganui Park Secondary College, McGuire College, Shepparton High and Mooroopna Secondary College, were closed between 2020 and 2021 and merged into a new $121 million mega campus called Greater Shepparton Secondary College. “We were told that we had four failing schools; that’s an awful thing to tell a community,” says Jenny Houlihan, a former Shepparton mayor with ties to the National Party.
Labor’s Education Minister Natalie Hutchins is dismissive. “They want to go back to letting the community down through underfunded and underperforming schools in Shepparton,” she says.The case for merging the four schools was built on their long-term poor NAPLAN and VCE data. “Students had a number of transitions from one campus to another over those years. It was probably not an ideal time, the two years when we had that transition before we moved here.”
Farren is studying VCE economics this year, a subject that wasn’t even offered at his old school, and plans to begin a Bachelor of Commerce at university next year. “NAPLAN and VCE scores have got a lot to do with the background of the students,” she argues. “How can a school that has a majority of kids who can’t speak English do well in NAPLAN, compared with the private school down the road with all the white kids? But people seem to think that’s the school’s fault.”
Source: News Formal (newsformal.com)
More LNP propaganda.
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