Member for Lismore and Tweed City Council remain strongly opposed to "NSW Government's ill-advised proposal to close four Murwillumbah public schools and replace them with a mega campus"

It seems that less than ten months out from a state election the NSW Perrottet Government is still not listening to local communities in the Northern Rivers region.....

NSW Labor Member for Lismore Janelle Saffin, media release, 9 June 2022:

Janelle Saffin MP has reaffirmed her 'rock solid' opposition to the NSW Government's ill-advised proposal to close four Murwillumbah public schools and replace them with a mega campus. Tweed Shire Council is also opposed.

STATE Member for Lismore Janelle Saffin remains ‘rock solid’ in her support to maintain Murwilumbah’s four public schools.

The NSW Government’s plans to close these schools and replace them with a mega school campus is nothing but a cost-cutting exercise, Ms Saffin says.

“They (the Government) have not demonstrated any educational benefit to students and to boot will sack 20 teachers and four support staff.”

Ms Saffin further reaffirmed NSW Labor’s commitment to keep Murwillumbah East Public School, Wollumbin High School, Murwillumbah Public School and Murwillumbah High School open for the community into the future.

Ms Saffin said Tweed Shire Council’s damning submission and formal objection to the Murwillumbah Education Campus development application, combined with the school communities’ concerns, should be enough for NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell to scrap the Government’s ill-advised plan and heavily invest in existing schools instead.

“My position has not changed; if anything, my opposition to this proposal — which is half-baked at best, silly at worst, does not contain a performing arts centre as touted from the original announcement all the way along, is vague on assessing flood impacts and is generally lacking in detail — has solidified,” Ms Saffin said.

“Some issues identified by Council include inadequate playing fields; indoor halls too small to be used as shared community spaces; a lack of shading for students; a 90-space shortfall in car parking spaces (which would put serious pressure on surrounding streets); and an incomplete bushfire management plan.

“It all adds up to a half-baked plan which sells the local community short, prompting Tweed Mayor Cr Chris Cherry to say the State Government should be a ‘model applicant, but is flouting all of our requirements and at this stage is being anything but’.”

Ms Saffin noted NSW Teachers Federation Deputy President Henry Rajendra’s call for the NSW Government to immediately halt its merger plan, and engage with local parents and teachers to permanently protect the staffing entitlement for existing schools.

In Education Quarterly Online, Mr Rajendra said: “The issues raised by Council are in addition to the staffing cuts that will result when the schools are amalgamated. Primary school provision will, at a minimum, lose a classroom teacher, up to two assistant principal positions, a principal position and a reduction in teacher-librarian staffing.

“The situation is far worse for high school staffing. It is predicted that at least 16 positions – 20 per cent of the teaching staffing entitlement – will be cut, including classroom, head teacher, teacher-librarian, careers adviser and principal positions,” Mr Rajendra said.

Second Term of the 2022 academic year, education still disrupted for students in flood damaged Northern Rivers schools

 

Across the Northern Rivers region this week Term 2 began for primary and high school students.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 April 2022:

Flood-hit schools face years of disruption

...it will be anything but business as usual for many students in the Northern Rivers. The devastating floods that hit the region in February caused mass disruptions and meant thousands of children missed weeks of in-person learning. For many students, school won’t return to normal for months, or even years, after the floods forced classes off-site for the foreseeable future.

Nine public schools in the region were significantly damaged and earmarked for rebuilding along with several Catholic and independent schools, and many more were damaged. At Lismore’s Trinity Catholic College, which has almost 1000 students, all but eight rooms were inundated by floodwaters and the damage bill is expected to top tens of millions of dollars.

Universities and community groups have opened their doors to displaced students.

At Lismore’s Trinity Catholic College, which has almost 1000 students, every room but eight was inundated with water and the damage bill was expected to top tens of millions of dollars.

Trinity Catholic College in Lismore was almost completely destroyed by floods.

Read the full article here.

Messaging in new Morrison Government-funded high school consent videos seem confused and often focussed on perpetrator’s feelings and continuing in an unhealthy relationship.

Snapshot from "Stop Ask Listen" 3 minute video

Tacos, milkshakes, popcorn, a brave male & cowardly sharks, as well as a very aggressive young woman, are all found in Morrison Government's initial publicly released four short videos for high school students 15 to 18 years of age on the subject of ‘respect in relationships’.

Highschool students are being told that to be human means wanting "food, money, power and love" (in that order).

The webpage and training videos appear to have been created by Interactive Animation Pty Ltd of Queensland, trading as Liquid Interactive, at a cost to the taxpayer of est. $3.79 million.

The "Moving the Line" video mentioned in the article below, along with another video "Yes No I Don't Know", were removed from the federal government website https://www.thegoodsociety.gov.au/playlists/the-field-model sometime before midday on 20 April 2021.

 Leaving only two example videos visible on the website, along with what appears to be an extensive hidden video playlist for public school teachers. What distorted messages do those hidden videos send to Australia's children?

Crikey, 19 April 2021:

A bizarre educational video for students in Years 10-12 suggests maintaining relationships even after disrespectful behaviours are called out.

A new government video designed to teach consent to Year 10-12 students is as damaging as it is bizarre. With a focus on the perpetrator’s feelings and “maintaining” an unhealthy relationship, the video echoes the arguments of men’s rights activists and fundamentalist Christians.

The Good Society is a new resource for “teaching respectful relationships in schools” as part of the Australian government’s Respect Matters program, featuring content for primary, middle and senior school-aged kids.

One video, titled “Moving the Line”, designed to teach Year 10-12 students about consent, stands out as being particularly strange. Overtly sexual without ever using sexual references, the video features a young teen named Veronica apologising for smearing milkshake cream all over her boyfriend Bailey’s face.

The decision to make a female the perpetrator of sexual violence is also a strange one: men’s rights activists often argue sexual violence is gender-neutral though 97% of sexual violence is perpetrated by men.

Instead of discussing consent in terms of bodily autonomy — which I’m sure teens on the cusp of paying taxes and reaching adulthood would be able to grasp — the video uses drinking milkshakes, eating pizza and “touching your butt” as examples of encounters that require consent.

More worrying still, the video has a perverse focus on maintaining relationships even when Bailey finds it disrespectful.

(The Morrison government has, against all expert advice, previously advocated victims of domestic violence sit down and talk out their issues in the presence of a couples counsellor with no training in family violence. $10 million was set aside for couples counselling. Of the groups invited to participate, a large proportion are faith-based.)

This ultimately downplays the victim’s experience and can put power back in the hands of the abuser, creating an illusion of shared responsibility for the violence......

The Guardian, 19 April 2021: 

Rape prevention and sexual education experts have criticised the federal government’s new consent education campaign, accusing it of creating “bizarre” videos and spreading misinformation about sex and consent. 

The Good Society website, launched as part of the Department of Education’s Respect Matters program, contains more than 350 videos, digital stories, podcasts and teaching materials to help teach sex and consent to school-age children.... 

The director of End Rape on Campus, Sharna Bremner, warned that the videos fail to meet the national standards for the prevention of sexual assault through education. She added that the videos are “bizarre” and “really trivialise an incredibly serious issue”. 

“This resource doesn’t give young people enough credit,” she told Guardian Australia. “It undermines their intelligence. It underestimates what they already know, and I wonder if anyone involved in it has ever met a 17-year-old boy. 

“It assumes that the problem is that people don’t know what consent is, not that they ignore it. Kids aged 15 to 18 are the most likely to be victims of sexual violence, and also perpetrators of sexual violence. So we need to be giving them correct information.” 

Dr Jacqui Hendriks, a sexual health academic at Curtin University, said the videos skirted around the issue of sex and consent. 

“Trying to talk about sex without actually talking about sex isn’t helpful,” she said. “We need to be specifically talking about consent in an intimate and sexual relationship.” 

The videos are built around a concept called “the field model”. Students are shown an image resembling a football field to explain how shared decisions are made. 

Bremner said neither she, nor other rape prevention experts she has spoken to, had heard of the field model. 

“The only thing I can find on it is that it is a communication theory created by a public relations expert to do with communication in the workplace,” she said. “This is not a theory based in anything to do with sex, consent or relationships.”.....