Bid to save Kilmore’s Colmont School

By Colin MacGillivray

The fate of Kilmore’s Colmont School will rest with state education regulator the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority, VRQA, after a prospective investor flagged his intention to reopen the school for 2023.

The school, formerly known as The Kilmore International School, collapsed into administration in August with an estimated $6 million of debt.

Last week a letter from administrators Cor Cordis to school creditors outlined a proposal to revive the international baccalaureate, IB, school in time for term one of 2023.

The proposal, spearheaded by businessman Ayub Khan, was put to school parents at a meeting on October 11.

Mr Khan, a former general manager at telecommunications giant Telstra who has also worked in management at IBM, Motorolla and Hewlett Packard, said he had significant support from former school parents and teachers.

He said everything was in place to reopen the school but that if the VRQA did not re-register the school his bid would be unable to proceed.

“I’m hoping the VRQA will do the right thing and give the community an opportunity to reopen the school. This school has been going for 32 years,” he said.

“My interest is the interest of 300-odd kids and 100 staff who came to school on a Wednesday morning to find out that the night before their school had been closed. That is a very traumatic thing.

“These people had no say in what happened to the school. Even on the evening that the first administrators had a chat with the parents, they did not give them an option of what they were willing to do.”

Mr Khan said he had no pre-existing relationship with former school owner Ray Wittmer or the current landlord, Chien-long Tai.

He said he approached previous administrators from firm Vince and Associates with an offer to revive Colmont when he read about the school’s collapse earlier this year, but was not granted an audience.

Vince and Associates were subsequently dumped by creditors in favour of Cor Cordis.

“The job of an administrator is to do everything possible to revive an organisation. I reached out to the first administrators and they did not even want to meet,” he said.

“I haven’t seen anything happen to the board, and I haven’t seen anything happen to the last administration.

“Between the two administrators, $1 million is gone in fees, so who are the winners in this and who are the losers?”

Mr Khan said he was passionate about education as a board member of two education technology start-up companies and the father of five children, some of whom attended IB schools.

He said he had compiled a ‘lean’ eight-person board to run Colmont if the school re-opened, with several board members also prepared to work in the school to keep costs down. He said he had a prospective principal with 15 years’ experience in the IB school system, and that many former Colmont staff were keen to return.

“If I want to open a school, there are three things I would look for,” he said.

“One, is there a catchment? Are there kids who want to go to that school? Two, are there teachers available? And three, is there a good building?

“The last I checked, all these things are sitting there waiting. The reason I became interested was because I saw a recipe for success at the school even after what had happened.”

Mr Khan said he had negotiated a deal with Colmont’s landlord under which a revived school would not pay rent for two years until it could begin turning a profit.

But he said he had encountered significant pushback from the VRQA, which typically takes about 18 months to register a school.

“When I met with the VRQA and they did everything they could to dissuade me from reopening the school,” he said.

“If I was the Minister for Education or the chief executive of the VRQA, my job is to look at public interest. How does it serve the public interest for the community of Kilmore and the surrounding areas to have an important school with hundreds of students close?

“I’m not saying at all that the VRQA shouldn’t scrutinise the application. They should put a lot of scrutiny on it, but they should help facilitate it.”

On Wednesday last week a VRQA spokesperson said the regulator had not received official paperwork to revive the school.

The spokesperson said the VRQA was unable to register a new school unless it could verify the school complied with minimum standards contained in the Education and Training Reform Regulations.

Mitchell Shire Council chief executive Brett Luxford said council would do what it could to support the push to reopen the school, but was not yet across many of the details.

“Council is continuing to work with our education partners to assist students and families who have been impacted by the closure of Colmont,” he said.

“We only recently learnt of a proposal to re-establish a school and we are keen to work with the current administrators to understand what council support may be required.”