By Pam Kiriakidis
School is back in session for Darraweit Guim Primary School, using temporary classrooms and community donations to continue on-site learning after flooding in October last year.
While some of the the school is still under repair, including the school’s historic bluestone building, principal Carol Booker said students and teachers felt ‘relief’ to be on campus after re-locating to Wallan Primary School for six weeks last year.
“It was a relief for everybody, although the school is still half cut off at the construction area and does not look overly inviting because there’s big fences up, the kids are very happy to be back,” she said.
Ms Booker said Wallan Primary School was ‘more than accommodating’ with their resources, allowing the students to continue their education post-floods last year.
“Our priority was to put everything else aside and just make sure that in the six weeks [we] were relocated, our learning program could continue. It wasn’t without challenges, I must admit, and I can’t say that it wasn’t impacted, but we did the very best we could,” she said.
“It was challenging, we’ve got 40 kids and they’ve got 670, so we didn’t have our resources and lunchtimes at the same time, but we used their facilities like the canteen, which the kids loved.
“We were offered use of their art room and gym, but timetabling our classes was a real challenge.”
Darraweit Guim Primary School this year has five prep students, currently learning in the school’s repaired portable and other temporary classrooms provided through the Department of Education.
Ms Booker said the first day was positive, however the school was still feeling the flood impact – with prep students unable to complete traditional routines such as transition week and parents could not visit the school’s staff room as it was now a storage room.
“We were a little bit nervous as to how the kids would go on their first day back but they were fabulous,” she said.
“Even though the classrooms, they weren’t set up … we met down at the park, so our transition sessions were made at the park, and we did some fun games down there.
“I had encouraged the parents to bring them over the holidays and play on the equipment to get the feel of the place, and a couple of parents took that up.
“When the parents dropped off the kids [on the first day], traditionally we would have the parents in the staff room … we couldn’t do that because our staff room is chock a block with a whole lot of stuff because we don’t have any storage area.”
Ms Booker said the school was still enduring a massive clean-up, especially after the overwhelming response from the community with donations, including a new portable speaker system, which assisted graduation and the school’s concert last year.
She said it was ‘heart-warming’ to receive equipment from several businesses and organisations to set up for the first day back, and was grateful of the extra efforts from the school’s teachers.
“Our teachers worked very hard over the holidays as well, I must add, because we’ve got all these donations that were then organised to get classes set up … so I’ll take my hat off to them,” she said.
