Wednesday, 8 June 2022

Adjournment

St Kilda Primary School

Mr SOUTHWICK (Caulfield) (19:00): (6406) My adjournment is to the Minister for Education, and the action that I seek is a commitment to funding a new community hub at the St Kilda Primary School, which would ensure that the school could run its mental health programs, have a facility for a gymnasium and physical activity and also house students for assemblies and general gatherings. I was at the school last week, and it was pouring with rain. They were about to have an assembly and I said to the school principal, Sue Higgins, ‘How will they actually conduct that assembly? Where will they house it?’. Sue said to me they would normally have all of their assemblies outside because of the size of the school and the lack of a facility to house the kids, but because of the rain they would be doing it via an intercom and the kids would have to listen to it in their classrooms. Obviously that is substandard.

This school, St Kilda Primary School, in fact with the new boundaries will not be directly in my electorate, although a number of my students do attend. It sits very much in between Prahran and Albert Park, but it is a school that we can all be very proud of. It is a school that has kids from all backgrounds, and it is a school that does so much in contributing so many valuable programs. It provides kids with Indigenous education, it has done a lot of stuff around climate change and has done a fantastic program educating kids on environmental programs and climate change. They have kids with special needs and very vulnerable kids—kids at all ends of the spectrum.

The school has worked with the Department of Education and Training, and the school in fact went through 13 different proposals to develop up this community hub. The Deputy Premier on 22 May 2019 said that they were going to allocate money, but the money was diverted to classrooms rather than the hub that had initially been developed and worked through. So this hub is still outstanding despite many commitments and understanding that this would happen. This hub would literally change the school and what they are able to do. This hub would provide the ability for the community to use it outside of school hours as well as the school themselves. At the moment the school facilities are substandard. They do not have a facility of this nature. They do not have a recreational facility, a gymnasium or a meeting facility, and it is a school that is in desperate need of this. I would ask the minister to fund this much-needed school. As I said, the member for Albert Park has given a commitment, the department of education knows about it, and it is time it got funded.