Memo Piccoli: meet the parents
Image: Sydney Secondary College - Leichhardt Campus
Greens MP Jamie Parker has called on the Education Minister, Adrian Piccoli, to meet with parents in order to understand the need for an extension of the Sydney Secondary College’s Leichhardt Campus.
The Member for Balmain is seeking to send a “delegation of parents” to meet with the minister as part of an ongoing campaign to have two adjacent unused buildings handed over to the school.
Mr Parker said the campus needs to be extended as part of a bigger challenge facing education in the inner west.
“We need to be making decade long decisions, not just decisions for next year,” he said.
In parliamentary question time last year, Mr Piccoli said the campus had the capacity to meet an increase in enrolments over the coming years.
But Mr Parker points to 26 per cent growth in children aged 0-14 in the 10 years to 2011 within his Balmain electorate as evidence that’s not the case. During the same period enrolments at Sydney Secondary College increased by 70 per cent – from 1,200 to 2,100.
He has not yet received a formal response from a letter sent at the end of May, but remains confident of being able to persuade the minister and the Department of Education.
Mr Parker says the school system needs to evolve now so that it can meet future demands, and that the metric used by the Department of Education’s to assess school resources is short sighted.
The Leichhardt campus is one of three inner-western sites that comprise Sydney Secondary College. With Balmain campus it caters for local students in the years 7-10, while students in years 11 and 12 complete their HSC at the senior campus in Blackwattle Bay.
The land adjacent to the Leichhardt Campus contains two heritage listed buildings formerly used in the operation of Sydney trams. Plans to build a $14 million police station on the site were abandoned after concerns about its proximity to the high school were raised. It is understood that no other use has been proposed for the site.
Mr Piccoli and Leichhardt Campus Principal, Melinda Bright, could not be reached for comment.
By Sean O’Grady
