Mike Symon (Deakin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I relate to the House yet another Building the Education Revolution project that has been opened in my electorate of Deakin. This is one of a continuing stream of good news projects coming up in my local electorate, and there are many more to come. The one I concentrate on today was for a small Catholic school in Ringwood, Our Lady of the Perpetual Help. It has been an icon in Ringwood for many years but, as I say, it is only a small school and, in common with most schools and community infrastructure in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, it is old and outdated. Although part of the school is quite old, they now have a wonderful new facility there.

I had the great pleasure to attend the opening of the new parts of the school at the end of last year and, because it is quite constrained and they do not have a lot of space there, they had to build up—they constructed a building with a new IT centre on the ground floor and new classrooms on the top floor. An IT centre is two to three times the size of a normal classroom and it gives the school access to an area that they did not have access to before—they simply did not have a place for IT.

Also, with their funding under the program, they were able to refit their assembly hall and build doors that open out onto the quadrangle—the courtyard—of the school. Before those doors were built, the children had had to walk around the side of the hall and go through a very narrow entrance, and if you have a couple of hundred kids trying to do that at any time it can be quite chaotic. Those of you who have seen it will know that. However, the opening day was not chaotic; it was a very good and fun day. It was good to be able to go there for the opening ceremony and have Father Joe from the church to officiate and Andrea Lacy, the principal, to keep things running and hear not only from everyone involved in the project—those who helped to design and build it—but also from the children at the school, who had watched it change every day as the job was completed.

Every time I visited the school over the last year before the new facility was opened there was always something happening. There were always kids, as usual, lined up at the fence—they were usually boys, I might add—watching the machines either lift things up or take things down. Slowly but surely the construction started, and then it came on really quickly, and now the two-storey building is there.

Our Lady of the Perpetual Help was established in 1932 and is one of the oldest public buildings left in Ringwood. It still looks like a great school from the outside, and I can certainly promise that it is a great school from the inside. In my electorate, we did not use template designs provided by either the state government or the Catholic Education Office; we used individual designs. Although it took a little bit of time to get the fine details right, the results are now standing there, and the uses the school can put the new facilities to are exactly what the school wants. The second storey classrooms are truly modern. They are 21st century classrooms; they are not mid-1950s or 1960s classrooms. Few of the structures at Our Lady of the Perpetual Help have been touched since 1970, which is a long time for any school.

Over 110 people from various trades were employed on this project at different times and, although they were not all there all the time, it was a very handy thing for our local economy. During 2009, when this project was announced, and then into 2010, there was still not a lot of work around for local tradespeople or people employed in the construction industry. They certainly enjoyed and needed the work that came with a project like this.

I congratulate the school for the hard work they put into the project to get a better outcome for the school. It will be there for decades and generations to come. The school is growing in its attendance numbers and, with assets like this on the books, I am sure it will improve even more. This is a great outcome not only for Our Lady of the Perpetual Hope in Ringwood but also for the electorate of Deakin as a whole.