High hopes for new high school

BY JENNIFER LUU

The Department of Education has confirmed plans to relocate the Cleveland Street Intensive English High School in order to build the promised new inner city high school in its place.

Representatives of the department met with Independent Sydney MP Alex Greenwich to discuss the project’s progress.

Mr Greenwich said that he had met with the Education Department Regional Director, who had confirmed the school was on track for 2020.

“The site is constrained with heritage buildings and little open space, so plans will have to be prepared carefully, and the director told me that there will be community consultation on the new facility,” Mr Greenwich said.

“I’ll keep pushing for some classes to start before 2020 in order to meet growing demand for the catchment to include students across my electorate and for adequate student transport.”

The announcement has been met with approval from the local community.

Skye Molyneux, director of the Community for Local Options for Secondary Education (CLOSE), said that the plans were “good news”.

“The fact that there is incremental movement forward is exciting,” Ms Molyneux said.

However, the community group is concerned that progress is too slow.

Ms Molyneux said that CLOSE hoped the school would be completed by 2018, claiming that the relocation and construction was “not that hard”.

“There’s an immediate need for this school, so waiting around for 2020, that’s a long time.” “That’s a generation of students that don’t have a local area high school,” she said.

CLOSE is also calling for more transparency, urging the government to prepare a detailed timeline of the project so that local families can plan for the future.

Ms Molyneux criticised the lack of concrete information provided by the government.

“We’re still in the dark…it’s disappointing that a department that’s meant to be the Department of Communities and Education does not actually have a line of communication with its end users,” she said.