JANUARY 20, 2015 \ MELTON.STARWEEKLY.COM.AU
NEWS + SPORT + PROPERTY GUIDE
(Kristian Scott)
Jurasic fun for juniors
A Jurassic world has come to life at Woodgrove shopping centre as life-sized moving dinosaurs roar into town for the holidays. Youngsters can discover all manner of animatronic dinosaurs, including Triceratops, just as a paleontologist would. Eoin and Montanah (pictured) put on lab coats and eye shields before busily chipping away on their own take-home fossils. Daily guided dino tours are hosted by rangers at 11am, noon and 1pm, before a campfire yarn and dinosaur story time, and there will be new activities each week until Friday, January 30. Details of Woodgrove’s school holiday program are at woodgrove.com.au. Yasemin Talat
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didn’t act fast enough to ensure we had new schools.” A spokesman for the department said “relocatables” offered a flexible and efficient solution to address various issues. “The relocatables provide state-of-the-art learning environments comparable to a school’s permanent classrooms,” the spokesman said. “Melbourne’s outer western suburbs are the fastest-growing area of Victoria. So schools in the area typically receive more of the relocatables.” The number of portable classroom
“transfers” across the state is expected to rise from about 160 in 2012-13 to 260 this financial year. Meanwhile, 61 portable classrooms were “transferred” to schools in the western suburbs last financial year, followed by 58 in the south, 53 in the north and 24 in the east. The department is now seeking expressions of interest to transfer the buildings in a bid to cut the program’s annual cost of $30-$40 million. The Andrews government made an election pledge of $50 million to replace 250 portable classrooms and $510 million to rebuild schools across the state.
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Thousands of western suburbs students are learning in a growing number of sub-standard portable classrooms, new figures have revealed. In some schools, more than half the students will study this year in “relocatable buildings”. An Education Department tender document has outlined that “population growth, high-density suburban development and emerging regional growth corridors and constraints on capital investment” have increased the demand for portables.
Australian Education Union Victorian branch president Meredith Peace blamed a lack of foresight for the unprecedented number of portables popping up at school grounds in the west. She said there needed to be more investment in, and planning for, the state’s growth corridors. “There’s a desperate need for schools and those schools haven’t been built quickly enough,” Ms Peace said. “I think we’re seeing a greater pressure on relocatables because the previous government
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By Sumeyya Ilanbey