AS A ratepayer I am happy to hear that Greater Dandenong Council is actively advocating to keep Maralinga Primary School as a future educational site.
Given three new kinders have been opened through the Scanlon Foundation in this area this week, you realise that our school population is again growing given that people are happy to invest again in our municipality given its close proximity to EastLink.
This growth was muted by Carl Wulff when he was CEO.
He said house prices that stopped at Warrigal Road years ago would eventually extend to this area once EastLink was built and it has.
Given there has been investment into early childhood, it is wonderful that the council is helping to fight the campaign to save Maralinga.
It is a win-win situation as the Education Department already owns the facility and families shop around for which school best meets their child’s needs.
In the 1980s parents would drive kilometres to Bangholme and the original Keysborough Primary so their children had safe, smaller school yard environments to cope with.
From personal educational experience, not every child copes in supersized educational environments and Maralinga fits this brief.
It would make a wonderful community hub, an environmental campus, a flexible learning environment like Oakwood, a flow-over campus for secondary, a tertiary campus but, best still, it would make an even better learning environment as a primary school.
The best news is that it is still standing and as the Education Department owns it, it would only have to make cosmetic changes to it and clean it up again.
One thousand more kinder places soon translates to foundation school students throughout the municipality, not necessarily at those schools with early learning centre hubs, as parents who are renting buy in the area.
Gaye Guest,
Noble Park.
