By CAMERON LUCADOU-WELLS
EMERSON School’s transformation from a derelict abandoned school site in Dandenong North to a state-of-the-art facility gets its crowning touches this week.
On Friday, the specialist school’s middle-school campus will formally open after two years of extensive renovation and building costing more than $8 million.
Friday’s opening will take place in a grand performing arts hall named after former principal Merna Slattery.
Yet with the building work almost complete, there’s more important issues to come for principal John Mooney and his staff.
“It’s all well to build a nice building but what about the spirit of the place? We’ve got to populate the spaces with our ethos – which is, to unlock the potential within.”
The campus in Gloria Avenue is a slick learning home for 150 students, taking the squeeze off the school’s main campus which is crammed with portables.
The school, which teaches students with intellectual disabilities, will also be a beacon for research and teacher training. Some classrooms have mirrored-glass observation rooms for teacher-trainees.
It was largely funded by the school – only $2.5 million of federal Building The Revolution funding came in for a gymnasium.
There is not much left to recognise from the site’s previous incarnation, Greenslopes Primary School.
Mr Mooney said that before works started, the grounds were strewn with graffiti tags and mattresses.
The night after works started, the construction site’s wire fences were pierced open by bolt-cutters and worker’s portables were graffitied.
Mr Mooney recalls a gang of eight young men asking him what he was doing there when he visited the site at night.
So one of the first priorities was towering, spiked perimeter fencing to signify that this was Emerson’s turf.
In place of a graffitied weatherboard canteen stands a cavernous $3.1 million gymnasium that will house training for the Melbourne Tigers’ NBL side.
The main school buildings had to be gutted, Mr Mooney said.
They bear no resemblance to the previous pebblestone-and-asbestos glue facades.
Inside, a boiler room has become a kitchen classroom where last week the students cooked with gleaming appliances around a group workbench.
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