AMID the gloom of $25.5 million in state budget cuts, Chisholm Institute had a reason to celebrate last week.
On Tuesday, its chief executive Maria Peters, alongside Oscar-winning animation creator Adam Elliot, opened a $3 million campus in central Dandenong – Chisholm@311, a school of interactive media design.
Elliot, who hails from Narre Warren North, was impressed by the Lonsdale Street campus’s green-screen area and a ‘future-proof’ design studio for film, animation and multimedia students.
If the same facility had existed in the late 1990s, he would have gone to the Chisholm campus rather than the Victorian College of Arts in Southbank, he mused. “It’s much more high-tech than the facilities we had at the VCA,” he told the Weekly.
Mrs Peters declined to announce what jobs, courses or campuses were under threat as a result of the state budget cuts.
She said the new campus was only possible because of “access to previous funding to acquire and maintain such capital works projects”.
“While Chisholm@311 will go on to inspire and change people’s lives through the delivery of education and training, this notion is now seriously in jeopardy for a lot of other TAFEs.”
She said it was important to offer a campus in a south-east hub for local students who were under-represented in tertiary education.
