Nhulunbuy community meeting, 12 May 1999 - notes
"We have a number of different Ethnic communities here in Nhulunbuy. It is a very diverse community."
"We came here (Nhulunbuy) from an Asian country and we couldn't believe the difference of the two countries. In Asia we would mix with the other culture. Here the communities are very segregated. I would like increased interaction between the two schools (Nhulunbuy High School and Yirrkala Community Education Centre)."
School resources
"Nhulunbuy High School offers Years 8 to 12 and has a total of 220 students. Devolution has worked really well at Nhulunbuy High School. Considering the size of the school we have managed our resources well so that we can provide the necessary resources to the school students. We have extra staff so that we can offer our students a good range of subjects."
"I experience blatantly (from the NT government) the sense that the bush doesn't matter and that we do not exist. I have just received news this week that we have had huge cuts to our Vocational Education Training [VET] funding and there have been minimal cuts in the urban areas. We did not get our multi-purpose building that was guaranteed to all schools by 1994. The chairperson of the school council was told (by the past School Minister) that urban schools have priority over rural and remote schools."
"Yet our kids have to have undercover areas to play sport and to do extra-curricula activities. We don't even have these facilities in the town. We just have a new private school in town with 23 kids. It is a Christian Community School."
"When students travel for interschool sports or sporting carnivals, there are no departmental funds for the accompanying teacher or teacher assistant. Teachers would end up fundraising in order to help pay for the airfares and accommodation."
"It costs $500 to send our child to the music camp in Darwin. You can fundraise but it is actually other parents who have their own expenses who end up helping to pay for your child. Children in Year 8 have to choose what they want to do as an extra-curricula activity. It is so expensive for travel that the children have to be sure about what they want to do (music, sporting activities, hobbies). They can perhaps do one trip per year to do these extra-curricula activities."
"Children who excel in a particular area often have to relocate to an urban area in order to be amongst the resources. This puts strain on families and on the children. We don't have people visiting our community, so there is a limit to the experiences that they can have here."
"The school curriculum in the NT is very good. It is very broad so that the children do languages other than English, performing arts and home economics. But because we are a small school there is a limit to the number of specialist teachers we can have. We have to ask teachers to double-up. The English teacher may be teaching performing arts, and the PE teacher running the home economics class. We need people who can contribute to the school and the community."
"It is not just remoteness that is an issue. Smallness as a school is an issue. Everyone is looking after 2 or 3 or 4 things. Every time there is an excursion we have to consider travel, fundraising, accommodation, administration, letters home, relief teachers and sometimes that is just the beginning. The demand on the teacher load is huge and they have to teach their regular maths class too."
"The Industry Training Advisory Board set up programs for VET training. The Marine Industry was seen as a growth area here. So we went out and talked to the maritime workers to set this up. But teachers in Darwin don't have to do this. We spend hours and hours and then they cut our funding. We are a small school doing everything with no community support. Yirrkala is trying to set up VET there. For the principals at Nhumbawarra and other places, they don't have the resources to set up VET and become a training provider."
Public schooling
"It is of utmost importance that public schools continue to be adequately funded by the government. In remote areas funding for our schools should be maintained, even increased. More and more our funding is being taken away and more funding is being provided to private schools. This is not a choice for remote communities. There is no other school that is a bus ride away. Funding public schools means keeping families together. I don't want to have to send my children away so that they can have a full education. I want my children here with me."
"I don't think that 70% of Australian children should have their education denigrated by the Australian Prime Minister. Remote school children have to be perceived as Australian. They are not all suicidal and they are not all unemployed. They have to be represented in our media and in our literature in positive ways. These kids don't exist in Australian culture."
The Education Department restructure
"I find the whole restructure indecipherable. There are levels of positions but we have not seen anything that identifies what these positions might be. I had 7 working days to respond to the Curriculum, Assessment and Certification document. I find this fairly indicative of the Department."
Disability
"We are able to access funding from the NT Government and we have been very successful. However, I know that my colleagues, principals in the area have not been nearly as successful. Having sat on the Ascertainment Committee that allocates this, I find myself really having to push funding to Aboriginal schools. Yirrkala has basically no funding. The difference is quite extraordinary."
"The system as I perceive it is addressing students with gross disabilities. We have a 'Students at Risk' program in the NT which is extremely well managed. We definitely have students who fall into this category. We have students diagnosed as ADD, ODD and ADHD and their medication is managed from Darwin, 600 kilometres away. There is no support for the parents or anybody with these kids. We have asked for one person for the region but we have not received anything."
"We have two children with schizophrenia at the school. We have had kids so overdosed on medication by distraught parents that we have had to put them into intensive care. We would like an Education Psychologist."
"The primary school has also looked at behaviour management strategies but the problem is that you come up against a brick wall because people with the skills are not available, and even if they were the school may not be able to afford the ongoing salary."
"In Darwin or a larger city you have access to all kinds of resources. We have to bring them into the community. One model that might work here is to prioritise the groups of needs within the school. You could bring people (specialists) in and move them around the communities. One week they could be in Groote Eylandt, another week they could be here and then the person could go on to other communities."
"The primary school has 600 students and so this is a considerable number of young people. There are a high number of children in the primary school who have high level needs. There are school nurses and therapists. They have moved to Health and I think these positions need to be tagged to the school."
Health
"The health issue is paramount. You are not going to have kids learning if they have poor health and we already have very poor access to specialists. High school students do not have access to support services like services for students with alcoholic parents. We provide through the Department, a good Health and Counselling Service. This is essential in remote schools because there is no community back-up for the school."
"This is the same with the school nurse. It is essential that the nurses remain in the school." There is a terrible injustice in that when you consider Indigenous health, we find that the nurses are provided by the NT Government to white schools and not to the Aboriginal schools."
"The school nurse is shared between the high school and the Primary school. She is stationed at the high school. There is no nurse at Yirrkala, Gapuwiyak or Galiwinku."
"The screening at the primary school for hearing and eyesight has not been good. We are picking up eyesight and hearing problems through the nurse."
Indigenous Education, Bilingual and Bi-cultural Programs
"When I came to Nhulunbuy I was stunned to find probably the most white school in the Northern Territory. I applied for some IESIP (Indigenous Education Strategic Initiatives Program) funds for us to research what we should be doing to address this problem. We set up a group of Yolngu elders to consider the issues.
"What they decided was that they wanted the students to learn about their languages and their culture. They put in terms of the 3 Rs: Recognise their culture; Respect culture; and Reconciliation. They also thought there was a need to work closely with parents and staff to improve understanding. I put in a submission to see this happen. Last year we had plenty of funding: we had $38,000. We were able to employ Aboriginal people to come in and teach Yolngu language. For all Year 8 students there was an option to learn either Indonesian or Yolngu. We had two classes of Yolngu and one Indonesian class. This year we applied for funding to go on to Year 9. The kids wanted to go on to Year 9, the parents wanted to go on to Year 9 but they gave us only $20,000 to run double the program.
"We decided that it was impossible to run all of the program on the $20,000. We have had to scrub the camp component of the program where our students went with Yirrkala students to the Homelands Communities. We are going to be scratching to do what we do; to simply run the classes. The Department response was that they had to really fight to give us any money at all. The rationale is that the Indigenous language programs are for the Indigenous people. Which means really that the only people who have to change are the Yolngu people and the Balanda don't have to change. Yet this program was what the local Yolngu wanted. Now we are working very closely with Yirrkala CEC to try and bring the two places closer. Yirrkala got no money to continue the program and we have been told that next year we will probably get nothing."
"This part of the curriculum is one of the most relevant parts of the curriculum. This is real education. Where is the equity in it? The parents are saying that this is the subject that the children are talking about at home. They talk about what they have learnt about Yolngu, not about maths or science."
"We had a small grant so that the Yolngu people could work with the parents of the children in the evenings. This was really well evaluated by the parents. This program is so fragile though, and there is some talk amongst the Yolngu as to why their people are working with the white kids, and shouldn"t these resources go back to the Yolngu community."
"There are a few Yolngu children at the primary school though they have difficulty with the class material. I have to say though that there is a distinct cultural difference between Yolngu and Balanda. There are different parental expectations."
"I have seen ESL support programs where NESB children in Darwin are exposed to intensive English language programs. We had a class from Yirrkala here using the science laboratory and I was appalled at the teaching methodology. These teachers had no ESL experience and they understood nothing about language learning. They need a person on their staff who understands ESL and yet every child in their school is an ESL learner. It should be a prerequisite that every teacher who goes out to these schools should have ESL training."
"The Indigenous children at Nhulunbuy High School are not Yolngu. They are from other communities outside of this area. There are 15 Indigenous children at the school. They are from Broome, from Katherine, from Darwin and their parents are here to work."
"In the last 20 years the bilingual approach has been separated from the ESL approach. Of course now the Department is looking to replace Bilingual with ESL but how are they going to do that when there are not the staff to teach ESL? Anyone who knows anything about language learning knows that it is important to learn to read and write in your first language. They talk about the constant battle of keeping the Yolngu children in the school, but how can we expect to build the relationship between the school and the community when there is the threat to take their language away."
"They [the Northern Territory Government] are just cutting money out where there is going to be the least noise and where there is the least concern about the votes, because the votes don't go to them anyway."
Professional development
"I know from my involvement with Council of Disadvantaged Schools Organisation [CODSO] that there is no travel money for people on committees so that it is only people from Darwin who participate and make decisions about schooling in those committees. If rural and remote people are not represented at those meetings, then how can our needs be represented? Teleconferencing is still second best but at least it would allow some kind of inclusion. There must be funding for this."
"The forums for rural and remote parents are CODSO and Isolated Children's Parents Association [ICPA]. Teacher involvement can be on SAT committees and yet there is no money for travel here either. Teachers can not participate in professional development so it is no wonder that they want to go back to the cities."
"I believe the Management Travel Funds have been badly managed. Some groups have used these funds wisely. We have two different types of needs. We have one Physical Education teacher. There is a workshop on working with disabled children and that is a good one to send one staff member to, but with Information Technology for example, a person can come out for two weeks and work with a whole range of people here and at Yirrkala. I really think that they don't work out how to maximise the resources and the travel."
"When there is professional development we have to find relief teachers, and not just for the professional development PD day but also for the days of travel. Teachers lose professional development by staying in outback communities. PD is run from 3pm until 9pm in the afternoon in Darwin. That costs us 3 days and travel expenses. I'm prepared to do it and spend the money, but I know that some principals won't spend the money. There's a lack of recognition that our teachers miss out on professional association meetings, sporting functions, and hearing speakers. When they come to a town like this they feel like they are missing out, and they are."
Last updated 2 December 2001.
