School shutdown

By Judy Wolff
A SIX-month battle has failed to stop a longstanding primary school from closing its doors permanently.
Upper Ferntree Gully’s Coonara Community School has been forced to close after a new board of parents failed in its attempts to secure emergency government operating funds.
The cash was needed to overcome the school’s longstanding financial problems.
After that rejection, a meeting on 21 November parents decided to place the 34-year-old school into voluntary administration.
Former school parent Melanie McIntosh said the result was immediate.
“The morning after the meeting, children simply stopped coming to school,” she said.
“There were a lot of grieving kids and parents.”
After three weeks, however, families had rested from the stress and were starting to move on, she said.
The Mail understands that teaching staff have found alternative employment and most families have found new schools for their children.
Former chairman of directors Paul Steele said that when he enrolled his son earlier this year the school had been functioning very well educationally with strong general and specialist programs.
However, underlying financial problems and diminished reserves resulted in the parent body electing a new board of parent directors in June.
Mr Steele said the school tried everything over the past six months to remain solvent.
His board had immediately sought government emergency operating funds.
After four months, the federal government, then in election caretaker mode, eventually declined the submission and, “the school’s fate was sealed,” he said.
Coonara Community School commenced in 1973 as a home-school collective, which gradually evolved from parent-led to teacher-led programs.
In 1976 it gained its first external premises with the former Shire of Sherbrooke’s lease of an old stone caretaker’s cottage on Kings Park.
The following year the school helped establish Coonara Community House on the site and set about building its own school.
Since then the school has won grants for two extensions, the latest and largest a doubling of floor space just two and a half years ago.
“We had fabulous new buildings and capital infrastructure,” said Mr Steele.
The school has deliberately maintained its small school status with an enrolment cap of 40, thus providing a flexible home-like atmosphere with cross-age friendships and parent involvement.
Records show its legal status was as a cooperative society.
It was directed educationally by teachers and administered by parent shareholders, under the authority of a board of elected parent directors.
Mr Steele said the reasons leading to the closure were complex but most immediately due to parents, who were untrained financially and who “just didn’t realise the dire financial position the school was in”.
Dobson Ward councillor Karen Orpen was shocked to hear the news.
“The school was unique in Knox,” she said.
“Not everybody thrives in the system and Coonara was close and personal.
“All the parents were so committed.
“This is very sad, very sad.”
Mrs McIntosh acknowledged that community schools have a rocky path and the parent-run model is a difficult one, “but I don’t regret for a minute sending my son here. The teaching was wonderful,” she said.
The future of the school is now in the hands of the administrator.