Sydney’s $225m highrise school crushloaded before open

It wondrous, at Domain:

Sydney has never seen a public school like it.

When Arthur Phillip High’s $225 million high-rise campus opens in Parramatta in term one next year, abseilers will clean the windows.

Students will eat lunch in mesh-enclosed courtyards overlooking city rooftops, before continuing their lessons in sound-proofed music rooms, or in penthouse science labs, or in atriums with eight metre-high ceilings.

The only problem is, it’s crush loaded before it even opens. Indeed, right around the corner there are so many little kids piled high in demountables they can’t even take a piss, also at Domain:

A school in Sydney’s west is now 80 per cent demountables and more than 500 students are having to spend their lunchtimes lining up to use the 10 available toilets.

Parents at Parramatta East Public School say it has been repeatedly overlooked for upgrades, despite the nearby Parramatta Public School being completely rebuilt and significantly expanded.

“The school’s 80 per cent demountables, we have 21 demountables and five brick buildings and we’re getting three or four new demountables every year,” said Linda Ka, a parent at the school who has started a petition calling for an upgrade that has gotten nearly 1400 signatures on paper and online.

It will be fun watching the crush loaded kids urinate from the upper levels of the gleaming gem onto the parade below. Quite the architectural wonder.

NSW Education Minister, Rob Stokes, has talked-up the State Government’s $6 billion investment in NSW schools, which has been labelled woefully inadequate by an education expert and the Labor opposition. From The ABC:

Students across New South Wales head back to school in the next two weeks and about 9,000 of them will be walking into brand new schools and classrooms.

The six new and 11 renovated or upgraded schools are part of the NSW Government’s multi-billion-dollar strategy to ease the squeeze in overcrowded schools.

Education Minister Rob Stokes said the strategy is about future-proofing schools.

“We’re talking about a $6 billion spend over the next four years — bigger than we’ve ever seen in NSW,” he said.

“It provides a pipeline of new schools and upgrades right across NSW and it’s calibrated to where we know the growth is going to occur.

“These 17 projects … will add around 9,000 places for students across NSW and provide more than 400 new permanent classrooms.”

The Government’s total school infrastructure plan aims to eventually build 2,000 new classrooms across the state and create places for an additional 43,500 students.

But education policy analyst Blaise Joseph said the Government’s plan was “a very small step towards solving the long-term problem”.

“There’s going to be a massive increase in students going into public schools in NSW, especially in Sydney, and the problem needs to be solved soon otherwise there’s going to be lots of kids who can’t find schools,” said Mr Joseph, from the Centre for Independent Studies…

Labor Opposition spokesman, Jihad Dib, said the Government had failed NSW school students.

“In 2016 the Minister promised that he would deliver 12 new schools a year, in 2018 they opened two,” he said…

“As kids return to school next week there will still be a record number of kids sitting in demountables — more than we’ve ever had before.”

In 2016, the Grattan Institute estimated that NSW would require 213 new schools by 2026 to cope with a projected 175,000 (14%) surge in students:

Moreover, this schools requirement is only the tip of the iceberg given the ABS’ latest medium (Panel B) population projections have Sydney’s population ballooning by 94,000 people a year to 9.7 million people by 2066 – driven entirely by mass immigration:

Remember, Infrastructure Australia’s modelling shows that access to schools let alone hospitals, jobs, roads and green space will all decline as Sydney’s population balloons to a projected 7.4 million people by 2046 (let alone 9.7 million people by 2066, as projected by the ABS), irrespective of how Sydney builds-out:

There is no fixing or building schools fast enough to keep pace with this people deluge. It is pure and simple a planned lowering of your living standards to support the outrageous wealth of a few billionaires.