Lakeland State School has been without a bus for over a year, making learning opportunities outside of school difficult and, at times, impossible. Photo: Supplied.
Adequate transport is vital for a school in giving its students opportunities to learn outside of the classroom, but one Cape York school has been without a bus for more than a year.
The Lakeland State School P&C Association is calling for help on social media in their fundraising campaign for a bus after the school’s only mode of group transportation, which they won through a Woolworths campaign in 2004, was deregistered last year after two decades of use.
“We’ve had that bus ever since, but last year, we just got a letter from the Queensland Education Department saying that it had to be retired because of its age, which we didn’t realise,” president Stefanie O’Kane said.
“Otherwise, we could have prepared for this, but they basically deregistered it on us.”
Ms O’Kane said over the past year, parents had to take their children to various activities held outside of the school, which was logistically challenging and not always possible.
“We don’t even have a public pool in Lakeland, so we were travelling to Cooktown every year for swimming lessons as part of the school curriculum,” she said.
“We’re part of the cluster schools in the area, so when we have sports days and cross country and things like that, we need to travel and we do it together as a group, so we can compete against each other.
“It’s obviously the same for school excursions and camps – we didn’t have a camp last year.”
Ms O’Kane said the P&C Association had considered other options, such as a bus charter service, or leasing a bus, but that both were too expensive.
“Because of where we are, if we want to hire a bus, we actually have to pay for the bus to travel from, say, Mossman to Lakeland, and back,” she explained.
“It costs like $5,000 just to get a bus to take us from Lakeland to Rossville, which is like a 40-minute drive and back, so it’s just not viable.”
Ms O’Kane said she was hoping to involve visiting tourists in the fundraiser.
“There’s hundreds of people that travel through Lakeland every year, so we are going to put some signs up along the way into Lakeland, and we’re going to have some banners at all our local businesses and also the gateway to the Cape to advertise our GoFundMe page,” she said.
Minister for Education and the Arts John-Paul Langbroek said the department had not received any formal requests regarding the provision of a school bus, but that it was now investigating potential grants and fundraising activities to support the school.
“I recognise there is a need for school bus services in some regional and rural areas of Queensland, and I will continue working closely with my colleague, Minister for Transport and Main Roads Brent Mickelberg,” he said.
Minister Mickelberg did not respond to a request for comment by the time Cape York Weekly went to press.
To help the bus fundraiser, visit the P&C Association’s GoFundMe page.
