Outstation Schools at Oenpelli

Extract

I’m Moses Mangiru and I’m called Liaison Teacher at Oenpelli. I visit five Home Land Centre Schools. There are about five outstation schools operating.

I need to explain that there are two kinds of staff working for outstation schools. The first kind are Aboriginal assistant teachers who live there and teach every day. The other kind are teachers like myself who live in the central community and visit the outstations about once a fortnight. During the first semester I could hardly visit any of the schools either by road or air. During the first period of the wet season it was very hard because all the roads were closed. The only flight we could use was to share the store and cheque flight to make it a lot cheaper for the Department of Education.

The outstations schools need two or three outstation teachers. Two to go out and visit and one to stay back at the central school to print booklets and make other aids that the teachers need at their schools.

I believe that in the first semester there have not been enough visits. I feel that one of the outstation schools will collapse because they feel that there was not enough visiting from Oenpelli. One of the Oenpelli assistant teacher positions has been moved to Jabiru. This position was at Manmoyi, which is one of our biggest outstations. Children from Manmoyi have moved to the central school at Oenpelli. If there was enough help from visiting teachers for Manmoyi the parents would rather keep their children at Manmoyi than send them to Oenpelli. They only sent them to Oenpelli because there was not enough help for Manmoyi.