The Napthine government has been accused of playing politics with the education of Wyndham students after three schools that desperately need funding to fix safety issues missed out in the state budget.
Tarneit Secondary College principal Michael Fawcett said he was still waiting on funding to finish the second stage of his school.
“This is the third consecutive state budget that we’ve received absolutely nothing,” Mr Fawcett said.
“From my point of view, this was purely an election budget and because we are in a safe Labor seat we’ve been ignored.
“If we were a marginal seat, we probably would’ve got funding. I think that’s a clear example of playing politics with our kids’ education.”
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Mr Fawcett said the school was only a third of the way to being completed and, as a result, some children in Tarneit would spend almost all their school lives learning out of portable classrooms.
Tarneit P-9 College principal Peter Devereux, said that by the end of this year, up to 400 students at his school would be in portable classrooms.
“The parents of our students are extremely angry that we’ve been overlooked again,” he said. “In reality, our kids will now spend another three to five years in portables.
“These are barely satisfactory conditions … the real educational needs of our students are being usurped to win marginal seats.”
Werribee Secondary College missed out on funding despite being the first school in Australia to submit an independent business case to the state government – in December, 2013 – requesting urgent funding of $7 million.
A spokesman for Education Minister Martin Dixon did not respond to allegations that schools in safe Coalition and marginal seats had been favored in the budget, but rather blamed the situation on the previous Labor government.
“Labor’s so-called Victorian Schools Plan left us a $420 million school maintenance backlog, which we are now having to fix,” the spokesman said.
“There are schools whose maintenance needs are greater than the capital funding invested in them in over a decade of Labor.”
Money for a new Point Cook South Prep-9 school and $7 million for stage two of the Truganina P-9 was included in last week’s budget.
