The new Bishop of Ballarat Paul Bird (left) and member for Wannon Dan Tehan share official duties at the opening of Emmanuel College’s new year 8 building.
THE new names for Emmanuel College’s three campuses were revealed yesterday at the blessing and opening of its new year 8 building.
The new building off Hopetoun Road will be part of the school’s Goold campus that will eventually accommodate year 7 and 8 students, while its Ardlie Street facilities have been renamed the McAuley campus and the Canterbury Road premises the Rice campus.
The Goold campus honours the first Catholic Bishop of Melbourne, James Goold, who asked the Sisters of Mercy to establish a girls’ school in Warrnambool that later became St Ann’s and then part of Emmanuel College.
McAuley honours Catherine McAuley, who founded the Sisters of Mercy and Rice the founder of the Christian Brothers, Edmund Rice.
The Christian Brothers ran CBC Warrnambool at Canterbury Road before it merged with St Ann’s in 1991 to become part of Emmanuel College.
The McAuley campus will eventually house only year 9 students and the Rice campus year 10-12 students. The $4.3 million building opened yesterday was the first of three stages to be built on the Goold campus and comprised 10 classrooms and staff areas.
It is also the first part of a $40 million masterplan announced by college in 2010.
The masterplan aims to create campuses focusing on different age brackets of education and catering for the intellectual, social, emotional and physical changes students go through in adolescence.
College principal Philip Morison said the next stage would be the construction of a college hall.
Work on the hall, to be built on the McAuley campus, will begin in a few years.
The federal government contributed $1.8 million towards the cost.
Member for Wannon Dan Tehan told the opening ceremony the delivery of secondary education into age segments was “the direction that education is heading”.
“Catholic education is keeping pace with that,” Mr Tehan said. Emmanuel’s year 8 students have been taking classes in the new building since term three.
The new building was blessed by the Catholic Bishop of Ballarat Paul Bird in his first official duty at the college.
