Luke Bone was among the students with plenty of reasons to smile on Tuesday as Mercy Regional College Camperdown officially unveiled its new middle school building.
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Luke, 15, said the $2.6-million building’s completion was a dream come true for students who had been working from portables and classrooms from the 1970s.
“I’ve been lucky enough to be in the new classrooms for the last three weeks and I will be in there for the rest of the year and hopefully years to come,” he said.
He brought laughs from the crowd.
“It is a huge improvement considering for the last three years at Mercy I have either been in portables or old, dated rooms. The new rooms are modern, spacious, comfortable, airconditioned… Plus the new toilets look just like Macca’s, the only difference is ours look a lot cleaner.”
Principal Darren Egberts said the new building was the second stage of its three-stage master plan.
“The design and construction of this building has been almost two years to completion and certainly for about six months of that it ran concurrently with stage one,” he said.
“Our new building is full of light, full of space, contemporary furniture. It gives the kids the best opportunity to learn.
“The works started last year and they followed our stage one building, which was senior school and science laboratories. So what we’ve built is a three-level building with four classrooms on each level and some maintenance room underneath.”
Floor heights have also been levelled to allow disability access and a new entrance installed.
The federal government contributed $2.4 million to the project and Member for Wannon Dan Tehan said it was money well spent to ensure country students had the same facilities as their city counterparts.
“If we can grow and educate our kids in the country that means that we’re growing our communities as well and that is vitally, vitally important and something that we must continue to do because as the pressures continue to increase in the city, my view is, our country communities are going to become more and more important for our way of life as Australians,” he said.
Dr Egberts said funding options for stage three were being explored.
“There’s a couple of stages to go. With our stage one building, which is on Dimora Avenue on the south... in our master plan we have a stage three that connects both buildings and includes an auditorium, a gathering space for our families and provide a link between those two,” he said.
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