The cost of educating three young children is taking a toll on a Boorcan family as they wonder how they are going to pay their fees this year. A Warrnambool mum is in a similar situation, worried about how she is going to pick up almost $900 of books before school starts next week.

MELISSA and Phillip Meade have three children, their eldest Luke, 6, will start school this year at a Catholic primary school while Zac, 4, begins kinder and Skye, 3, attends day care.

Luke’s school fees are $1300 for the year and Zac’s kinder fees are about $1230. Skye’s day care is $50 a month.

“We can’t afford to send her weekly, she just goes fortnightly. I think ‘how am I going to pay their fees?” Mrs Meade said. 

She said last year Luke’s kinder fees were due at the end of each term and they went on a payment plan to make it easier. They’ll do the same this year.

“I was paying $50 a fortnight. That’s how I’ve done it for kinder and for Luke’s school this year because I can’t find the money to pay for his fees up front.”

Mr Meade manages a dairy farm with more than a third of his income going to the family’s mortgage, another third is spent on food, with the rest going to living costs, maintaining the car and the motorbike he uses for his work on the farm. 

Mrs Meade said she wanted to budget for their expenses but when you have a “bill pop up from nowhere” it’s impossible to get ahead. “Then the bike needs servicing or the car needs servicing and you’re straight back to square one.”

“I’ve got bills sitting there and I can’t pay for them because I haven’t got the money to pay them all up front. I can pay a bit and then you get another big bill come through and you think ‘how am I going to pay that?”

Mrs Meade, who is looking for work while caring for her young family helps on the farm. She raises heifers for which they are paid $100 per calf which is put towards bills. They’d like to put it towards a holiday but that’s out of the question. 

“The kids are doing swimming and I’d like to put them into extra curricular activities but I can’t because we can’t afford it.” 

Mrs Meade wants to study to become a vet nurse after completing her Certificate III in animal companionship last year. The Certificate IV she wants to study costs $6,500, something they simply cannot afford. 

“I want to get back in the workforce and help to bring that income in for my family but these days you need a lot of qualifications. The qualifications I’ve got are for dairy farming or anything to do with animals and I can’t get in anywhere. It makes it a lot harder.” 

Warrnambool’s Michele Featherby says she knows a number of families who were struggling to meet back to school costs.

She has four boys, Max, 6, Rylie, 11, Jack, 16 and Luke, 19, who is studying online to become a personal trainer.

Mrs Featherby, who is studying a Certificate III in Individual Support, said the associated back to school costs had come as a surprise. “I nearly died. I didn’t realise how expensive it was going to be this year,” she said.  

She’s not sure how she’s going to collect almost $900 of text books that she’s ordered for her two sons in secondary school. 

Some of the VCE texts cost between $80 to $100 each and she said the VCE books were more expensive than in previous years.

She found herself weighing up which son needed the text books more if she could only afford to pay for some of them – Riley who is starting year 7 or Jack who’s doing VCE.

“I started stressing because I didn’t realise how much the books were going to cost. You just start having a big guilt trip as a parent.

”I’m a single mum but I know people in two income families that are really struggling this year with the cost of their books. It’s across the board.” 

“When you start school it’s not just the books that are expensive. You’ve got the uniform, then when they start they’ve got their (school) photos and a camp in March.

“Everything’s gone up. It’s not just the books, it’s electricity and the cost of living. The kids have heard me say more this year, and I try not to say it in front of them, ‘we can’t afford that this week’.

She went into Brophy Family and Youth Services on Wednesday to enquire about a No Interest Loans Scheme (NILS) after a reader shared information on the Standard’s Facebook page following a story about the increased cost of education.

The interest-free loans are for individuals or families on low income and can be used towards education costs. 

Mrs Featherby said more people had been in touch with her after she shared her situation on the Facebook post.

“I’m hearing it everywhere,” she said. “No-one’s alone. They don’t speak about their stresses but it’s all there in the background. It’s a horrible feeling.

”I’ll definitely be budgeting for next year.”