Mernda
From the ashes of the Uniting Church’s 2013 fire sale of properties across Melbourne, sparked by massive losses at church-run schools in Melton and Mernda, a campaign to bring low-cost, non-religious independent learning to the north has found fertile ground.
Blackwood International Community College has secured an interim home at the former NMIT Greensborough campus, with the aim to be Australia’s first “crowd-funded” Big Picture private school with a permanent site at Mernda.
College spokeswoman Jes White, a former Acacia College parent, said the fledgling P-12 school’s organising committee had gathered both business and educational expertise to guide the emergence of a new education option for families from Kinglake to Kilmore.
“We need the community to join us on the next stage of this journey,” Ms White said.
“Together, we will create a sustainable independent school in Melbourne’s north.”
She said the college board had forged links with Big Picture Australia, an arm of the Big Picture Company (US), which was founded in 1995 to catalyse vital changes in New York’s urban education system by generating and sustaining innovative and personalised schooling.
She said Big Picture schools promote and create personalised education programs as well as training educators to serve as leaders to actively engage the public as participants and decision-makers in the education of young people.
The first Big Picture School, The Met Center, was launched in 1996 with 50 students. More than a decade later, The Met is now made up of a group of eight small Big Picture schools. There are also nearly 50 Big Picture schools in systems of small schools across the US, the Netherlands and Australia.
Blackwood College board chairman Dr Peter Harris said in a statement that the new school would be one that “cares for the individual student, the families and the local community”.
He hopes the school will start next year.
HELEN GRIMAUX
» … Details: blackwoodcollege.net.au and bigpicture.org.au
