Badu Island State School: What can we do to make it happen?

Principal, Steve Foster, explains…

We sat down and said how are we going to do it?

We had the Community Council involved, we had other government agencies from the community sit down together with us and our ASSPA committee and our P&C committee and we said 'If we're going to make it happen and it's a high priority for us what are we going to pool to make it happen?'

We spoke about how are we going to do it without any extra cost. And if we were fair dinkum about it and it was a high priority in the community, what can we do to make it happen instead of sitting back waiting for things to happen? So we did a scan across the community and looked at what resources we've got and we pooled all our resources together to say 'Let's make it happen. It's a priority for these students.'

The Community Council said 'Look if we're looking for a building we've got an old child care centre down there that is not being used. We're going to shift the child care centre to a new site.' They were going to use it as a community conference room and they said 'Let's put that to the community and if they support it we trial that as the pre-school down there and we have the year 8 up here. There is a building.'

We spoke to QBuild facilities and Education Queensland Facilities and they came to the aid of sponsoring to modify and just do some maintenance work on the building to bring it up to scratch with workplace health and safety. The Council chipped in by painting the building for us and QBuild gave us some building materials, the Council gave us free labour of their builders to maintain the building to bring it up to scratch. The ASSPA and P&C got together and looked at buying resources for the year 8 program and the ASSPA people chipped in and bought a whole set of computers because the parents identified technology as a key priority in the learning areas. They bought ten computers and set up and networked them and got them on the Internet and so forth.