Adelaide High School student origins revealed in Labor Freedom of Information bid
From Hallett Cove to Golden Grove, out-of-zone students are taking up spots at Adelaide High, new figures reveal. The revelation comes amid growing parent anger over enrolment rules.
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Dozens of eastern suburbs teens zoned to some of Adelaide’s most desirable public high schools are instead taking places at Adelaide High, the institution at the centre of this year’s rezoning furore.
An enrolment “star chart”, showing where students live, has been released to Opposition MP Jayne Stinson under Freedom of Information laws.
The Badcoe MP has campaigned against the rezoning and, in July, when it was revealed only 41 per cent of AHS students lived in its zone in 2018, she said the figure “really feels like salt being rubbed in the wound” for affected families.
But the star chart shows that in February 2016, two years before Labor lost government, the in-zone proportion was even worse at just 35 per cent.
A total of 77 AHS students resided in the eastern Norwood Morialta, Glenunga, Unley, Charles Campbell and Marryatville zones.
Woodville High missed out the most, as 169 living in its zone attended the city school instead, followed by Underdale (115), Plympton International (94), Roma Mitchell (92) and Findon (58).
Ms Stinson told The Advertiser she lodged the FOI request to gain “baseline” information about her Badcoe electorate, which she hoped to update annually to map trends.
Some of Adelaide High’s out-of-zone students are in special interest programs and the Education Department has argued many others live in-zone when they enrol, then move elsewhere.
The star chart figures predate Labor’s 2017 announcement of a shared zone for Adelaide Botanic High (which opened this year) and Adelaide High, extending the old AHS zone not only to the inner northeast, but also to the west and south.
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The Liberal Government angered families when it announced in February it would cut all or part of nine suburbs in the west and south from the shared zone. Families reassigned to the Springbank, Plympton and Underdale high school zones were blindsided after buying homes specifically to be zoned to CBD schools.
“The Liberals created this problem with their underfunded promise to move Year 7 students into high school,” Ms Stinson said.
“The Government could have fully funded the capacity increase needed at Adelaide High, as it has done for other schools, but instead it chose to cut the zone.”
But the Government argued Labor had made the shared city zone unfeasibly large, even without the Year 7 shift.
Education Minister John Gardner said Labor had failed to do “anything” about looming growth in high school students across the state.
“It is not good enough for Labor to pretend that the existing school infrastructure was capable of supporting all of the students under the (city) zone,” he said.
“Labor increased the CBD high school zone despite clear evidence that the schools would be significantly over capacity ... Would they have cut special interest programs at these schools? Would they have racked, packed and stacked students into classrooms and corridors that could not fit them?”