Boarding school students ‘stranded’ by COVID-19 border closures
Farm kids from country towns have been caught in the crossfire and political argy-bargy of COVID-19 border closures and are trapped in boarding schools, cut off from their families and a long way from home.
Victoria
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Farm kids in boarding schools have been cut off from their families and “stranded” by border closures.
Like many other students studying a long way from home, the Mort boys from “the back of Bourke” in New South Wales have no idea where they will spend the next school holidays, if not allowed to drive home in their ute.
Barney, 18, and Charlie, 17, — boarders at Geelong Grammar School — missed the window of opportunity to drive back to the family farm and now can only return home via plane from Melbourne to Sydney, because of COVID-19 border road closures.
Flying home would require them making their way to cities where there are coronavirus cases, and their hardworking parents leaving the farm to make a 2000km round trip to collect them from Sydney airport.
It would also mean the boys would have to leave their dog Barty, with a broken leg, behind.
Despite Victoria’s school closures, there are more than 100 boarding students still at Geelong Grammar, many of them farm kids with families living interstate, and international students.
Some will struggle to get home for the holidays, or if they get sick or injured, Barney, a year 12 student and school leader, said.
Asked how he felt, he said “stranded … and somewhat homeless”.
“It’s very stressful because I’m counting the days before I have to go and find somewhere else to live in Victoria (during the September school holidays), I might end up having to rent somewhere,” Barney said.
Australian Boarding Schools Association chief Richard Stokes said country kids at boarding schools had been caught in the crossfire and political argy-bargy of COVID-19 border closures.
Nearly 70 per cent of the 21,000 boarders in Australia were country kids, with an additional 18 per cent identifying as indigenous and 10 per cent from overseas.
Many students were on scholarships, Mr Stokes said.
“These are not the elite, they are the everyday students needing boarding schools to be able to get an education,” he said.
There was nearly 420 interstate students boarding in Victoria, mostly from New South Wales and the Northern Territory.
And more than 100 Victorian boarding students attended schools outside the State, Mr Stokes said.
For some families, despite being in another State, the school was the closest of its type to the students’ home, he said.
President of the Isolated Children’s Parents’ Association Claire Butler said there were about 25 Victorian students of Tooleybuc Central School – which lies over the Murray River in the western Riverina district of New South Wales – living on farms just outside the border “bubble”.
“Any Victorian child who lives outside Victoria’s bubble cannot go to NSW for school,” Ms Butler said.
“This affects a lot of children, at least 100 in the Echuca Moama area alone, and all along the Murray.”
Barney Mort said some farm kids in remote areas did not have internet for remote learning at home or parents available to stay in the house and supervise them.
His mother, Michelle Mort, said the family’s 24,000 hectare farm was 150km west of Bourke, in northwest New South Wales.
The nearest school was hours’ away, “on a rough, dirt road”, which was why the boys boarded.
“We actually sent the boys down to school in the ute because we were concerned that exactly what has happened, might happen (there would be a second wave of coronavirus and schools shut),” Ms Mort said.
“We thought, if they had a car, they could just get in it and drive out of Victoria and fuel up at Jerilderie and again at Cobar and be home … we thought that was the safest bet.”
When the borders were shut, however, and the boys missed the chance to drive out of the state, it was clear “we now have children that we have to get out of Victoria, that we can’t get out”, she said.
Barney said permits for exemptions to drive across the border seemed to be given out “willy-nilly”, with some people being granted them and others in near identical circumstances, rejected.
SCHOOLING NEEDS LEAVE FAMILY DIVIDED
Victorian teenagers Tabitha and Thalia Cross could never have imagined being separated from their parents and the family farm, because of where they went to school.
The girls attend The Scots School in Albury, just across the New South Wales border and only 30 minutes from their Indigo Valley home.
But with the border between twin towns Albury and Wodonga now closed, crossing through the permit system is slow and problematic.
And the family has made the hard – and expensive – decision to temporarily board the girls at the NSW school.
“The girls and I have gone through four different permits since the border closure … when my last permit expired I went … to see how I could get into Albury (and learnt) I would have to travel to New South Wales by aircraft, land in Sydney, quarantine for two weeks and then fly to Albury Airport, which is 28km from our house,” Ms Cross said.
Permits for Victorian children to travel to NSW schools ran out on Friday night, with no guarantees they would be renewed, she said.
The new boarding arrangement meant the girls were unable to help on the family’s beef cattle farm, as they always had, Ms Cross said.
Tabitha, 18, was the main “farm hand” on the property when she was home, helping with breeding, calving and feeding, she said.
Before the border closure, the girls had taken the bus to school, and back home, every day. “We will probably have to sell a couple of cows to pay for the boarding fees, so the girls can stay at school,” Ms Cross said.
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