Church to repay millions for shutting school

The Uniting Church will be forced to repay millions in federal grants if it sells an indigenous school to property developers.

Shalom Christian College is up for sale. Picture: Zak Simmonds

The Uniting Church will be forced to repay millions of dollars in federal grants if it sells an indigenous school in Townsville to property developers, having been put on notice by the government.

Offers closed on the 26ha site of Shalom Christian College in August after the church decided to complete a controversial shutdown that began last year when it pulled the plug on secondary school and boarding programs.

In advertising the campus, the church said the grounds in Townsville’s west were suitable for residential subdivision subject to local council approval. But strings ­attached to the $4.5 million in federal funding for buildings and school facilities paid since 2009 will make the church liable if the site is cleared or put to another use.

Contingent liability provisions of capital grants and cash from the Rudd-Gillard Labor government’s Building the Education Revolution program apply for 20 years. They would capture the church if a new owner re­purposed the land.

The Queensland Independent School Block Grant Authority can charge up to 5 per cent of an allocation for each year the building concerned is not used for education, program guidelines show. The indigenous board that ran Shalom until the Uniting Church took over in 2012 received $1.483m in federal Education Department capital funding in 2010-11 and $3.047m from the BER in 2009. Under the clawback arrangements, the church could be pursued for up to half of that $4.5m plus costs for furniture and school equipment.

“As per the Australian government Capital Grants Program guidelines, Queensland Independent Block Grant Authority is continuing to work with the Uniting Church and the department regarding the future of the grant-funded school assets,” the agency said in a statement.

The head of the Uniting Church in Queensland, moderator David Baker, said yesterday he continued to be “open to all ­options” for use of the school site.

“We are aware of the funding obligations of the block grants which were entered into by the previous owners and we will work with the relevant authorities to ensure our obligations are met,” he said. Shalom Christian College was one of the few specialist indigenous schools in Australia to offer boarding places to children from remote Aboriginal and islander communities in Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia. But the Reverend Baker said safety and “quality” ­issues meant the church had to “get out of it for the sake of everybody” and the remaining primary school operation would close at the end of the year.

His claims, underpinned by the alleged 2006 gang rape of a ­female boarder by male students that was reported on last year by the royal commission into child abuse, have been disputed by the school’s founder, Shayne Blackman, a Uniting Church pastor who headed the indigenous board that was ousted when administrators were called in six years ago. Reverend Blackman said the church needed to raise cash to cover its exposure to a victims’ redress scheme established after the royal commission, a claim rejected by Reverend Baker.