Home away from home gives strength

Kimberley high school student Shaleeka Ozies needed to escape the demons in her home town of Derby.

Paige Walley, 17, Asmara Drummond, 16, Shaleeka Ozies, 17, and Ashy Carter, 16, with house parents Kaz and Lew Penny. Picture: Colin Murty

The Kimberley girls from the Deadly Kews basketball team are like a family, under one roof and studying at schools in Perth. They are also a solid example of young people making life-changing decis­ions to leave home for a ­focused school experience outside their indigenous communities.

The four high school students come down at term time from ­ Kimberley towns where Closing the Gap measurements are often dismal. The not-for-profit Wunan Foundation runs four family-style homes for 40 students, three in Perth and one in Sydney.

Wunan launched the Kimberley Education Excellence Prog­ram in response to the significant social dysfunction and poor social and educational outcomes for Aborigi­nal children there.

That disadvantage was further highlighted last week in a coronial report into the suicides of 13 indigenous children and youths in the Kimberley. Most had poor school attendance records.

Shaleeka Ozies, 17, admits she needed to escape the demons back in her home town of Derby. “I was in a dark place when I was in Year 10, with depression and stuff, so I wanted to get away,” says Shaleeka, now in her final year at the government-run Belmont City College in Perth’s east. “A lot of indigen­ous kids go through a cycle where they do drugs and ­alcohol and they drop out of school. I didn’t want that for myself.”

The girls are encouraged to keep up their cultural traditions at school and at the Wunan-operated “home’’ in nearby Kewdale where they live with house parents Kaz and Lew Penny. “This is not a boarding school or dormit­ory, it’s run like a family home becaus­e a lot of the kids get homesick,” Ms Penny says.

For five years, she and her husban­d were foster parents in Broome, where they came face-to-face with children attempt­ing suicide. “You think, ‘this is so terrible’, you are shocked. And then you think, ‘what am I going to do about it?’,” she says. The Pennys now prepare meals and drive a minibus for their “family’’ of 12 girls living in a spacious house.

Wunan’s executive director Ian Trust says only 17 per cent of Aboriginal people in the East Kimberley complete high school, compared with 54 per cent of the non-Aboriginal population in the region. The average Aboriginal student attendance rate is 66 per cent but most of the region’s high school students assessed as being at “severe attendance risk’’ (less than 60 per cent) are Aboriginal.

“Sending kids away is not about devaluing our local schools, but we want to give these kids a view of the bigger world, not small-town thinking,” he says.

Mr Trust says Wunan is struggling to find recurrent funding for its student homes, at a cost of $20,000 a year per student. “The parents hand over their Abstudy payments plus a $2000 donation, but it’s very expensive to pay for the houses and bus maintenance.”

While the Australian Indigenous Education Fund provides scholarships for indigenous students to attend leading schools and universities, the Wunan Foundation is viewed as a model with even wider application.