Michael Fokerd (Canberra Times letters, June 14) has been taken in by the Government’s propaganda when he states that students at Giralang Primary cost $20,000 a year to eductate or double the cost of other ACT schools. This is certainly not the case for Giralang (Figures like these are true for only one or two extremely small schools and do not apply to most of the schools facing closure.)
The Department of Education are yet to reply to my request for the real figures, but my reading of the ACT Government’s own graph gives a per student cost at Giralang of between $10,000 and $13,000 per annum compared to an average across ACT schools of around $10,500.
The statements in Minister Barr’s full page ad in the Canberra Times (page 14, June 10) that costs are “as high as $18,000 per student” and that students in small schools “are costing the Canberra community as much as $10,000 extra for every student” were probably intended to evoke responses like Fokerd’s. But they are far from useful for the rational debate that Minister Barr is calling for.
