About

My name is Aidan Heerdegen, and I am a father of two young children, with one of them in the ACT school system this year. I am opposed to the ACT Government’s Towards 2020 plan. It appears to be driven solely by budgetary considerations, and even then the amounts to be saved seem small when the massive disruption caused is taken into account. No whole of government costings have been done to take into account the increased road traffic, reduction in local suburban amenities, loss of social cohesion and reduction in child activity levels for those who can no longer walk to school.

No convincing educational case has been made for any of the changes and no justifications or criteria for how they decided on the school closure list have been disclosed.

The Government engaged in a very aggressive PR campaign using very misleading figures in order to distort the debate. They failed to provide detailed information right at the beginning and have only released detailed figures when pressed to do so.

In response to this I have started to write letters to the Canberra Times, and thought there might be some value in making them available online a few days after submission.

I will also post statistics and links when I find them for anyone else who might be interested.