THERE’S not many schools that experience a 25 per cent increase in numbers after the enrolment of two new students, but that’s exactly what happened at Nowendoc Public School last week.
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The tiny school, opened in 1945, went from six students to eight with the arrival of a new family in town, and unlike a bigger school it’s not going to take Henry and Jenna-Rose very long to learn who everyone is.
Principal and teacher Kathy Bourke is in her fifth year at Nowendoc Public and loves her tiny tribe.
“I love the connection with the kids; we’re just like a family, really,” she said.
Mrs Bourke moved with her family from Narrandera and a school of several hundred students to Nowendoc – something of an adjustment but one she’s glad she made.
Students are from Kinder to Year 4 and don’t let their relative isolation affect their studies.
Mrs Bourke said they used the internet to access resources at the likes of the botanic gardens and museums in Sydney, and email to communicate with students at other schools.
And it’s here that Mrs Bourke said the staff and students faced one of their biggest challenges.
Mrs Bourke said the village’s unreliable phone and internet connections meant a storm could knock them out for weeks at a time, leaving students high and dry.
The school’s isolation also made travelling more difficult, she said, but on the positive side Nowendoc’s distance from other centres has also helped save the school from closure.
While such tiny numbers may pose a threat to some schools, at present the distance from Nowendoc to Walcha was considered too far for primary-aged children to travel daily on a bus, Mrs Bourke said.
The single-digit student population hasn’t always been the case at Nowendoc Public, though – the school had 105 pupils at its peak.
But the demise of saw-milling operations in the area also began the decline in school numbers.
Still, what Nowendoc Public lacks in pupils it more than makes up for in spirit.
“There’s things here you just don’t get in bigger schools,” Mrs Bourke said.
“It’s not like coming to work at all.”