Surprise, surprise, a private school has been allowed to flout current NSW lockdown restrictions and send an entire group of Year 9 students to the Kangaroo Valley for a lovely six-month staycation camp. There are just some things you can’t make up.
The Scots College, an ‘elite’, all-boys private school in Bellevue Hill in the eastern suburbs is said to have received express permission from NSW Health to just up and leave the place during a lockdown, so that students can enjoy their annual six-month camping trip to the southern highlands.
Keep in mind that not only are there current orders for all schooling to be done online, but there are also stay-at-home orders so that people, you know, stay at home.
Scots College reportedly describes the trip as a “rite of passage into manhood”, which sees students attend a six-month stay at a Glengarry residential campus in the Kangaroo Valley.
Students are asked to not bring phones, and most technology is completely removed from the trip, until they are asked to make the 200km trip back to Sydney via days of canoeing, hiking and biking. There’s something about all of these activities that feels a bit contradictory to the ideas of staying at home, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Headmaster Ian Lambert told the Sydney Morning Herald that a 14-day lockdown will commence once the students arrive at the Glengarry residential campus.
“Those staff who live on campus and have children in the local school are not to have any contact with the boys or other staff during this time so that we can be in total lockdown. These staff will do their lessons online and the boys will be supervised in class,” Ian Lambert told the SMH.
“The College sought guidance, advice, and received approval from NSW Health for students to travel and commence their boarding at the Glengarry campus… Similarly, guidance and advice were sought from the Association for Independent Schools NSW in relation to the operation of boarding schools.
“In every consideration, our priority has been to meet and exceed the requirements of the public health orders.”
A spokeswoman for NSW Health told the SMH that the reason the boys were allowed to skip lockdown was because the length of the trip meant it wasn’t just a regular excursion.
Just gonna say it, this sucks. All of it.
