A LOT ON THE LINE
A Territory school is helping bush kids overcome the tyranny of distance
Welcome to Katherine School of the Air.
ELIZABETH ‘Buffy’ Gillett Anderson has risked everything for her children. The mother of eight lives 34km out of Borroloola, but twice a year she makes the 700km-odd journey into Katherine, crossing flooded roads and crocodile infested rivers.
It’s a journey that doesn’t make sense until one word is said. Education.
It’s for her children’s education.
The indigenous woman has lived in 20 Mile for most of her life and has little schooling.
She wants more for her children.
And so, twice a year, she travels hundreds of kilometres to visit the Katherine School of the Air.
This year, about 150 students are enrolled in the Katherine School of the Air.
They come from all over the place — from as far north as Jakarta in Indonesia, to as far west as Halls Creek in Western Australia.
Many are from pastoralist families, others are from remote indigenous communities and some live on yachts travelling around Australia.
There are even students who live in Darwin who struggle with mainstream schooling.
Almost all age groups are accounted for — the school teaches everyone from preschool to year nine.
On the first day of school, pre-school teacher Kerryn Window greets the students.
It’s their first time in front of the school computer screen. Unlike students at a normal school, there’s no walk up to the school gate. There’s no hug goodbye to mum and dad.
Instead, mum sits at the screen with the kids, ready to help if technology fails.
Ms Window introduces herself and says how glad she is to meet the kids.
With poor satellite connections, she is forced to speak to just one student at a time, but despite this, each child lights up as their face fills the screen.
She asks the children questions and, in a perhaps uncommon occurrence, none are shy about talking to the strange woman being beamed from the other side of the digital divide.
In a normal school, shy students can be pulled aside, or comforted with a friendly hug.
Here there is no physical connection, leaving Kerryn to simulate a cuddle through the screen.
“I want you to give yourself a big hug from me,” she says.
“That’s a congratulations for talking to me today. That was a big step and I’m really proud of you.”
She opens her arms out wide and then squeezes them across her chest, as if the child were in the room with her.
TECHNOLOGY has drastically changed the way kids learn over the past 70
years. Education of children over the air waves began when the Royal Flying Doctors allowed teachers and students to use their air space in 1951.
All that was demanded was that if a call for medical help came through, it was given first preference.
Fifteen years later, the Katherine School of the Air began operating on its own frequencies.
Students would sit at home, tune their radio into the school’s frequency and listen to their teacher explain the work.
Next came phone conversations. Nowadays, a good satellite internet connection means students can have face-to-face meetings with their teachers and classmates, sitting as if they were in a classroom.
The tech set up can be loaned from the school — which allows the IT department to remotely tap into any computer to fix any problems.
The remote access can be particularly helpful against truant students.
So long as the computer is left on, teachers can wait for the student to accidentally walk in the path of the camera lens before calling out their name — they then watch them jump guiltily. But the improvements in technology do not come without problems.
Relying on internet and satellites, a cloudy day can cause major issues for students.
Suddenly, they’re forced to do their maths lesson without a visual, or the connection may drop out completely.
And the clouds may not even be over their own isolated home — instead, they could be hundreds of kilometres away, sitting low over Katherine itself.
In some remote indigenous communities, for people like Buffy Gillett Anderson, power is a luxury and not available during the day. Instead, children have to go back to basics, waiting by the community’s only payphone for their teacher to call.
It’s a unique life very different to what most Aussie kids remember from their own school days.
ADVERTISED as the biggest classroom in the world, students at the School of the Air don’t spend most of their days in a typical schoolhouse setting.
Their classroom may be the kitchen table, out on a tractor or sitting under a gum tree while on a lunch break from mustering.
Despite the vast distances between students, the school insists upon a uniform. It creates a sense of belonging among the pupils, and makes it easier for them to distinguish between home time and school time.
The uniform also comes in handy when the students head into Katherine for school camps.
Principal Sharni Wilson says it is “beautiful” when the students come together.
“They come into school for drop-in visits occasionally — if they’re in town they might do their day of school at school,” she says.
“But what’s really wonderful is when the kids come together for contact events.
“Sometimes, it’s the first time they meet each other and what you see on the screen is very different to what you see in person. It’s very special.”
To keep up connections with the students, teachers also head out to stations and communities, to meet the kids at their home bases.
“The kids come running out the door and down the driveway,” Ms Wilson says.
“They treat us so beautifully, it’s a real luxury to have. Even our community families who don’t have a lot make us feel really welcome.”
ABOUT 50 per cent of the students are taught by a governess, while parents make up the rest of the teachers.
While there are benefits to being the home teacher, some parents find it difficult to change between being mum and being teacher.
To make it easier on parents, the school does whole-school projects each term. The level of learning about the topic varies depending on the year, but it allows students to learn together — and parents are only required to learn one extra topic.
In the Inskip family, mum Emma has to learn the curriculum for her 11-year-old daughter Mackenzie and her seven-year-old son Kurtis.
The family is from Lajamanu where the parents work in road crews. Ms Inskip says she’s seen her kids “improve in leaps and bounds” since joining the Katherine School of the Air, although it hasn’t come without its difficulties.
It took the family four months to get their own internet connection and there are always little problems, but overall, Ms Inskip is really impressed by how well the kids are learning.
“It’s been brilliant,” she says.
“There’s so much support — we’re seeing the teachers everyday and I get to spend all day with the kids and really see where they’re at with their learning.”
Homework is one difficulty the family has, given all the schoolwork is done at home.
“Sometimes its hard to have the separation of mum and teacher,” she says.
FOR Buffy Anderson, education is the path her children need to have a good life.
She’s determined to do her best by them, and so is teaching them the best she can. Along the way, she’s learning things she herself was never taught.
The Katherine School of the Air is a learning experience for all, and Buffy is adamant she’ll provide the best education she can for her kids.
This term’s project is rocks, and one of the assignments is to use playdoh to create the different layers of the earth.
Coming from a community with no power during the day, Buffy asks to make the modelling clay at the school.
“It’s a little difficult to make on a campfire,” she laughs. It is just one hardship on the way to providing her kids a good education, but Buffy isn’t going to let them down.
Neither will the Katherine School of the Air.