Trip of a lifetime for remote students
A SCHOOL excursion company will donate $10,000 towards the cost of a trip to Canberra for Kowanyama State School children.
Unearth-Ed managing director Paul Crowther said the business had helped organise trips for 250,000 students over 30 years and wanted to do something special for a school that hadn’t “experienced the potentially life-changing opportunity of travelling with your peers and teachers on an organised educational tour”.
“We approached Kowanyama State School principal Finn Buckley to see if his school would be interested in being the benefactors of this donation and he embraced the concept wholeheartedly because of the opportunities it presented for his Year 6 students. It also coincided with these students’ study of civics and citizenship for the first time in 2019,” Mr Crowther said.
“As part of the students’ venture to Canberra, we will also be endeavouring to get the students to meet the Prime Minister or another significant political identity to really make it an even more memorable excursion.”
Deputy principal Hayley Lawton said the students were excited about their trip.
“Kowanyama is a school that values culture and takes every opportunity to integrate community events into the school,” she said.
She said the importance of such a trip could not be underestimated.
“If we can get more remote indigenous schools to visit Canberra, (that) reinforces that they are part of something bigger which can potentially empower and hopefully inspire them to be politicians, lawyers, scientists, entrepreneurs and leaders in and outside their communities,” Mr Crowther said.
He also said Kowanyama could host other Australian schools in the future in an exchange.