Nine o'clock on Sunday night.

Login or signup to continue reading

That's when I finally received confirmation that my children's school would be closed on Monday.

By the time it came, the news was out, the final list published, and most parents had accepted their Monday fate. But the whole situation - entire schools closed because of small plastic tubs of colourful sand? - seemed so ludicrous that the official school email, along with a text message urging us to check our email, was the only thing linking it to reality.

As mentioned, ours didn't land until 9pm. We live in Weston Creek, and this seems to have been a southside thing. Other schools - especially, it would seem, on the northside - got their emails a couple of hours earlier.

But that's just Canberra for you - where public schools are so joyfully autonomous from each other, so enlightened and independent and free-thinking, that the whole thing dissolves into chaos the minute something vital happens.

This was particularly stark during those early, panicked days of the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, when it became clear that children across our relatively small territory would all be having very different experiences of home-schooling - or remote learning, as some insisted we call it - to each other, with a vast and inconsistent array of classroom arrangements on show.

My kids are at Telopea - one in primary and one in high school. Usually having them attend the same school all the way through to college is a plus,........

© Canberra Times