School’s Back, It’s February

Parents are rejoicing with their happy cries echoing around the Hills.

This is something nearly as old as time when someone else has the responsibility of your child for around 6 hours a weekday. The weekends these days are about activities, another opportunity for your child to be with friends, running around or doing something that you are not always needed to participate in. As much as we love our children, the Summer school holidays can be exhausting.

School is Back

School is back and new routines are underway. Whether you have the cuteness overload of a preppy or the intensity of a Year 12, 2024 will bring new routines. These are the children that were either born just before covid or may have been in year 8 when the lockdowns of 2020 began. They either knew not much or the world or had the experience of both normal primary years and the old standard initial start to secondary. 

The excitement of kinder for the first time, or prep, of being one of the big kids in Grade 6, the trepidation of Year 7 and the ‘light at the end of a tunnel’, the culmination of your schooling after 13 years for those in Year 12. As parents, we often consider moving towards a better school zone early for kinder or prep, or again for year 7. For our childrens final two years of high school, we may move home, getting closer to a school that suits our childs subject choices. If it’s any comfort, this has been the way for many decades.

School and Local Community

Our Hills kids have wonderful kinders where they will often go from kinder through primary with the same kids creating a beautiful sense of community, only venturing further afield for secondary choices. Again, same same for many decades. It doesn’t make it easier just the security of knowing that you are not alone or not the first parent to worry about the impact of school choice on where home is. 

School and Routine, Then and Now

The routine of school lunches, day in, day out and thank goodness for weekends. Retrieving the uneaten portions that somehow escaped the lunchbox and ended up in the corner of a school bag before beginning the school lunchbox dance, on repeat for many weeks in a row.

School lunches back in the day in my family were often a vegemite and cheese sandwich and a piece of fruit, a flask of cordial for summer (if you were lucky). I have completely blanked my own childrens school lunches but am sure it included something unhealthy like a bag of chips, daily.

Back then, we didn’t worry about allergies or our food impacting on any other children. We didn’t worry about plastic either although we were more aware by the time my youngest moved into high school. Back in the day, I remember the bottles or cartons of milk that were delivered to Mt Dandenong Primary, nice and fresh or warm and disgusting, rarely an in-between. 

School and Road Safety

Traveling to school was by foot in the 1960s and 70s, if you were super lucky your mum would pick you up otherwise it was a walk. Secondary was public transport or school bus for Hills children and usually a fair walk just to get to the bus stop. There were no school zone speed limits or school crossings, somehow we all survived. Schools have regulated drop-off zones these days – either drop and go or stop and stay a while.

Mt Dandenong Primary has two school crossings now, we used to ‘look both ways’ and hear the words of Hector the Safety Cat preach to us “Stop at the curb, look to the right, look to the left, look to the right again, then if the road is clear of traffic walk straight across the road, don’t run. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JXCezYlPNE I seem to recall a giraffe at some stage also teaching children about something.  

After School

After School Activities existed back in the day however I don’t think they were as prevalent as today with a much smaller variety available, possibly because we had to be driven to everything due to distance. When I started playing netball at Olinda I could catch the bus to Olinda and walk. There was ALOT more walking back then. Walking home from the Olinda Pool meant you arrived home just as hot as when you left to go to the pool. The fun time in between seemed to make it all worthwhile. The pool was absolutely freezing, no heating back then which was lovely on our sunwarmed skin. 

In some ways, the Hills haven’t changed much in February. It gets hotter once the kids start back at school and the community is still fabulous. Growing up in the Hills is really a bit of a charmed life for children I believe. It’s more than our fresh air and small schools, it’s our community that makes it worth a move to secure.