February 12, 2002 AD
New Norfolk High School Opens Its 2002 Year
New Norfolk High School opened its school year with the largest Year 7 intake in several years, a staffroom still a mathematics teacher short, and one bus route running late. Several hundred students from across the Derwent Valley returned or arrived for the first time. Among them were Sarah Lahey, starting Year 7, and her brother Oscar, beginning Year 10 on an attendance watch list.
New Norfolk High School opened its school year on a hot Tuesday morning. Students from New Norfolk itself and the farming districts of the upper Derwent Valley (Lachlan, Bushy Park, Glenora, Magra and the Plenty Valley) began arriving from a little after eight, most on the district bus runs and the rest on foot or in their parents' cars.
The Year 7 intake was the largest the school had taken in several years. Staff put the increase down partly to families moving out of Hobart in search of cheaper housing and partly to an unusually large cohort in the valley's primary schools. The new students were gathered in the gymnasium for a welcome assembly from the principal before being collected by their home-group teachers and walked around the grounds in groups of twenty-five. Two portable classrooms brought in over the summer holidays were in use for the first time that morning.
Not everything went to plan. The Glenora bus broke down outside Bushy Park and arrived nearly an hour late, so most of its passengers missed the assembly. The school had begun the year with one mathematics position still unfilled, and two Year 9 classes spent their first maths period in the library under a relief teacher. One Year 7 student was briefly reported missing before being found in the wrong home-group room. By recess, staff had confiscated the year's first packet of cigarettes behind the gymnasium.
Staff were also preparing for change. The state's new curriculum framework was being trialled in a number of Tasmanian schools that year, and New Norfolk's teachers had spent part of the preceding week in professional development sessions about what it would mean for them. Several said privately that they had more pressing problems.
Siblings Sarah and Oscar Lahey were among the students who arrived that morning. Sarah, twelve, came up from New Norfolk Primary as part of the large Year 7 intake. Oscar, fifteen, began Year 10, his last year at the school, on an attendance monitoring arrangement agreed with his grandparents at the end of the previous year. He was present for the full day. The two did not acknowledge each other in the school grounds.
The school day finished at ten past three. Apart from the late bus, every route left on time.
