Cheryl McBride
Our community spirit will shine through
Until the opening of Sarah Redfern School in 1979, children from the Minto Housing Estate were not permitted to attend the public schools in Minto and were bused to the next suburb of Macquarie Fields everyday. One of the catalysts for the building of Sarah Redfern School was the protests of parents for the right for their children to attend schools in Minto. These protests achieved significant news coverage.
“ At the end of 1978, officially in 1979, Sarah Redfern was opened. Can I just say, it was the Taj Mahal of schools. The philosophy was, the children, from the time they were three years old, could come into the preschool, progress through the primary school and go right through until their HSC at Sarah Redfern High School… all of the children in the community. So Passfield Park was attached to our school as well, so there were special classes for the intellectually disabled, for language disabled children.
It was celebrated as that wonderful concept, and with the community library in the centre, there still remains no other school like it. So visiting dignitaries would come through our classrooms just about every week [from]… Bangkok, Hong Kong, London. And at that time, the community was fairly new, full of hope, different kids from everywhere. We had some of the earliest Timorese families come to Australia at that time and I can remember how difficult it was for them to settle in because many of them had been child soldiers at that time. It was amazing.
You might recall some of the early people who worked at the school, including my husband, Tom McBride, the first principal. And the early parents that supported us so strongly and who still work at our school, like Maureen Booth, Karen Mitchell, Lyn Farrell and Jan Joyner , our crossing lady. The fantastic service providers we’ve had in our community, we always can help a child.
So my early life, I married Tom, the boss. I was smart, I got the right one. My life intertwined very much with Sarah Redfern at that time. I married Tom, we lost our first child and our whole community grieved with us. But our community then celebrated with us in 1984 when Lachlan was born and he very much got to know the Sarah Redfern children as well.
It was very important to me to become a good teacher… so I gained a couple of degrees along the way and left Sarah Redfern in 1986. But always at the back of my mind, was… I’m going to apply for that job and come back as principal. And I was so glad I did. I came back in 1992 to take on that job.
So it’s 1992 and I have to say the school had gone through some difficult times. It was a school that needed a lot of work. The community welcomed me back with open arms. Many new principals find it difficult to settle into their new schools but the Minto community were just solidly behind me right from the first day I was there.
And so the job was there to be done and to renew the confidence of the community because the school had shrunk dramatically. There were only 370 children there. We began a new journey… I head-hunted, I enticed, I tortured some people, I cajoled them to come from other schools and be a part of our school.
Our kids compete regularly in dance and drama eisteddfods, and I always find that I have an aversion, it sounds awful, to little brown dance shoes because not many of our children wear little brown dance shoes so when we compete with the… more affluent schools, I always feel that our kids just haven’t got the same advantages. But one year, our children were runners-up in the State Grand Final of the Wakakiri Drama and Dance Eisteddfod, and it wasn’t that they had absolutely polished dance steps. Again it came from their spirituality, so it was really, deeply embedded within our community.
So we rose from a school of 370 in 1992 and we peaked in 2003 at 550, not because we had more children in the community but because the community once again had renewed faith in what we were doing… So I’ve been the most fortunate of people, the most fortunate of principals and to really be a part of our children’s lives.
We have some rocky times ahead of us and we’ve had some rocky times behind us. But always, our community spirit will shine through.”
FROM A SPEECH BY SARAH REDFERN PRIMARY PRINCIPAL CHERYL McBRIDE AT THE REMEMBERING MINTO STORYTELLING FESTIVAL, CAMPBELLTOWN ARTS CENTRE, MAY 2006.