[Two children sit on stools in front of a neutral background. One wears a green and gold polo shirt and the other wears a red long-sleeved polo shirt.]
Interviewer [offscreen]: Are you guys excited to move into your new school?
Jemma: Yeah.
Allister: Yeah, looks pretty good.
[Gentle music plays throughout the rest of the video]
[We see shots of a country town and then a school building.]
[On-screen text: Orbost Community College Regeneration Project]
[A blonde woman sits and speaks to camera. Behind her are shelves of printed materials and a shop counter.]
[On-screen text: Sammi Reynolds, Snowy River Mail]
Sammi Reynolds: Orbost Community College, the build is magnificent, and I'm excited to see what potential opportunities that can give to our kids.
[A man in a black t-shirt and cap stands outside a building. In the next shot the same man sits in a pub and speaks to camera.]
[On-screen text: Craig Perry, Orbost Club Hotel]
Craig Perry: So I moved back to Orbost just recently, about three years, but like, there's still mates that I had from school. Oh, the teachers are good, I still see them now. So being back in the community I wave to them in the bus when I do the school run. It's pretty good.
[We see some more shots of the town then the scene cuts back to the student interview]
Interviewer [offscreen]: So what's the best thing about school then?
Jemma: I like Miss O'Connell because she's a sports teacher.
[On-screen text: Jemma]
Allister: How many camps we get to go on, and the mystery tours – 4 every year.
[On-screen text: Allister]
Jemma: We’ve been to Cottage by the Sea, Canberra...
[The scene cuts back to the Sammi’s interview. While she’s talking we see some shots of her working at the Snowy River Mail. There’s a shot of an old newspaper article featuring a picture of Sammi as a child.]
Sammi: I moved from Melbourne to Orbost when I was in grade four. It was really daunting, but I went from a school of, you know, four [to] five hundred students to a school of about twenty-something. It was a big change, certainly a lot more close-knit.
Sort of, I look back to those times and I think they're probably some of my best childhood memories.
[The scene cuts back to Craig’s interview. While he talks there are some shots of the town.]
Craig: Just to grow up as a kid here, like, you could ride your bike around, it's sort of like now, like I'll see kids that I know. I'll yell out to kids who don’t have their helmet on them. And that's what it used to happen to me, but I'd say, “Did Helmet Thief get you as well?” Like everyone looked out for everyone, that's, that's the thing. Yeah.
[The scene cuts back to the student interview.]
Interviewer [offscreen]: What is it like going to school in Orbost? How big is your school? How many kids?
Jemma: 110.
Interviewer [offscreen]: 110? What about at your school, Allister?
Allister: 22.
Interviewer [offscreen]: 22!
[The scene cuts back to Sammi’s interview.]
Sammi: I think the biggest thing was like you're just a number in city schools, whereas once we got more country, it's, you know you know your teachers more individually.
[The scene cuts back to Craig’s interview.]
Craig: What shaped me was the teachers. There was good teachers at Orbost and they always had time for me. I struggled with a lot of academic stuff, but they found ways for me to get through it. They changed the learning for me that suited me. And I'll never forget it because it's made the person I am today.
[The scene cuts back to Sammi’s interview. While she’s speaking we see some more establishing shots of the town.]
Sammi: Schools, health care systems, those types of places, they're sort of really ingrained into a community. I think schools are a really good indication of what families look like in small communities. So for us, you know, Orbost North was a really close knit family, given there was only sort of 20, 30 kids there. It was it was small. So then transitioning from that to high school was incredibly daunting.
[The scene cuts back to the student interview.]
Interviewer [offscreen]: Show me how big your old school is. That big? And then how big is this school compared to that?
Jemma: Like that.
Interviewer [offscreen]: Like that?
Allister: If we want to play around, we have lots of space to!
[The scene cuts back to Sammi’s interview.]
Sammi: Looking at the Orbost Community College, that's probably one of our big benefits is that flow on right through and I know is, you know, as parents of children that are going to the school next year, that's one of the benefits we looked at was, you know, I was only one of two grade sixes. Now, my children, you know, will have gone through that larger cohort right through which I think I can see that as being a more cohesive environment for them moving forward.
[The scene cuts back to Craig’s interview. While he’s speaking we see the children sitting outside the new school. Jemma holds up the new Orbost Community School jumper.]
Craig: I think it's going to be great for the kids to see older kids, and I think they can, you know, possibly support them. I think it’s going to be really positive. And I love the name that they chose. Orbost is a little community, and I think having Orbost Community College is going to be great because it will bring a lot of people together.
[The scene cuts back to Sammi’s interview. We see some footage of the children playing soccer on the school oval.]
Sammi: It's great to see that the money has been invested here quite heavily into a facility like that. And it's nice to see that, you know, just because you don't have children attending schools in metropolitan areas, that we can still have schools in regional areas that look as fantastic as that.
[The scene cuts back to Craig’s interview.]
Craig: I just think Orbost needed it. Orbost has so much facilities in the way of tennis courts, pools, all this stuff that it has to offer for a little town. We come from such a small town, a little school, you know, but we've got a huge heart, and we’ll show you.
A white background appears with the VSBA and Victoria State Government logos.
[On-screen text: www.schoolbuildings.vic.gov.au]
A black background appears and white text appears.
[On-screen text: Authorised by The Victorian School Building Authority, 33 St Andrews Place, East Melbourne]
[Transcript ends]
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