Support teachers for children with disabilities, and school counsellors, are among the jobs which would be axed under a draft plan by ACT Education to meet a 1per cent budget efficiency dividend.
Parents, teachers and the Opposition have accused the ACT Government of attempting to avoid scrutiny by releasing on the eve of school holidays a consultation paper which reveals details of the proposed cuts.
Under the plan, one of four support teachers who assist blind and visually impaired students would be moved into another job.
Two of 14 hearing support teaching positions would be scrapped as would four vacant school counselling positions.
Six Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literacy and numeracy officer positions would be abolished and resources for the service allocated to schools under another program.
Hawker mother Isla Smith, whose 10-year-old son Rory is legally blind, said most families with visually impaired children were unlikely to be aware of the consultation paper.
Rory, who attends Maribyrnong Primary School, receives about three hours of support a week from a vision support teacher, who works with the classroom teacher and is able to read Braille.
''I would really like [Education Minister] Andrew Barr and his bureaucratic cronies to go into the schools and see what these teachers do before they make such a decision that's clearly not been thought through,'' Ms Smith said.
''They clearly have no concept of the service these teachers are providing families and schools.''
Mr Barr was travelling interstate yesterday and was not available for comment.
He said yesterday individual schools budgets would be spared from the cuts, which target ''head office'' jobs, and no staff would be made redundant.
''We do have to save $4million, so there are some positions that are going but the desire is to restructure the way we do things in order to push the resources back into schools,'' Mr Barr said.
For more, pick up a copy of today's Canberra Times
Source: The Canberra Times
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