Perth Voice Interactive

THE new $11.2 million Mt Lawley primary school is on budget and on target for completion in November.

The 100-year-old school was burnt down in July 2012 and its teenage arsonists sentenced to eight months’ gaol.

Children’s court president Judge Denis Reynolds says the duo—who admitted to being stoned and drunk when setting fire to plastic chairs—left the fires burning and were therefore criminally responsible for the $9 million destruction.

The new two-storey school includes 12 classrooms, a dental therapy unit, a refurbished library and hard courts.

Mt Lawley Liberal MP Michael Sutherland toured the soon-to-be-completed school with WA education minister Peter Collier last week.

“The new school will rise like the phoenix from the ashes.”

“The students, staff and parents will be very pleased with the new school: it has more space and facilities than the old school and modern technology embedded in the buildings,” he says.

“The fire that destroyed much of the original school was a disastrous event. The new school will rise like the phoenix from the ashes.”

The Mount Lawley Society and hundreds of locals successfully lobbied for the Second Avenue brick facade to be retained, a poke in the eye of bean-counters who’d said the most “cost-effective” option would be to raze it to the ground.

At this stage it should be business as usual from February 2015 for school.

by STEPHEN POLLOCK