When people told Tracey Mandavy she would never get a security fence built around the St Georges Basin Public School she refused to listen to them.
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The president of the school’s Parents and Citizens Association was not going to take no for an answer.
Her efforts were rewarded when she recently got a call from the office of the Member for the South Coast Shelley Hancock to tell her the school would get the fence.
“[The announcement] felt like Christmas for me because this has been a big fight,” she said.
“Everyone said, ‘Tracey, your kids will be in high school and you will still be here fighting for the fence’.
“Now they are all happy this is happening for our school.”
She said the buzz of excitement in the community, when word spread about the fence, was fantastic.
“I was getting phone calls the night the announcement was made until 11pm from parents congratulating me,” she said.
“The parents were saying this is something they wanted and children have also come up and said it’s great to know their stuff will be safe.”
A fire in October 2012 that gutted four classrooms, along with an ongoing battle with vandalism and break-ins, is the reason she fought so doggedly to get the security fence funded.
Mrs Mandavy thanked Mrs Hancock for her help and the two just had a meeting to go over the details.
They don’t yet have a date for when construction will start but workers from the NSW Education Department were at the school this week doing preliminary measuring work.
Mrs Mandavy does not care about not having a time frame for when the work will start and finish.
“I am just happy we are getting the fence,” she said.
“I am still on a high so I am fine with not having a starting date.”
She hopes the work will start in the next school holidays.
“It would good if it could start in the next holiday just so we don’t have to have any stress over Christmas,” Mrs Mandavy said
The stress she mentioned relates to the children being worried about their school being broken into and their work being destroyed as it was in the devastating October 2012 fire.
“The anniversary of the fire was just this month and we don’t want that to ever happen again,” she said.
Nothing was destroyed at the school during the last holidays, which was only because maintenance work was being carried out.