News / Whalsay joins school closure fury
ISLANDERS in Whalsay are calling on councillors to leave their school alone when they meet on Thursday to decide which schools in Shetland might have to be closed to save more £3 million from the education budget.
A petition with 300 signatures from islanders was handed in to Shetland Islands Council on Wednesday morning.
By late afternoon the number of people having signed a paper copy available in local shops or the online petition had risen to 500.
One of the organisers, parent Marie Manson, said everybody in the bonny isle was horrified at the prospect of their junior high school closing by 2016, leaving pupils to travel to a planned new Anderson High School, in Lerwick.
Closing the Whalsay junior high school would save the local authority just over £700,000 annually, education officials have calculated.
Ms Manson said everybody in Whalsay was against the idea, saying it could lead to a significant depopulation of the island.
She said her 11 year old boy William was now at an age where he had to commute to Lerwick under the proposal.
“There is no way that he would cope travelling every day on the ten to eight ferry and back to the island on the quarter past four ferry. He would effectively be out of the house from half past seven to five o’clock. It is hard enough on an adult travelling that time.”
She also said that if 40 bairns travelled between Symbister and Laxo, restrictions on how many foot passengers are allowed to be on the ferry in certain weather conditions might be breached.
“Are they going to have somebody there supervising the kids?” she asked.
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