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PLEASE LISTEN: Member for Callide Jeff Seeney is working with the Widgee State School to help them get a desperately needed third teacher. "You can't expect teachers and students to just cop it sweet," he said at yesterday's protest meeting.

Gympie Times/Renee Pilcher

FRUSTRATED by the slow-moving bureaucracy of Queensland Education to provide a desperately needed additional teacher, Widgee State School parents voiced their concern to Member for Callide Jeff Seeney at a protest meeting yesterday.

Parents and Citizens Association vice-president Larissa Stuart said 32 students currently in a combined Prep, Year 1, Year 2 and Year 3 class placed an unacceptable strain on teacher Robert Andrews and the situation was patently unfair on the children.

“Our concerns have gone on for so long and finally it has come to this,” Mrs Stuart said, addressing the 20 or more assembled, including parents, teachers and Gympie Regional councillors Graham Engeman and Tony Perrett.

“We have frustrated teachers coming to us - they've followed all the right avenues and now parents are threatening to pull their students out of the school.” She pointed out that losing students would further exacerbate the situation.

The stumbling block to student/teacher ratios in smaller schools is the “magical” day eight rule, whereby teacher allocations increase or decrease according to the number of students enrolled on that day.

Principal Robert Lonergan said the school had applied several times for a third teacher and had sufficient student numbers since July to meet department requirements, but the teacher had not materialised, in which case the school might now lose the student numbers they needed for that extra teacher.

It's “a Catch-22 situation” that has those involved crying foul. And while parents are trying to hang on because they love the school and staff, they are naturally worried for their children.

“We have brilliant teachers,” Mrs Stuart said, “but they are forced to be administration officers, aides, music and physical education teachers - all this with overcrowded classrooms.”

When it comes to changing the way the system works for small schools, “there's a stubbornness in the government,” Mr Seeney says, and concedes that it may be hard to change short term. He adds the assumption that student numbers do not grow after day eight is clearly absurd. Mr Lonergan agrees, saying that for the past five or six years Widgee State School has shown positive growth, but the increase in student numbers often occurs after day eight in the smaller rural and regional schools.

Mr Seeney said there was an urgent need for a new formula for small schools.

“The day eight measure is an incredibly blunt instrument that just produces impediments.”