Claremont College Opens Its 2006 Year

Claremont College opened its school year on a cool, overcast Tuesday. The first buses from the Derwent Valley and the northern suburbs began unloading at the top car park shortly after eight, and by half past the breezeways were crowded with new Year 11 students looking for the room numbers printed on their enrolment letters. There was no uniform. Most of the new intake had dressed carefully anyway.

The Year 11 intake was smaller than the college had planned for. Enrolments had been falling for several years as families in the northern suburbs moved away and other senior campuses competed for the same students, and two classes timetabled over the summer were merged on the morning itself. The new students came from high schools across the corridor, from Glenorchy, Bridgewater, Rosetta and Claremont itself, and from New Norfolk further up the valley. Most arrived knowing at least a handful of others. Some arrived knowing no one.

The day began with an assembly in the gymnasium, followed by tutor groups and a shortened run through each student's timetable. The timetable did not hold. Within the first hour the administration office had a queue of students whose subject choices clashed, and the college secretary spent much of the day reallocating classes by hand. Psychology was oversubscribed, and a second class was opened at short notice under Margaret Holloway, who had expected to be teaching Modern History. Several students gave up on the queue and went to the timetabling office at lunchtime to argue their own cases, with mixed success. Sarah Lahey, sixteen, up from New Norfolk, argued her way out of a clash between Legal Studies and Outdoor Education. Dylan Achterberg from Bridgewater found at ten o’clock that he had been put in Chemistry instead of the Physical Education class he had chosen. Rather than join the queue at the office, he stayed where he was, and remained in Chemistry for the rest of the year.

The new students found the college different from the high schools they had left. Teachers were addressed by their first names, attendance at study periods was left to the students themselves, and a number of the intake spent their free periods that first afternoon unsure whether they were allowed to leave the grounds. Most stayed. The library was full by two o'clock.

The last buses left at a quarter past three. The valley bus to New Norfolk ran ten minutes late, and the college received its first parental phone call of the year about it before five.