DENISON College Kelso High Campus principal Mick Sloan hopes the school will have a mammoth new bus shelter and covered walkway by the end of January after receiving a funding boost on Monday.
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The NSW Government has announced it will provide $120,000 for the shelter – which will be the length of a football field - and $20,000 for the walkway to improve safety out the front of the school.
“We are planning for both projects to be completed over the Christmas holidays in time for next year,” Mr Sloan said.
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Kelso High is the main interchange for more than 1000 students every day from across the Bathurst area and Mr Sloan said the projects would benefit them all.
“This is really not about Kelso High. This is a community interchange,” he said.
Bathurst Regional Council applied for the bus shelter funding under the NSW Government’s 2017-19 Country Passenger Transport Infrastructure Grants Scheme.
The custom-built shelter, 100 metres long and three metres deep, will be erected on Boyd Street.
The covered walkway, meanwhile, will be 82 metres long and 2.4 metres wide and will be built from the bus shelter to the school’s administration block.
Mr Sloan said fundraising for the walkway had been going on for almost a decade.
He said former long-serving Kelso High teacher Hans Stroeve had raised about $50,000 for the project over a number of years of running trivia nights, including last weekend.
He said that money would be combined with money from the school and the NSW Government’s $20,000 to complete the walkway.
Member for Bathurst Paul Toole said the walkway was a project that he had been fighting for and he was pleased that it would be built.
The announcement that a new shelter and walkway will be built follows the opening of Kelso High’s new bus interchange in February last year after it was constructed over the 2016-17 Christmas holidays.
The new bus bay addressed a number of the school’s concerns, including the narrow concrete footpath and lack of a handrail along the kerb to separate students from buses.
Mr Sloan said he was “really concerned” about the safety for students – particularly young students – at the bus interchange when he first arrived at the school.
Now, he said, the interchange was “safe, calm and comfortable”.
He said the other schools in Bathurst had supported Kelso High’s push to improve the bus interchange.