A fun reason to come to school
How this community-owned video boosted school attendance in Kalkarindji. What better way to encourage kids to come to school than to give them creative license?
The remote communities of Kalkarindji and Daguragu, located south west of Katherine in the Northern Territory, invited Community First Development (formerly ICV) to help boost their school attendance. Their small school has 165 students enrolled and an average attendance rate of just 52% over the past three years.
Community First Development spent a week working with Victoria Daly Regional Council and their Remote School Attendance Strategy (RSAS) team as well as at the local school to develop a video about coming to school through the eyes of the Year 2 students.
The young students needed a little prompting at first, but it wasn’t long before they took on this creative project with excitement. They came up with the concepts for the video themselves by designing simple storyboards showing how they get ready for school each day. The Community First Development team used these ideas to direct a short film, starring the students who acted out each scene with lots of enthusiasm. The children even learned about being ‘behind the scenes’ by using the camera and looking at the editing process.
While the kids were learning all about film making, it was a great way for them to understand the importance of coming to school. At the end of the week we asked kids, “How do you get ready for school?” They replied excitedly by chanting, “Get out of bed! Wash face! Get dressed! Brush hair! Eat breakfast! Brush teeth! Then Walk or catch the bus!”
Thank you for your support to make this community-designed video possible. We’re so happy to share that this resulted in record school attendance during the week of the activity, plus greater community engagement on the topic of school attendance. After discussion with community members, there are already further engagement projects and we’ve already received a request for another video for Yarralin community. Stay tuned!
