Tirkandi Inaburra is anxiously awaiting news on a potential re-opening, as they continue to run after-school programs but cannot fully re-open.
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Tirkandi Inaburra Cultural and Development Centre has been running lockdown-friendly activities for the past few months including
Rebecca Zilionis, the team leader at Tirkandi Inaburra said that the continued restrictions to boarding schools had been prohibitive but they were finding ways to work around it.
"We're still not completely open, due to the fact that we're considered a boarding school ... Most of our boys are back at school, we're catching up with them after school though. We've been doing a lot of after-school activities - cultural quizzes, men's yarning groups and things like that," she said.
CEO Matt Watts said that they could technically open however the restrictions would hold back the program to such a point that they had concluded it was better to wait until they could run the program as normal.
"With the implications of the restrictions, it's just virtually impossible to run the residential programming,' he explained.
"The Department of Education is running it under the level 3 restrictions, which means that when the fellas get here on site, they would not be able to leave the site at all. We wouldn't be able to intermingle age groups ... a lot of the participants have suggested they'd rather wait until we can run the program as normal."
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"On December 1 with the more relaxed rules, we're hoping that might allow us to do more but by then, we're getting close to the end of the school term anyway. We might be able to run a few camps or a small program though," Mr Watts added.
Mr Watts explained that they were hoping to return to 'business as usual' early next year.
"Everybody here is absolutely hanging out to get back to normal and do what we're good at ... we're very much wanting to get back to business as usual, but we have to put health and safety at the very forefront. Next year though, we will be back up and running, with gusto!"
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