The inaugural Rural Youth Ambassadors (RYA) program has made a successful start this year despite the COVID restrictions.

The program is specifically for South Australian year 11 rural students and has been designed by Victoria’s Country Education Partnership (CEP) – who have successfully been running RYA in Victoria for the past seven years. CEP have been successful in obtaining over $1 million in Federal grants to roll this program out across Australia and have chosen South Australia as the first state to work with on this, and SAASLA as the key organisation to partner with to implement the program.

Up to 20 year 11 students are now involved in the program which has been meeting virtually to date using the iSee virtual campus (given COVID – they normally meet for a 3 day conference each term in Adelaide), students involved have come from; Eyre Peninsula, South East, Kangaroo Island and the Riverland. The RYA’s have been building relationships and identifying their major projects for this year – which may possibly be lobbying our system to get schools in near geographies to work together more to share staffing and to organise and run a week long aspirational experience for country students that showcases TAFE, UNI’s, etc.

There has been lots of positive feedback from the students and schools involved so far, the Exec are hopeful that this will grow into one of the flagship programs for Area Schools annually.