The ground-breaking Education Act of 1872 made education “free, compulsory and secular”, and in 1874 the secretary of the Mooroopna United Vigilance Committee drew the attention of the Minister for Education and the local MLC, Simon Fraser, to the need for a school in the Undera locality.
The material for a portable building class room with two small attached rooms as the teacher’s accommodation-was sent, arriving in Undera on 12 August 1876.
State School No. 1771 was opened with 70 pupils on October 2, 1876.
The teacher, WH Bourke, soon found the teacher’s accommodation inadequate for his family of nine.
In late December 1876, tenders went out for a “wooden building of increased size”, and a larger school room, was erected.
The earlier building was reverted to accommodation for the teacher, although from around the 1890s, no teacher seemed willing to have occupied it.
By 1911, the inadequacy of the school building was again being felt, and on July 6, TJ Quinlan on behalf of the school committee, urged the Education Department to remove the school and re-erect it on a larger site nearly a mile to the north-west.
The suggested site was purchased by the Department for £15 per acre, and the building was removed, re-erected and remodelled in February-March 1913 at a cost of £138; it re-opened immediately after Easter 1913.
A new teacher’s residence was built at a cost of £472.15.6.
By early March 1914, the school committee could report the move had been successful. Shade trees had been planted (’the present committee has taken up the idea of planting for the aesthetic effect’), a windmill erected to convey water to all parts of the school grounds from the new school dam and a fence was erected.
Neverthless, the school committee and parents were concerned at the overcrowding at the re-erected school, which still consisted of only one room, and were agitating for a new building for the Infants class.
The tender of Henry Levings, a Cobram builder, was accepted, and an up-to-date and well-ventilated infants’ room was constructed.
In the 1960s, a new wing was added.
