 |
River City Christian College "Teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" - Matthew 28:20 |
29 Rose St, Echuca 3564 Victoria |
History of River City Christian College by Neil Schroder
A group of concerned parents met under the leadership of George Moran, to start a Christian School in 1980.
We started Olivet Christian College, an offshoot of Olivet in Castlemaine. We started with campuses in Bendigo, Robinvale, Echuca and Yackandandah in 1981. After two years, we decided we weren't going to get registration under this concept, so we went about changing our name to River City Christian College and got registration almost immediately. Yackandandah moved to Wodonga and is going well.
A week before we opened, our teacher ended up in hospital for a month, so we got off to a rugged start with 27 students.
The school started in the office section of the old S.K.F. building. Eventually we moved to the present site which we got rent-free for 12 months on the condition that we planted 100 trees.
The site used to be the drive-in theatre, and a week before school started the school building was still sitting on drums with no power connected, so we had a huge amount of work to complete in a week. We had parents come in with tractors, deep rippers and a layer grader to level the ground and remove the humps.
Later on we purchased buildings from the former Tech School, moved them onto the property and over a period of time we refurbished them.
A government grant enabled us to build the toilet block, which was a great blessing, and we purchased the last building block on Rose Street - No 29 - which gave us a private entrance. We purchased 5.2 acres from the Community Church which gave us a permanent home.
The school principals have been:
George Moran, Gail Middleton, Ernie Hayes, Neil Schroder, Alan Beasy, Phil Arnold, Greg Simon and Jamie Dunstone.
God has blessed us through many difficult times.
