Deer Park Secondary College was established in 1975 and has grown from an initial enrolment of 250 students to approximately 1200 today. The school caters for all year levels from Year 7 to Year 12, with enrolments projected to grow to 1500 by 2016. All teachers and support staff work to provide a teaching pedagogy reflective of 21st Century designs including ICT rich environments and Personalised Learning for all students.
The school has recently undertaken infrastructure works, replacing portable classrooms across the grounds with permanent buildings. It has a main administration building, with a reception, principal's office, assistance principal's office, staff room, library, utility room and a large meeting room with video conferencing capabilities. It has three further buildings, each of which houses twelve classrooms and a dedicated computer lab with school-imaged pcs for student use.
Next year, the school is introducing a 'Bring Your Own Device' program, in which students will be required to purchase their own iPad to use for their studies. These iPads will be configured with a school-image so that the security of the network can be maintained. Teaching staff will also be issued with iPads, in addition to their existing laptops.
The school has a Principal, an Assistant Principal, 40 teaching staff, 4 administrative staff and 2 cleaners.
The school caters for the following basic ICT requirements:
- Desktop support for all staff laptops
- Desktop support for five PCs and an online printer in each classroom and fifty computers and two online printers in the library
- Support for student and staff iPads
- Support for dedicated computer labs, each of which houses fifty computers
- Support for video-conferencing
- Web Server support and Web content management
- Maintenance of the central file server in the utility room
All Internet access is provided through a Proxy server which redirects all web requests to cached web content managed by the Victorian Education Department. This provides safe Web access to students and staff. It also ensures no student or staff member is exposed to illicit web content.