Regional South Australian parents are calling on boarding schools to relax their COVID-19 restrictions, claiming their children are isolated, missing classes, and facing frequent long-distance round trips.
Boarding houses are following SA Health advice to limit boarder's extracurricular activities like sport and time spent out of the school like going to the shops.
But Nicole Duffield, a parent in South Australia's Riverland region, said the restrictions were too heavy-handed and could have a negative impact on her children's mental health.
Ms Duffield and her family hail from South Australia's Riverland in Stockyard Plain, about 170 kilometres from Adelaide.
Her 16-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son are at boarding school in the city, and Ms Duffield said they were resilient, independent country kids.
But she's worried about how they will cope with the school year if restrictions remain the same.
"Whereas the day kids are allowed to do as they like."
South Australian boarding schools can adapt their COVID-19 guidelines from SA Health advice such as triweekly Rapid Antigen Testing, the use of face masks in communal areas, and separating boarders into cohorts, meaning they spend most of their time with those in their sleeping quarters.
SA Health also defines close contacts, advising that all boarders within a cohort will be considered household contacts of a positive case in the boarding house.
For regional families like the Duffields, that means they could be facing lengthy round trips back home throughout the year.
"It's not a pleasant thought to think that at any point we're going have to go down, pick them up, bring them back, which isn't going to be good for their studies or mental health or anything," Ms Duffield said.
SA Health said the advice was regularly reviewed and updated as necessary as the local circumstances changed and that schools were best placed to understand their own settings and the needs of their school community.
The advice has not yet been changed since it was updated in January, prior to the start of the school year.
'A really big mental stress'
Australian Boarding Schools Association chief executive Richard Stokes said individual boarding schools did not feel they had much say on the advice.
"Our boarding schools have been told what they can and can't do. They don't have a lot of choice about how that works," he said.
Mr Stokes said he was worried about the impact current rules could have on boarders' wellbeing.
"I think about the poor kids who are sitting there thinking, 'Oh, gosh. Mum has to turn around and drive all the way to town … and really she should be working on the farm in the first place," he said.
A number of federal and state politicians have called for more reasonable conditions for boarders, including Member for Chaffey Tim Whetstone.
"There needs to be a fairer process when putting restrictions on particularly boarding school students," he said.
"It's quite expensive enrolment fees into some of those boarding schools.
"They're also being penalised, I think, unfairly when they get to boarding school and some of the restrictions they have to live under."
