| For years, Dundee has claimed that Angus residents living on its doorstep have been only too willing to take advantage of the city’s sports and leisure facilities — but Lawside Academy pupils are doing their best to reverse the trend.
City councillors have been amongst those who have criticised the propensity of people living just outwith Dundee’s boundary to use facilities like Olympia and the Dundee Indoor Sports Complex while paying their council tax to another authority.
There have even been calls in the past for people living in Angus or Perth and Kinross to be denied the use of Dundee facilities or to be surcharged.
However, senior Lawside pupils have shown that these cross-border raids involve more than just one-way traffic.
The facilities on offer at the Next Generation sports and leisure club near Monifieth, on the Angus side of the border, have proved an irresistible magnet for fifth and sixth year pupils when choosing where to go for their Tuesday afternoon activities.
A Dundee City Council spokesman said that the teenagers are left to decide which sports they wish to try out and have to fund the activities themselves.
This leads them to many venues in and around Dundee but it seems that the facilities at Next Generation cannot be matched in the City of Discovery.
The Lawside pupils are understood to be fairly regular visitors to the Angus sports complex.
A spokesman for the city council said activity afternoons were part of the PE curriculum at Lawside, adding, “The pupils take part in a wide range of activities. If a cost is involved, the pupils pay for it themselves. |
