General manager Levi Armstrong, who founded the academy with his wife Dana, said they set it up to provide more opportunities for rangatahi who come from difficult backgrounds, including addiction, gang connections, and intergenerational trauma.
Before the funding, Meke Academy could only cater for around six rangatahi at a time; now they are hoping to expand to include 24 more rangatahi in the programme.
“This extra pūtea, this extra money from the proceeds of crime, will actually allow us to expand and provide more opportunities for more rangatahi, but also provide some employment opportunities for some of our whānau in the community,” Levi said.
Levi said the rangatahi at the programme had trouble in mainstream schooling, with some academy members being shifted around eight to 10 different schools in mainstream education.
Site manager for Oranga Tamariki in Napier, Davina Winiata, said from the Ministry for Children perspective, rangatahi who were coming to the Meke Academy hadn’t just been kicked out of mainstream education, but the general alternative education wasn’t even a fit for them.
“So what these guys have been able to do to have these rangatahi here and keep them here and get them achieving, [it] can’t be underestimated how difficult that is and how amazingly successful they’ve been over the last 3 or 4 years doing that,” she said.
“We’ve got a lot of different providers, mentoring programmes we can refer rangatahi to, but I would really say none of them have been as successful as this one.
“It’s a credit to these guys, they’ve done an amazing job and I believe will continue to do so with this funding.”
The academy brings in rangatahi and gets them learning through Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu (The Correspondence School).
Once they turn 16 they then transition into study at EIT, which will hopefully then lead to tertiary study.
Dana teaches the rangatahi at the academy through Te Kura (The Correspondence School), which she said links what the rangatahi do at the Meke Academy to the New Zealand curriculum, but at a pace that is more suited to them.
“Te Kura also has personalised learning plans, so our rangatahi come in with goals or we kind of tease out the goals that they might have access to or might want to aspire to, and we try to link them with subjects,” Dana said.
“It frees us up to not have to focus on lesson planning so much, but focus on the delivery of the content.”
Levi said that there had been plenty of success stories come through the academy’s doors over the past few years, but he said having the rangatahi show up to the academy every day is a big win.
“You’ll have kids that maybe turn up to mainstream schools like Napier Boys’ High one day or two for the whole term, but man – we need a holiday, they keep turning up every day,” he laughed.
“We’ve had about half a dozen go from Te Kura into EIT and then graduated, which is a huge outcome on our previous funding.”
Levi said one of his boys got his electronic monitoring ankle bracelet removed last week after “probably committing a crime three to four times a week, to having six months with no criminal activity”.
“So for us, that’s a huge traditional change and transformational changes for these rangatahi,” he said.
Jack Riddell is a multimedia journalist with Hawke’s Bay Today and has worked in radio and media in Auckland, London, Berlin, and Napier.
