TOP STORY: Maori immersion for former Wycliffe Intermediate

Kathy Webb
The former Wycliffe Intermediate School in Napier is to be demolished to make way for a new, $5.2m Maori-language immersion school.
All buildings on the Wycliffe Street site except the school hall will be pulled down and replaced. The hall will be modernised.
The new school will have 14 general and specialist classrooms and toilets, an administration block, library, resource areas and new hard courts.
It is being built for Te Ara Hou, a school of 181 pupils, which originated as a breakaway group from Omahu School at Fernhill, near Hastings, some years ago.
Te Ara Hou survived for some years by attaching itself to various schools, including Managteretere and Hukarere Maori Girls College, as a special unit.
Since 2002, the group has been at the former Pirimai School, after that school merged with Henry Hill School.
Wycliffe Intermediate merged with adjoining Colenso High School at the end of 2003 to become William Colenso College, a form one to seven secondary school.
The new buildings on the Wycliffe site are expected to be ready for Te Ara Hou at the beginning of the school year in 2007. Marilyn Scott, manager for the Ministry of Education in Napier, said Wycliffe Intermediate's buildings were to be demolished because "long term it is sometimes not cost-effective to modernise existing facilities, by comparison with building new, purpose built facilities. This is the case at the old Wycliffe site".
Te Ara Hou, with children from new entrants to form seven (years 1-13) will get 14 general and specialist classrooms - an average of one classroom per 13 children.
Mrs Scott said the school was getting that number of rooms because it was the only kura kaupapa (total immersion Maori) in Napier, and its roll was predicted to increase before the new buildings were ready.
Architect Gary Pidd had completed the first draft of the plan, she said.
The National Party's spokesman on education, Bill English, said Wairoa parents would be upset to hear a new, $5.2m school was being built for 181 children when larger schools in Wairoa had been closed because they were considered too small.
Kura kaupapa schools tended to be expensive to build because they were usually quite small, he said.
He said he would like an assurance from the Ministry of Education that Te Ara Hou children were getting the same treatment and standard of classroom as those in any other school.
If the Wycliffe buildings were adequate, they should be used, he said.