Chapter ends for Awatere reading plan

Convicted fraudster Donna Awatere Huata's four-minute reading programme appears to have sunk without trace - at least as it was run by her Pipi Foundation.

The former Act MP is in custody awaiting sentencing after she and her husband, Wi Huata, were found guilty this week of misappropriating about $80,000 of Government money earmarked for the foundation's reading assistance programme for underprivileged Maori children in Hawkes Bay.

Awatere Huata's brother-in-law, Ron Huata, insisted after an Auckland District Court jury returned its verdict that the reading programme would continue even if she was sentenced to a jail term.

He told the Dominion Post newspaper the programme was still working well in Hawkes Bay schools, despite the Government's withdrawal of financial support in 2002 after suspicions were raised about the way the foundation was being run.

Mr Huata said the programme remained a big help to Maori children with reading problems.

But inquiries made by the Weekend Herald of schools in the district, which were relayed to a meeting of 52 principals yesterday, have failed to find any evidence to support his claim.

The Hawkes Bay branch president of the Principals Federation, Doug Fitzsimons, said he specifically asked the meeting for a show of hands from any school still using the programme, and drew a blank.

It is understood 45 schools in the district tapped into the programme in its three years of Government funding amounting to $840,000.

The cash stream began in 1999 while National was in office, but former Education Minister Nick Smith has accused the Education Ministry of failing to carry out the most simple monitoring in allowing its contract with the Pipi Foundation to survive for so long.

His Labour successor, Trevor Mallard, blames National for handing the money to the Huatas in the first place without inviting tenders "as they desperately needed Act's support and ended up folding to the demands of Donna Awatere Huata".

But amid all the political name-calling, national Principals Federation president Pat Newman yesterday described the four-minute programme as originally devised by Awatere Huata in the mid to late 1970s as a "valuable addition to the toolbox" of teaching children to read.

Mr Newman said that although he was not condoning what may have happened with the foundation, Awatere Huata had been a very good educational psychologist, and the concept of reading to children for four minutes each day worked well in many South Auckland schools.

He said the programme had evolved in the interim, and many primary schools were probably still using parts of it, whether they were aware of it or not.

Mr Newman recalled adopting the programme at two rural schools where he was principal, finding it particularly valuable when used in "peer tutoring", in which children with good literacy skills read aloud to those with learning difficulties.