By TIM WATKIN
A spark ignites in the thin Maori boy's eyes, then travels to his mouth, bursting into a full-flame grin. His hand shoots up. He's thought of an answer. The question asked of the 17 pupils in Rick Topp's year seven class at Glen Innes Intermediate is straightforward: What
do they think of their school?
"I like the landscape and the trees," one boy has said shyly. Another, that there are no bullies. One girl has giggled and cunningly said she likes the cool teachers. Then the smiling, spiky-haired boy down the back raises his hand. "It's cool because we've got not much people," he says.
That's an understatement. Glen Innes Intermediate's roll stands at 36. It looks likely to fall at 36. By the end of next week, Education Minister Trevor Mallard will have decided whether to close the Farringdon St school that covers 3.5ha among some of the city's poorer state houses.
Today in the school's two classrooms, pupils learn about measurement and angles. The lessons could be useful for Mallard, who must somehow measure the importance of a school and work out what angle to take when quality and budgets clash.
The minister won't speculate on his decision. Neither will commissioner Anne Hunt or principal Tairi Fenwick, who are temporarily running the decile one school.
Yet everyone at liberty to discuss the school's future agrees it's a fait accompli: Glen Innes will close before the year's end. The previous principal and board of trustees have already given up, resigning in December.
In the end, there's no way to justify a city intermediate with 36 pupils. The minister can point to the falling roll and say parents have voted with their feet.
But that decision will mask a decade of unfulfilled promises, mismanagement and poverty, it will plaster over the failings of Tomorrow's Schools and the vulnerabilities of decile one schools, and it will ignore the fact that just two years ago school staff seemed to have achieved a remarkable resurrection, only for the ministry to withdraw its support.
How did it come to this?
"The school has had a very difficult decade since the Tomorrow's Schools reforms," the historical report commissioned by the ministry in 2000 says bluntly. Built in the 1960s to educate 400 children in a suburb of new state houses, it was, says ex-pupil and minister for Auckland Judith Tizard, "a great school". She remembers her role as Annie in a production of Oklahoma, and the joy of discovery in Mr Peacock's science classes.
Yet by 1999, its roll had slipped to 131.
When the Tomorrow's Schools reforms handed school governance to local boards a decade earlier, the Labour Government had hoped for local solutions to local issues. But schools have relied largely on the skills and, increasingly, funding from parents. Schools in poorer suburbs with few professionals have suffered.
Peter Haycock, principal from 1996 to 1999, says the expertise to govern the school was "thin on the ground". It was just one of the problems laid bare by a series of reports through the 1990s.
Before reviewing those problems, two points can be made: First, the viability report in 2000 found that, despite its troubles and size, Glen Innes was viable. Second, the accompanying historical report concluded that "the school has been in more or less serious financial difficulties over most of the decade, and this has been at the basis of a set of chronic problems that would have taxed the most dynamic and effective of school leaders".
Those problems began in the early 90s when the school's roll took a double hit. Under National's reforms abolishing school zones, those who could left for higher decile schools in nearby St Heliers and Glendowie. Then in 1992 Glen Taylor Primary, just blocks away, was allowed to take years seven and eight.
The historical report says, "Almost all those who spent their years seven and eight at Glen Taylor might have been expected to attend Glen Innes".
Adds Tizard, "It was always my view that the casualty would be Glen Innes, and sure enough it's slowly bled to death".
The roll fell from 180 pupils in 1991 to 143 by 1994.
Empty classrooms were handed over to Kura Kaupapa Maori O Puau Te Moananui A Kiwa in 1993.
Then in March 1996 - with its roll holding at 143, less than two-thirds of its 232-pupil capacity - another cut. An ERO report revealed "factionalism within the teaching staff" and an unbalanced curriculum. Students' education was "at risk" and the board incompetent. There was little chance the necessary improvements could be made.
The school's reputation was suffering. Despite population growth of 3 per cent a year the roll was falling on average 4 per cent a year. Parents didn't like what they saw. In a poor suburb and with a shrinking roll, the school had little money to staunch the wound. What they did have was lost to financial mismanagement, including unauthorised loans to staff and board members and two personal grievance payouts totalling $42,000. Former associate principal Gaye Russell says when she joined Haycock in 1998 the school, with a roll of 135, was in crisis.
"It was even having difficulties meetings its obligations in terms of water and power. It had bad governance and [the board] didn't have the skills to turn it around."
These financial shenanigans created "an absolute poverty of resources", the historical report says. The most experienced of the report's authors said Glen Innes was "the worst resourced school I have ever seen".
The report includes this damning description: "The school has almost no dictionaries or atlases. Teachers complain of having no paper for students to draw on and no coloured markers for their own use. The library is woefully understocked. And there are almost no reading resources. The most accessible of these are issues of National Geographic, some of which date back over 60 years, and a set of Funk and Wagnall encyclopaedias that are more than 40 years old. The maths resources are scarcely any greater."
Despite expansive grounds, there were no rugby posts or netball stands. They had been stolen, along with the school's copper spouting, TV and video.
By the time Haycock took over, Glen Innes Intermediate was a mess.
"I think the ministry should have been involved much earlier," Russell says. "If the ministry had got stuck in in the 90s, things would never have come to this."
So where was the ministry through all this? While not giving details, northern regional manager Terry Bates says from 1996 the ministry was working informally with the school, injecting thousands of dollars and sending in advisers.
However, there was no formal intervention until Haycock went pleading to the ministry in 1998.
It recommended completing historical and viability reports. Here, Bates says, the board did itself no favours. Three times in 1999 it refused to co-operate - in January, August and October - only agreeing to the reports after the ministry's fourth approach in November.
Rose Neal, who started as principal in July 1999, disputes that, saying the board never refused co-operation during her tenure.
Nevertheless, despite at least four years of informal and formal intervention from the ministry, the researchers found a "poverty of resources" and "chronic problems". How, parents and taxpayers will cry, was that allowed to happen?
"You have to ask some questions about the trustee and principal management for a school to get to that point," Bates replies. "It's easy from where people sit now to say the ministry took a long time [to intervene]. Truth is, the board took an awfully long time. There was perhaps a reluctance to face up to some of the core issues."
Having stabilised the school's roll at around 140, Haycock resigned in 1999, feeling frustrated. He was replaced by Neal. In the next two years, what an independent consultant called "a remarkable transformation" and the ERO labelled "significant progress" took place. The roll grew from 131 in 1999 to 145 in 2000. Against all odds, Glen Innes was showing signs of recovery.
TIM Heath chomps on a mouthful of ham sandwich, carefully choosing his words - they have got him in trouble before. Last year he criticised the ministry's handling of Glen Innes, resigned when they slapped his wrist, but, remarkably, continued as a volunteer member of the board.
"My concern," the bespectacled 60-year-old sighs, "is that here was a rare decile one school that was making a go of it, with the people who could do it right. What a tragedy it's closing when it needed just a little bit of input."
A bustling yet thoughtful man, the retired primary school principal was appointed by the ministry in 2000 to train the board of trustees and support Neal in her reforms. He was just part of the ministry's assistance, including $19,000 for learning resources, in what Bates says was "the sincere hope" of renewed growth.
The ERO was impressed by what it saw that year, reporting the school was making "notable progress".
"The new principal has been key to this progress," investigators found. "Her capable, dynamic leadership style has been instrumental in providing direction for the board."
In 2001 they said "significant progress continues".
David Hodge, principal at Tamaki College, which receives most Glen Innes pupils, says he noticed a marked academic improvement in the pupils.
"Rose was outstanding. She decided while the [historical and viability] studies were going on she would get on with the basic stuff. They gave the whole place a real overhaul."
The historical and viability reports were completed by June 2000. The viability report warned "at least one too many primary/intermediate schools in the area" and said the ministry should be wary of throwing "good money after bad". Yet for all its troubles, the researchers decided Glen Innes was viable. Closure was "not the quick, clean and financially attractive solution that is perceived by some", they found.
The ministry commissioned a business case to put dollar sums to that recommendation. But the entire reporting process was dogged by delays, dragging on for two years.
Massey University education consultant Kay Hawk, who led the business case, says, "I think [the delays] perpetuated the difficulties the school was in ... The community needed some visible signs that the ministry had made the decision to support this school and they never came."
Says Heath, "I quickly came to the conclusion that the biggest problem for the school was the ministry."
Even so, the business case, completed in September 2001, recommended spending $761,240. Rescue was in sight.
"We wouldn't have stayed so long and fought so hard if we thought there was any way they were going to back out," says Russell.
But in March 2002, the ministry did just that. Northern schools performance manager Ray Webb emailed Neal to say it was withdrawing its support for the financial injection.
"In other words," Heath says, "it was 'hang on in there guys, the business case is on its way', then 'oops, sorry, it's not'."
"The staff were devastated,"says Russell, "because everybody had put their hearts and souls into making it a good school."
Hawk, author of five business cases, was astonished. "That's a devastating thing to do to people and a community. There didn't seem to be an explanation, just lots of broken commitments."
A year on, Bates' explanation is clear: the disappointing 2002 roll. From 131 in 2001, it fell to 97 last year. That, says Bates, amounted to "a roll collapse". Spending more would have been "reckless". Staff saw that as betrayal, Bates as prudence.
"Our proposal to invest was based on a baseline in the mid-100s with expectation of growth. Once it dropped sharply below that we were forced to reconsider our position."
Neal and Russell say they neither knew what the ministry considered a minimum roll, nor that it expected such quick growth. Bates replies: "There wasn't a magic number, but at 145 there was a very large viability issue. At around 90, there was a huge viability issue."
The roll drop showed parents still weren't convinced Glen Innes was a good place for their kids, he adds. Tizard backs him up. "For whatever reason the parents in that area are choosing not to send their kids there ... Let's not be sentimental, let's make sure the education resources are used as best they can be."
That interpretation riles Neal, who puts the parents' wariness down to years of ministry inaction that sparked rumours of closure. Staff had been caught in a vicious, bureaucratic circle where they couldn't grow without ministry funds and the ministry wouldn't pay up because they weren't growing, she says.
"We were doing a really good job with 100 kids and they said no, not good enough. It just seemed really, really unfair and illogical that we weren't talking about quality, we were just talking about numbers."
Heath is confident that given the funding and four or five years, the reputation would have been restored and the roll back towards 200.
"Changing the image of a school is like steering a supertanker. You do the right things in the wheelhouse, but it's a long time before anything actually moves."
Bates says Heath and Neal's growth projections were "only speculation". It was the ministry's experience that negative public perception would "not be alleviated by the mere application of additional dollars".
That seems at odds with the historical report, which - remember - said money was at the base of Glen Innes' woes. Additional money was exactly what the doctor ordered.
Bates offers another reason for closure. After the roll drop, the ministry took "a second look" at school capacity. Glen Innes was 60 per cent under its maximum roll; Tamaki and Glen Taylor 37 per cent and 22 per cent respectively. That's a lot of empty desks.
"I accept the staff have a different view from the ministry, but in the end we are charged with efficient use of the public purse and we were being asked to put a substantial sum of money into a school that was running not a little under capacity, but well under capacity, and there was capacity in neighbouring schools."
And the viability report showed that even when the suburb grew, the school didn't.
But for how long? The Auckland City Council has designated Glen Innes a priority growth area. Its town centre and train station are being refurbished. Housing New Zealand this month began building $27 million worth of new homes in Talbot Park, and Auckland University's Tamaki campus is being expanded. The suburb is earmarked for gentrification, which will mean more families and the need for more schools.
Mallard is on the record saying he wants the property retained "because of population growth in Auckland". Presumably for a primary or secondary school.
Still, if there was excess capacity in 2002, there was excess capacity in 2000, when the school was deemed viable.
In fact, there was nothing the ministry learned in 2002 that it didn't know as far back as 1996, except the exact size of the roll.
In 2000 it knew the roll was well below full, its finances were shot and that there was excess capacity in Glen Innes. As Hawk and Heath say, closure then would have been understandable. Instead the ministry endorsed the viability report and helped staff to turn the school around. Closure now "defies logic", Hawk believes.
Bates insists parents had abandoned the school and that 2001 roll drop justified the ministry doing the same.
But the ministry was either wrong then, or is wrong now. Either public money has been wasted on a hopeless case for at least the past three years, or an opportunity for quality education is being cast aside.
"One of the things I said to the ministry all along was shoot us, don't strangle us," says Heath, but strangle them is exactly what the ministry has done.
Last year the school struggled on. But without a financial panacea it was bleeding to death. Neal and Heath went public saying the children's education was suffering. Heath was told off and resigned, but why did he stay on as a volunteer?
He offers a wry smile. "Because I'd become involved and thought an injustice had been done. And because I tilt at windmills ."
In December the board succumbed, resigning en masse and writing to parents recommending they send their children elsewhere this year. Their last meeting was emotion-charged, he recalls.
"It was a sense of failure, a sense of sadness looking at the amount of work people had put in and seeing it amount to nowt."
The feeling among the school community is angrier, says one Glen Innes woman who doesn't want to be named. "Many of the kids come from broken homes or tinny houses. They love going to school, it's their safe haven. They haven't got much and what they do, they've had to fight for."
Neal: "A lot of them feel it's just one more thing their community doesn't have."
No one knows what will happen to the site. The 48-pupil Kura Kaupapa told the ministry years ago they want it, but the ministry won't consider proposals until the minister has decided.
Hunt and Fenwick came to Glen Innes in January, only days before the school year began. Fenwick says she was told "we might get lucky if we get 10 students the first day".
They got 23, and others returned once they learned Glen Innes was open.
Neither Fenwick nor Hunt want to debate the school's past or future, saying only that they are ensuring the children who remain get "the best education".
It's what most past staff and board members wanted, too. But with almost all the lifeblood drained from the school and Mallard about to sign the death warrant, it looks as if this is the last year anyone will get an education of any kind at Glen Innes Intermediate.
HISTORY
1989
Tomorrow's Schools introduced
1991
Glen Innes roll is 180
1992
Abolition of school zones
Nearby Glen Taylor Primary extended to take year 7 and 8 pupils
1993
Some empty classrooms given to Kura Kaupapa and Kohanga Reo
1994
Roll hits 143
1996
ERO report reveals Glen Innes students "at risk" and staff "factionalism"
Peter Haycock becomes principal, finds school in "dire straits"
Ministry offering "informal" support
1998
Glen Innes struggling to pay power and water bills, owes $42,000 from personal grievance cases
Haycock approaches ministry for help
1999
Haycock resigns, concerned for own health, Rose Neal joins as principal
Roll holding at 140
Ministry says school rejects historical and viability reports three times. Neal says they were never offered until November, when research begins
2000
Historical report describes Glen Innes as "the worst resourced school ever seen", with few books and no rugby posts. Puts problems down to "financial difficulties".
Accompanying viability report, however, says Glen Innes is viable and recommends reform and cash injection
Ministry sends in Tim Heath as adviser
ERO says school making "notable progress" under Neal
2001
Ministry's much-delayed business case recommends spending $761,240 on school and ministry pledges support
ERO says "significant progress continues", but school roll down to 131
2002
Roll falls to 97 and ministry withdraws support for business case
Neal and Heath speak to Herald, criticising ministry
Heath is chastised for speaking publicly and resigns, but stays on board as a volunteer
Neal resigns, followed by board, which writes to parents recommending they send children elsewhere
Ministry initiates process to consider closure
2003
Anne Hunt made commissioner, hires Tairi Fenwick as principal
School begins with 23 pupils, growing to 36
By TIM WATKIN
A spark ignites in the thin Maori boy's eyes, then travels to his mouth, bursting into a full-flame grin. His hand shoots up. He's thought of an answer. The question asked of the 17 pupils in Rick Topp's year seven class at Glen Innes Intermediate is straightforward: What
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