By ROSALEEN MACBRAYNE
TAURANGA - Papamoa parents may have won their battle over a new zoning regime which threatened to lock many children out of their neighbourhood school.
The Ministry of Education will re-examine the zoning and the pressure on schools in the rapidly growing suburb.
The ministry had directed Te Akau ki
Papamoa, the newest of the seaside settlement's three primary schools, to shrink its catchment area because there were empty classrooms at the long-established Papamoa Primary 4km away.
But under redrawn boundaries, the board of trustees found that it would be excluding families who lived only 200m from the school.
Principal Boyce Davey and the National MP for the Bay of Plenty, Tony Ryall, were inundated with complaints from parents, some of whom had bought homes in the area so that their children could attend the one-year-old school.
At a weekend meeting called by Mr Ryall, Mr Davey told 80 people that the ministry had told him on Friday that it had rejected the proposed zone, agreeing that the boundaries had to include houses closer to Te Akau.
Ministry officials also accepted that the school should have more than the four new classrooms under construction for next year.
Te Akau now has 12 rooms but a site capacity for double that number.
It would be back to the drawing board this week to find a solution to the problem of under-resourcing at Papamoa.
"We just can't keep using the enrolment zone like a rubber band, moving it up and down," Mr Davey said, adding that it was "gut-wrenching" causing heartache and financial problems for families.
He said it was always going to be impossible to reduce the school zone further in a high-growth area of mostly first-home owners.
