"We just felt it was best to do it this way instead of having just a few students go every week and it would get more and more sad for the students who were left, and their families.
"It was just the writing on the wall.
"We were in the high 30s two years ago and the numbers just dwindled. We had two successive years of eight children leaving for college, and no new entrants starting. You could just see it coming. The numbers just weren't there."
The board had held two community meetings, she said, and the closure was seen as inevitable.
"We knew the school wasn't going to be feasible after the end of the year. These days it's a wider community decision to close a school and we had some people there who had been at Mangamaire about 60 years ago. You can imagine how they felt having to be the ones to say, 'okay, the time has come'."
The community would hold a celebration in December to commemorate the 118-year history of the school and while acknowledging the irony, Mrs Gavin said she believed emotions sparked through the closure would have by then subsided.
"It's just too hard to do it now. But by the end of the year we'll have past pupils back from university or back from overseas and we can all be part of looking back at the good times - it's just too gut-wrenching right now."
Acting principal Ester Romp lived in the district and both her children had attended the school, with which she had been involved for about 25 years. She had been appointed acting principal part-way through the first term this year and was unsure whether she would stay in the education sector.
She said community members were now focused on the commemoration celebration and community groups were "exploring ideas with the MOE to allow continued use" of the adventure playground and tennis court at the school grounds.
Ministry of Education senior advisor Bruce Levick, who was involved with 41 schools from Norsewood in the north to Lower Hutt in the south, said Friday's closure had been "a very amicable and carefully worked out solution".
"It's been one of the smoothest operations I've come across of all those I've worked with. It's a lovely place and it was a very difficult decision to make, I'm sure," he said.
"You've got to take into account modern education and sometimes it's a bit more effective when the numbers are larger. I understand there had been quite strong debate a few years ago about closure. But then you get resurgences and people come and go, and that's just the farming community, especially dairy farming."
Mr Levick said be a company will soon take the property in hand and check on original owners and any Maori land claims, before possibly putting the school up for sale.
