The human cost of arson

Mangere East Primary School teacher Aisina McDonald looks at the damaged classrooms with her daughter, Bella McDonald. Photo / Dean Purcell

The middle class from the block of prefabs is gone now.

Air whistles through where walls should be. Now and then the wind collects some of the ash, scattering it into faces and clothes and tainting everything with the smell of burnt school.

Last Sunday night's fire, one of two school blazes at the weekend, burnt out the entire middle classroom of this block at Mangere East Primary School, leaving mangled pink batts dripping down the walls and the metal frames of what once were desks.

"It's not so bad here, follow me,"says the tall man in the green jumper, who's putting on a cheerful face.

Really, principal Anthony Noble-Campbell is as gutted as parts of his school.

We trail after him to see what is left of the junior school.

There isn't much. A second fire lit here has ravaged the block, reducing to ash the colourful pictures of the new entrants and the precious mats adorning the Samoan bilingual unit's walls.

The remaining piles of rubble and char have extinguished the joy from the Samoan language week celebrations held just the week before.

In all, seven classrooms and everything in them are missing at this school, including the goldfish.

It isn't just the missing buildings that hurt.

The ripple effects of school fires go on for a long time.

Missing now, too, is the sense of safety. This is carefully nurtured at the decile one school, which takes in children from the surrounding neighbourhoods making up this low-income area of Mangere.

When life outside is tough, the children know school is safe. When we visited on Wednesday, staff surveying the wreckage were wondering how to go about reassuring them this still is a safe place.

On Thursday two teenage boys, 13 and 14, were arrested in connection with the fires.

Whether they are responsible and whether this was arson remains to be seen, though firefighters we spoke to were certain these fires were deliberately lit.

Each year there is an estimated $3 million or more cost from fire damage to schools.

The two latest fires - Kerikeri High School lost a science lab and classrooms last weekend - bring the school blaze total to 57 in the past financial year. Two thirds are believed to be arson.

Mostly, says Peter Wilding, the Fire Service's fire investigation and arson reduction manager, young people who commit arson don't realise the consequences. The vast majority who light fires at schools are reckless or opportunistic, but not usually malicious, he says.

Once they realise there are serious consequences, they can be shocked and remorseful.

This is small comfort for Mangere East school.

When the school re-opens on Monday, the 5-year-olds will probably ask first "did anyone die" and follow with "was there any blood", say two junior school teachers surveying their wrecked classrooms.

When the children inevitably get around to asking why did someone burn down their safe place, well, they'll just have to say sometimes people do mean and silly things.

Some of these children probably know that in their lives already, the women say, but they will tell them whoever did it won't be coming back and do their best to make them feel secure.

Jannette Henderson and Linda Jones are now standing in the lone unwrecked room at the end of the block as people mill about, moving out what is left of scarce teaching resources.

The huge turnout of firefighters on Sunday evening managed to contain the fire to here, but this room is structurally unsound and also will be demolished.

The teachers hope nothing will be left of the fire when the children return to school on Monday.

It would be worse for the kids to try and see where they sat among this decimation; a clear, empty space would be better.

"It's just awful because they're only 5 and they've just started school," says Henderson.

"Some have been at school a week and some a couple of weeks, others a few months, but they all just started this year."

Some of the children are very vulnerable, the women say. They come to school and talk about what they've been doing and their parents, too, talk to the teachers about personal issues.

This will be traumatising. The children will need to be reassured, because they'll probably wonder if the fire can happen while they are here at school.

The children will also want some of their things around them, their art area and painting equipment, because they'll probably say "can we do painting today?"

But nothing is left.

"Our rooms and Malo who teaches next door - all ash," Henderson says.

Aisina McDonald is here today, with her 7-year-old daughter, Bella.

McDonald teaches in the room still standing at the end of the condemned junior block and Bella goes to school here too.

Bella agrees she feels a bit icky about the fire.

"I feel scared," she says softly, "cause, um, it's never happened before. Yeah, it feels frightening and scary."

Later, the pair are outside when rumbling machinery pulls down what's left of what was the nice new sun shelter at the junior block - only a year old - and the ground trembles.

McDonald pulls her daughter close. Bella has asked her questions, such as what does arson mean, and her mum's told her it's when people try to burn something down.

It's so sad, McDonald says, for the community and the children.

Because the school closed for the week, parents, a lot of whom do shift work, suddenly had to take time off work, so there's a financial cost for these families.

Another consequence, says the principal who is gazing at the grassy area in front of prefabs in the distance, is going to be less space.

That grass is the smaller children's playing area but they are going to have to fit in seven relocatable classrooms until the block is rebuilt, and that could be two years.

A couple of the temporary classrooms will have to go up on the senior playing field, so there will be less and less room to move, he says.

Noble-Campbell's school is well cared for. There are bright murals and tidy lawns.

There's a lot of pride in this school, he says, but this has been disrespected.

"We've lost buildings and resources, but it was also our place. Our school was like our daytime family.

"This was our house, our place that we all knew.

"That's what we've lost, that's what we're grieving for and that's what the community is angry about."

Some of the teachers have been here for years and over that time they've built up valuable teaching resources - books, games, maths equipment.

It's all gone. "You can't replace these things overnight," he says.

He and the staff here have spoken to the Education Department's trauma team, to deal with their own grief and also to be alert to recognising the signs of grief and behaviour change in the children. Kids can be resilient, but some might find this hard.

"My hope is they'll talk about these buildings that have gone, that they'll write stories about it and I think the children will move on."

The teachers know their children well, he says, and they will know if they have withdrawn into themselves, whether they're less expressive, and programmes will be adjusted accordingly to get the children back to how they were.

There is so much grieving here. The school opened in 1928, the first in the area.

Generations have been through here, parents and grandparents of the current students.

People are calling Noble-Campbell, expressing their sorrow.

Former Prime Minister David Lange's children went here, sporting hero Valerie Vili went here.

A small group of teenage girls have turned up and are watching the demolition.

One says she went to school here.

"That's my classroom right there," she says pointing at the mess.

"That's where I got my brains from," she giggles, but she looks sad and shocked.

This is a cool school, she says. It meant a lot to her.

Malo Solfa Seuloni, who heads the Samoan bilingual unit, is also gutted.

"Reduced to ashes. Mixed emotions. Heartbreaking, angry. Just no need for this. The books and all that, you can replace," she says.

"But it's the memories, the story to those rooms that cannot be replaced."

So much hard work had gone into setting up the unit.

"It's one of the initiatives that came up from the community, and the school, and looking at it now, it's so heartbreaking, so sad. It's more than just a classroom, it's a second home to most of our children and our parent community."

Some of the parents have to go to work before seven so teachers always tried to get to school early to throw open the doors and warm up the rooms for the children.

It's also the place where they had their morning prayers.

"There's five classes to the unit and you know, one of the first questions that came up when I came that evening [Sunday night when the school was burning], little Willie came round and said 'Malo, where are we going to have the morning prayers now?'

"That, to come from one of the kids, was heartbreaking. It's not safe anymore. What we'll do is we'll try to get everything back to normal as soon as we can. It's not a job we can do by ourselves. We'll call the community in.

"We cry together, we laugh together, read together, we'll go through the process together and we'll bounce back," she says firmly.

And Matariki, which signals the Maori New Year is about to begin.

That's good timing, she says, because Matariki is about new beginnings so that's what they'll tell the children.

WHO LIGHTS FIRES

The curiosity fire setter - usually very young, fire setting is experimental rather than a sign of psychopathology or family problems.

The cry-for-help fire setter - often shows early behaviour problems, has a stressful life, and lights fires for attention.

The delinquent fire setter - behaviour is usually present in adolescence and displays other deviant signs.

The severely disturbed or pathological firesetter - rare, and has other severe problems.

Fire Research Report, 2009, University of Auckland