Collingwood Area School - thriving at 150
Year 8 students Pamela Burton (left) and Taylor McNeil (right) taking part in the welcoming powhiri for ERO last week.
With its 150th year “Sesqui” celebrations coming up over Easter, Collingwood Area School (CAS) lays claim to not only being the oldest school by far in the Bay, but amongst the oldest in New Zealand, founded when our nation’s first goldrush got into full swing in 1859. Today its 122 students (ranging from Year 1 to 13) may be fewer than the 230-plus students who graced its roll in the mid 1990s, but it’s still a place full of life and innovation.
Principal for the last seven years has been John Garner. He says that when he first started at Collingwood there was widespread talk nationwide about school closures, but CAS was never actually mentioned. “Fact is, there’d be a long way for kids to go if this school ceased to exist. Already the pupils from Mangarakau who attend here have to get on their bus at 7.25am, and they don’t get home until 4.10pm. That’s enough of a long day without making it longer.” Collingwood was once surrounded by smaller satellite schools, at Rockville, Bainham, Pakawau, Puponga, Rakopi, Mangarakau and Onekaka.
The Education Review Office (ERO) paid CAS its routine three-yearly visit last week. “Obviously we have to wait until the report is released, but the feedback we got from them was the school is certainly going in the right direction,” said Mr Garner. “‘Just keep going the way you are’ was the message we got. We’ve certainly had some good results with our senior students (several of whom last year qualified for scholarships). One achieved endorsement with excellence and two others got merit. We only have 25 students in our years 11 to 13, so that’s a great result for us.”
John sees his school’s big challenge in the near future as keeping as up-to-date as possible with IT, and this includes securing the best possible internet connection for his students. “It will hugely facilitate one-to-one learning. At the moment our Pacific.net wireless system lets us operate around 2 to 4 megabytes per second, and that’s probably better than anyone else is getting in the Bay. But compare this to Parklands School in Motueka who recently got upgraded to 70 megabytes per second! That’s the power of the fibre optic network that we don’t have access to.”
Twenty of the senior students are also looking forward to attending the Top of the South Area Schools Tournament from 4–9 April, this year to be held at South Westland Area School in Hari Hari. Art competitions and bake-offs are now all part of the play as much as the active codes.
The newest arrival on CAS’s 15-strong teaching staff is new entrants’ teacher Linda Gosling, all the way from Stoke Golding, a town the size of Takaka in the English Midlands. The enthusiastic “primary reception” teacher came here at the start of the year with her farmer/electrician husband Richard and their three boys for “a lifestyle change”.
“I love it here!” Linda says. “As a family we are experiencing things we would never do in the UK, like eating shellfish off the beach, for instance. Last weekend we all went down to Kahurangi Lighthouse. Coming from the middle of England, that felt amazing.”
John Garner says that having to adjust to a new education system is a big ask, but reckons his new teacher’s enthusiastic and hardworking approach has brought all-round benefit to the school. Linda’s class of 16 five to seven-year-olds is expected to be up to 26 by the end of the year as new school-age kids from the area come onstream.
John is pragmatic about the changes. “Demographics change all the time. This school has been around a long time, and it’ll be here a while yet, that’s for sure.”
Gerard Hindmarsh
