Catering for senior students at Collingwood
The “sky climber”, newly installed at Collingwood Area School. Photo: Gerard Hindmarsh.
This school holidays it will be learning as usual for at least seven senior Collingwood Area School (CAS) students, as they will be attending various training courses around the country.
Four will participate in a National Area School leadership camp at Wainui, Akaroa Harbour, and another three have gone to a Beyond the Camera course in Christchurch. As well as attending the latter, which deals with all aspects of filming, Year 12 student Rachel Boult will also be spending her holidays taking in a Youth Drama course in Hastings for her second consecutive year.
CAS principal John Garner says that having only 30 students in the senior school (year 11 and up) means individual programmes can be tailor-made to the needs of students.
“Overall our NCEA results have been very encouraging, but it’s outside the mainstream subjects that some really marvellous opportunities are happening for our senior students, and we really want to encourage them in activities that will give them good workplace skills. Ninety percent of all our outside courses are funded by the school and that’s a big support for students.”
CAS’s Gateway programme for students now routinely includes courses in agriculture, early childhood education, building and electrical engineering, while their STAR courses are in tourism, travel, hospitality, and agriculture and forestry, the latter run in association with Telford Polytechnic near Balclutha. The school recently acquired a portable bandsaw mill so the forestry and building students can learn to mill their own timber for the woodworking shop.
Six senior students, along with PE teacher Steve Beck, gained their scuba-diving certificates at the end of last term, having trained at Kaiteriteri and in Nelson. They are planning their first trip together as qualified divers to the Marlborough Sounds in May.
Twenty senior CAS students spent the last week of term attending the Area Schools Tournament in Tapawera, but one of them, year 12 German exchange student Yanik Scholtissek, headed instead to attend the Warbirds Over Wanaka. The reason? He already holds his private pilot’s licence.
Younger students at the school need not feel left out. Their school’s latest acquisition is a “sky climber”, a sophisticated German-designed climbing web that was erected by builder Alan Clingan. It’s not only proving popular for recreation, but also for sports competitions and even tricky maths exercises involving calculating areas and volumes.
And that’s not all that’s going on. The day this reporter turned up, years 5 and 6 students had just made (and ate, of course) pizzas, made with some of the ingredients they’d grown themselves in the school garden.
Gerard Hindmarsh
