\u201cThis investment will allow us to fix those issues and bring facilities up to a standard that students and staff expect.\u201d<\/p>\n
Porritt School\u2019s principal Maaka Papuni said the announcement ended an eight-year wait.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe heard about a replacement project for our school in 2018,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been going through the motions as global pandemics have struck, local natural disasters, and different ebbs and flows with the funding situation. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe are stoked as a school to finally be seeing some progress.\u201d<\/p>\n
Papuni said the 50-year-old school will receive six new teaching spaces in the first stage of its replacement project.<\/p>\n
He said the school\u2019s ageing prefabricated modular classrooms, dating back to the mid-1970s, had faced ongoing roofing issues.<\/p>\n
During severe weather events, including Cyclone Gabrielle, parts of the roof were damaged.<\/p>\n
Water leaked into classrooms and the staff room.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur roofs don\u2019t have much pitch at all. They\u2019re essentially flat roofs, so over time, there have been several issues,\u201d Papuni said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve worked really proactively to make sure those issues don\u2019t occur, but with just the nature and age of our building stock, they have from time to time.\u201d <\/p>\n
He said roof leaks had caused the school to close, even before Gabrielle. <\/p>\n
Porritt School, which has 325 students, had faced a re-roofing bill estimated at more than $2 million.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was probably a conservative estimate … purely to replace our roofs,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat gives you a bit of a sense of rebuild versus re-roof.\u201d<\/p>\n
Papuni said replacing the ageing buildings would create warmer, drier and more modern learning environments for students.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is really about the impact of these new purpose-built spaces for our tamariki.\u201d<\/p>\n
Raureka School principal Keryn Burns said her school had been allocated three new teaching spaces to replace its current Block I building.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe replacement of this block has been talked about for more than 10 years, so we are very pleased with the announcement,\u201d Burns said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey will provide warmer, more modern learning spaces with better acoustics, and will generally create a much nicer environment for teaching and learning.\u201d<\/p>\n
At Waipukurau School, principal Matt Jackett said the investment would help ensure facilities continued to meet the needs of current and future learners.<\/p>\n
\u201cAny investment in school property is ultimately an investment in our students, staff, and wider community,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHigh-quality learning environments make a real difference, and we\u2019re grateful to see support being directed towards ensuring our facilities continue to meet the needs of current and future learners.\u201d<\/p>\n
None of the three schools had received a timeline for construction, with further details on funding allocations and project start dates to be confirmed by the Ministry of Education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThis investment will allow us to fix those issues and bring facilities up to a standard that students…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491814,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1561,738,1976,178,111,43,139,69,814,6649,24352,1529],"class_list":["post-491813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-bay","tag-funding","tag-hawkes","tag-longawaited","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-property","tag-schools","tag-secure","tag-three"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=491813"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491813\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}