School gains ground, one toastie at a time
The country’s largest low decile high school has turned itself around – but its future is uncertain as the Education Ministry considers its funding, writes Josephine Franks.
Ateenager wields a can opener, peeling back the tops from dozens of tins of spaghetti until glistening orange discs cover the table. At the other end of the trestle table, a boy spoons baked beans onto a slice of bread. As soon as the dollop of beans has landed, another pair of hands places two slices of bread on top. Sandwiches stack up in a teetering pile, secured with plastic wrap.
Making 500 toasties requires a well-oiled production line. Industrial-sized toastedsandwich machines line one wall of the pavilion at the edge of Manurewa High School’s playing fields. Outside, teenagers charge up the field, red tags whipping in the wind behind them. Soon they’ll be flocking inside for a feed, courtesy of 18 of their classmates.
On Tuesday mornings, the high school’s pavilion pulses with the activity of 18 teenagers, year 9 and 10 boys who are preparing hundreds of toasties for their peers, as part of an alternative education pilot run by the school.
With more than 2000 students on its roll, Manurewa High is the largest decile-one school in the country. The South Auckland suburb is one of the most deprived in New Zealand. The number of one-parent households is higher than the national average, and the population is young. The alternative education pilot focuses on where teenagers go after their class-time, and what they have to deal with at home.
The programme, Te Ara Hou, or ‘‘the new path’’, is a bit different, set apart by its focus on wha¯ nau involvement, all-round wellbeing and Ma¯ ori and Pasifika values of love, respect and servant leadership.
Alternative education isn’t new. It’s mostly for students who have been suspended, excluded or have otherwise disengaged from school, the idea being that the individualised programmes get them back on track and back into regular classrooms.
The Ministry of Education funds 87 schools to run these initiatives and although Manurewa isn’t one of them, principal Pete Jones is hoping to change that next year.
Giving back is central to the programme, and that’s where feeding fellow students with toasties comes in. It’s not something the students will brag about, though, 15-year-old Miracle Amosa said. ‘‘We know for some kids out there the struggle is real so we’re happy to give.’’
The struggle is real for some of them too. The teenagers had a few things in common that flagged them as potential candidates for the pilot. They were capable learners, but disengaged from the classroom. They skipped school, and when they were there they struggled to focus. They needed a learning environment that would help them develop resilience to overcome the social issues they were facing outside school.
The boys had their own tales of what they were like: wagging, swearing at teachers, not listening. ‘‘No good,’’ as 13-yearold Vincent Collings puts it, with a bashful smile.
Te Ara Hou was structured around the boys’ needs. The programme took them out of the classrooms where they were struggling to concentrate. A team of three teachers and teacher aides, predominantly male, and Ma¯ ori or Pasifika, act as role models as well as teachers. The timetable took in te ao Ma¯ ori, kapa haka, dance and values-based learning as well as literacy and numeracy.
Kai is an important part of the programme, too. As well as making the toasties, they eat breakfast together every day, provided by KidsCan.
Rather than move between different subjects and teachers, they spend most of the school week in one group. That has given them – perhaps most importantly – a brotherhood.
‘‘We started off as strangers but it’s like we’re brothers now. The bond is really strong,’’ Miracle said. If children end up in gangs, it’s because brotherhood is so important, Jones said. This is a ‘‘positive gang’’.
Having a group of brothers at school was a big confidence boost for 14-year-old Carlos Rakete. The changes haven’t just been in the classroom, either. He got a leadership award from Counties Ma¯ ori Rugby and at home he’s started behaving differently towards his brother, helping him out. Before Te Ara Hou, friends and bullies were one and the same. ‘‘I didn’t know what a proper brother was.’’
Teacher aide Tony Pati is an extension of the brotherhood. At 26, he can see himself in the boys – he was easily distracted at school, too – and the students can relate to him. He and the other teacher aide are members of hip hop dance crew Prestige, and dance lessons have formed an unlikely cornerstone of the timetable.
It was completely out of the boys’ comfort zone at the beginning, Pati said. Some kids would sit outside the class out of shyness. Then this term, they got a standing ovation after performing to a crowd of 400. Dance has given them a new type of confidence, Pati said.
That’s not the only change the teachers have seen. There was less fighting and swearing in class, and all the boys were engaged with learning. Ten of the students improved their internal assessment levels. Attendance went up across the board; one student went from 35 to 90 per cent attendance. Another jumped from 24 to 71 per cent.
That’s not to say it’s been an easy ride. ‘‘At the beginning it was really hard – and it’s still really hard now,’’ Pati said. There are days the boys fight, or someone goes missing halfway through the day. Absence can still be a problem, and normally it’s to do with things going on at home. Making up for missed time is a challenge.
The students do a daily reflection writing exercise that helps them understand why they might have behaved the way they did, and the teachers grasp what external forces might be at play. If one of the boys isn’t focusing, it might be because they arrived at school too late for breakfast and hadn’t had dinner, so they were hungry, Pati said.
Or they were up late looking after their baby sister because their mum was at work, dad’s not around, and they were caring for their nana too.
‘‘In the first two terms, we found we had to listen to our kids, not teach our kids,’’ he said.
Responding to individual students’ needs and the make-up of a community was vital, former principal and Manurewabased education consultant Keri Milne-Ihimaera said. Too often, students in need of alternative education were pulled out of their school communities and sent away to external providers: an ‘‘out of sight, out of mind’’ approach, she said.
The school still doesn’t know if the ministry will fund the programme next year. It was only by chance it had the resources this year – two teacher aides were available and some teaching hours freed up by someone returning from maternity leave.
That won’t be the case in the new year, but it’s not an option to thrust all the boys back into the classes they left in term two. Some of them would transition back, but not all of them were ready, Jones said. For some of them, Te Ara Hou is it.
A bid is in with the Ministry of Education for upwards of $230,000, which would pay for two teachers and two teacher aides plus classroom resources, uniforms and winter jackets.
There were many girls who would benefit from the initiative, Jones said, but the programme could only expand if it was funded. If not, plans for the girls’ class would go on hold.
For the boys, though, he said there was no way they could scrap the programme after seeing the benefits it had brought. Taking a fulltime teacher out of the pool would stretch staffing in the rest of the school, but Te Ara Hou wasn’t something they could afford to lose. ‘‘We’ll find a way,’’ Jones said.
‘We know for some kids out there the struggle is real so we’re happy to give.’ MIRACLE AMOSA ‘‘‘I didn’t know what a proper brother was.’’’ CARLOS RAKETE, 14