Rural school’s final bell
Nationwide, small rural schools are closing as rolls dwindle. Nikki Macdonald reports on the sad end of Tuturumuri School after 97 years.
The morning of the sendoff, Ian Hunter cranked up Leonard Cohen – ‘‘There’s a crack in everything’’ – sipped on tea and contemplated not going.
To the outsider, it’s just a couple of classrooms, a swimming pool, a tennis court and playground. But to Hunter, Tuturumuri’s tiny rural school is a part of him.
It’s the thread spun through three generations of his family. His mother, Alison Deller, rode there on a pony with her seven siblings when the classroom was still the shearing quarters. She opened the indoor pool and cut the 75th jubilee cake.
When he went there, in the 1960s, it was still freezing in winter, even with the pot belly stove. But it was bloody good fun and it set him up for the world.
His daughter Kirstin’s and son Callum’s artworks are still sewn to the classroom curtains. ‘‘This is who I am,’’ he says. ‘‘This is my tu¯ rangawaewae.’’
Or it was. After two years of battling Education Ministry plans to kill off its 97-year-old school and social hub, the small Wairarapa community has finally given up the fight.
Locals tried everything from cash incentives to job ads looking specifically for workers with families to encourage more kids. But this year the roll dropped again from seven to two, and time ran out.
So on Sunday, about 80 former pupils, parents and principals gathered to remember the good times and farewell another rural community hub.
Since 2002, 174 state schools have closed, not including former charter schools. Many have been in small rural centres, including recent casualties such as Hillcrest School in Pahı¯atua, Mapiu near Te Kuiti, Isla Bank near Winton, and the 131-yearold Inangahua Junction School.
With farming communities already feeling their distinctive lifestyle is under threat, Hunter says rural school closures feel like another nail in the coffin. And don’t get him started on the billion trees.
Hang a left out of Martinborough and it’s 29km of wiggly tarseal to Tuturumuri. Past the rolling sheep farms, the Whakapuni stockyards, the slow chop-chop of the Hau Nui wind farm. Forget GoogleMaps – cellphone coverage fades around the same time as radio reception.
Tuturumuri Station was bought by the government in 1920 for farms for returned war veterans. There were 99 marbles in the ballot – 11 sections sold, and eight were set aside for a school.
Lessons were initially taught at settlers’ homes – the first being Hunter’s grandparents the Dellers. In 1932, a classroom was finally built, with a blackboard, an easel, curtains and 12 children. The only transport to Martinborough was the twiceweekly mail truck.
Beyond Tuturumuri are the coastal settlements of White Rock and Tora, which used to have its own school. But that was an early casualty of rationalisation, closing in 1970.
Now its neighbour will suffer the same fate, meaning coastal kids face the choice of a two-hour drive to Martinborough School, or the social isolation of correspondence learning. As unnamed Tora parents told the Education Ministry during previous attempts to close Tuturumuri, that would mean replacing after-school sports, activities and time with friends with ‘‘just a bumpy ride for the next eight years of their lives’’.
In Tuturumuri’s second classroom, former pupils from the 1950s and 60s are trawling archive books and swapping stories. They all know each other, despite a 10-year age gap. They all played in the 1957 school rugby team. That’s the good and the bad of a tiny school, where you might have no mates your own age.
Theresa Moran remembers her brother Gary taking his .22 on the bus, to shoot magpies. There must be a pile of used leather shaving straps somewhere, but Gary’s gun didn’t merit one – the teacher reckoned that was a great idea.
They’d go eeling and pick walnuts while waiting for the bus, and walk around learning the names and whistles of the birds.
Dian Marment bears the scar on her knee scoured by the tennis court. The school was the hub of the community, she says. Files record the momentous Pet Day, with its lambs in grass skirts and tutus, and dogs made from vegetables. It was such a big deal it once featured on Country Calendar.
Peter and Viv Wimms walk past the empty community noticeboard and peek into the 97-year-old main classroom. The former principal and relief teacher haven’t been inside since they left in 1977, when the school was in its heyday with 54 pupils. ‘‘A lot were workers’ kids from surrounding farms,’’ Viv says. ‘‘And owners’ kids. It was really nice – there was always somebody having a baby. I guess times have changed.’’ There’s a noticeboard in place of the art cupboard where she used to park her youngest when she helped teach; there’s a staff toilet so teachers no longer have to put on gumboots and tromp across to the toilet in the principal’s house. There’s a second classroom and a flash heated indoor pool. But the change is more profound than that. In the 70s, the road to Martinborough was still gravel and ‘‘quite a mission’’, Viv says. Groceries, milk and newspapers were delivered.
‘‘The school was the hub, and I imagine it still is. I would think the community is devastated. People would stop at our place and ask ‘Where’s the petrol station?’ or ‘Where’s the dairy?’ There’s nothing. This is it.’’
But now the road is sealed. And some of Tuturumuri’s parents are choosing to drive their children past the school gates into town.
There are children aplenty playing on the climbing frames and in the pool, but only two belong there – 11-year-old Garnier and 5-year-old Nutrisse. Their parents, Rita and Peter Bragger, are gutted at the school’s closure.
‘‘It’s been an awesome
school,’’ Peter says. ‘‘You can’t complain about the studentteacher ratio,’’ he jokes.
Now they’ll have to drive the girls 50 minutes to Featherston. Having lived just around the corner from the school since they moved into the district in 1987, they worry they’ll no longer be involved in school life. But they know it’s the right decision. ‘‘You have to have buddies at school,’’ Rita says.
The school started the year with seven pupils, but that dwindled to two, after parents moved away. Roll volatility has always been a problem, both for parents and principals. Nik Edwards rates his years as principal at Tuturumuri in 1994-95 as the best years of his teaching career. But as sole charge for 30 children, he couldn’t do it any longer. ‘‘I was just shattered.’’
After a successful earlier fight to keep it open, there is ‘‘resigned acceptance’’ the school has come to the end of the line, current principal Alistair Morrison says.
He came from a small Ka¯ piti Coast school for a lifestyle change and a career promotion. He believes there’s still a role for small rural schools, where low student numbers allow realworld learning.
But a ‘‘perfect storm’’ of factors makes it hard for such schools to survive, says Jenny Boyne, of Tora Station. Her husband Alistair and their four children all went to Tuturumuri.
‘‘It’s a fantastic country school. It’s just a shame there’s a lack of kids.’’
While there are subdivisions pending, tough times for farming mean there are few work options for young families. And there’s a lag before kids return to take over family farms, and have their own children.
Land use change is also changing demographics – with farmland turning to forestry and honey-making, which use mostly out-of-district contract labour, Boyne says. She would have loved to see the school given a five-year recess to ride out the low numbers.
Maureen Coulson reckons social change also makes it more difficult for isolated schools to survive. She moved to Tuturumuri in 1974 from the Hutt Valley, after husband Peter decided to try shepherding. They sent their three kids to Tuturumuri School.
Maureen would drive the old Bedford bus to round up the children. The school was ‘‘a hell of an important thing’’, she says. ‘‘It kept everybody together.’’
Most mothers didn’t go out to work, so there was no need to trek into town to send the kids to daycare, or to commute. Now, that’s changed.
‘‘We had a house, we got our meat, we got our power. The lifestyle kept us here as well . . . People are having children a bit later now. Both parents are working. You can’t travel from here to Martinborough or Masterton or Featherston every day.’’
In a submission opposing Tuturumuri’s closing, Rural Women New Zealand said the decline of rural schools was increasing the urban-rural divide by making the countryside less attractive for workers.
It could also consign women to the home as, if home-schooling was needed, it would inevitably fall to them.
‘‘We fear that there will be an increase in isolation and continuation of the notion that women should be the primary caregiver, housekeeper and family cook – hardly gender equality, hardly empowering, and hardly expected in 2018.’’
The ministry made much of the fact that 10 potential pupils chose not to attend Tuturumuri. Some had parents who worked in Martinborough, so joined their commute. One parent sent a submission supporting the school closure, saying it didn’t meet his children’s education needs and the funding would be better spent elsewhere. That cut a cleft through the community.
‘‘Sometimes I’m not sure if we still have a community,’’ Peter Bragger says quietly. That may be the saddest consequence of the school’s closure, and the hardest to fix.
Maureen Coulson’s daughter Tania eyes the field where they played bullrush and climbed trees – all the freedoms now denied city kids.
‘‘It’s just a real shame that it has come to this. I hope they use it for some good, not just let it go to rack and ruin.’’
Assuming Education Minister Chris Hipkins signs off the school’s closure, the last day will be Friday the 13th of December. The land will then revert to Land Information New Zealand for disposal. The community will fight for the facilities it fundraised for, such as the indoor pool.
Judging by the fate for other closed schools, the classrooms could be shipped out, turned into homes or holiday rentals. Who knows what will happen to the two-headed papier mache dragon Twinlicia, who was supposed to be the school’s guardian.
By term’s end, Ian Hunter will probably be into shearing season. The community will struggle on, he says. It won’t be as close. You won’t see your neighbours as often.
But you have to live in the real world, and closing his heritage is the only sensible decision. ‘‘I will get over it.’’
Peter Bragger smarts at the finality of it all. ‘‘We just know once it’s gone, it’s gone forever. There’s no coming back.’’