Fall and rise of Salisbury
From near closure, to a complete rebuild, Salisbury School near Nelson is celebrating a dramatic revival in its fortunes. Katy Jones reports.
When Molly Armstrong started secondary school, her family was falling apart. The contrast, some two years on, is stark. ‘‘I can’t describe to you the difference in my daughter,’’ Nick Armstrong said.
‘‘Last weekend we went out for a meal in a restaurant.
‘‘We sat for an hour and a half ... she had a pizza and we talked and did crosswords and had a laugh, it was just so uplifting. We could just function as a family and enjoy ourselves, rather than not leaving the house.’’
Before Molly was enrolled at Salisbury School in Richmond, just over a year ago, such an outing was unimaginable.
Molly, who has a unique chromosome abnormality, would come home from mainstream school exhausted.
When people tried to teach her things she found difficult, ‘‘her reaction was to be physical, and not verbal in words, but with noise,’’ Armstrong said.
‘‘It became a pretty constant assault.
‘‘She is not a bad kid, she just struggled, and we did not know how to overcome those things.’’
While behavioural services workers visited the family at their home in the Wairarapa, the right expertise couldn’t be found to deliver respite.
Tensions at home escalated as Armstrong and his wife tried to understand what the future might look like for Molly and their other daughter, knowing that he and his wife were not going to be there forever.
‘‘All those things brought a huge amount of stress and a huge amount of guilt, and a lot of anger.
‘‘My younger daughter was racked with anxiety all the time.
‘‘You keep a brave face out there, you keep turning up for work and all those sorts of things, but we were desperately looking for relief.’’
While the local college was not equipped to support Molly, who is missing genes including for vision and mental development, the couple realised that she could learn, and started to investigate options.
It was only through luck that they discovered Salisbury School.
Looking for help online, they stumbled across a clip for a television programme about disability, in which the school in Richmond featured.
When they visited Salisbury for the first time, they met other parents with similar stories.
‘‘It really struck me at that point there that we were not alone in all this, there was hope at the end of the tunnel, where we did not know if there was any.’’
Armstrong said an announcement on Wednesday, that the Government was pumping in $8 million to rebuild the school on site from scratch, offered the prospect of more hope for more families.
The news was a lot for staff to take in, senior teacher Dale Roozenburg among them.
‘‘My immediate reaction was: is this real? and then a huge weight lifted off my shoulders,’’ she said.
Roozenburg, who has worked at the school for girls aged 8-15 since 2002, said the past eight years had been a rollercoaster for Salisbury as it battled to stay open.
In 2012, National’s Education Minister, Hekia Parata, attempted to close Salisbury but lost the fight in the High Court.
Four years later, Parata said the successful implementation of the Intensive Wraparound Service (IWS) in 2012 had reduced the demand for residential schooling, and a date was proposed in January 2017 to close the school.
It was not until December 2017, three months after the general election, that Labour’s Education Minister, Chris Hipkins, announced he was ending the closure process.
The chair of the school board, Emma Thompson, said Salisbury’s roll dropped after the introduction of IWS, when the focus was on supporting mainstream schools to cater for some students with learning difficulties or other disabilities.
A decade ago, Salisbury had 77 students, and over 100 staff.
There are currently seven girls and 34 staff.
Thompson said a ‘‘complicated’’ system introduced in 2012, where students were no longer able to enrol directly at Salisbury but had to be accepted into the IWS first, meant the process was not easy to access for all families.
Changes to the system last year through the ‘‘direct access pathway’’ (renamed the RSS-only pathway) had not made the process easy enough, she said.
‘‘It is not a very equitable process ... there are some families that really won’t even try when they look at it.’’
The school was working with the ministry to simplify the system, and it was hoping for significant changes next year that would see the roll grow.
While the new build would cater for 20 students, the school needed to build a plan for double that number, Thompson said.
‘‘We know the need is there.’’ Students had more complex needs than previously, most presenting with more sensory needs and with a combination of disabilities since the introduction of IWS, including vision and hearing impairment, autism, Down syndrome and dyspraxia.
Christine Robertson, a weekday morning supervisor in the residential unit, said the school’s buildings, some dating back
100 years, were no longer fit for purpose. The girls deserved a more welcoming home environment than the run-down, dormitory style accommodation with dingy corridors and 1950s style shower blocks.
‘‘We need to have something that is light, bright, modern.’’
Roozenburg said it would be helpful not to have to prop up sash windows in the day school with pieces of wood, to have an even temperature in the classrooms, and doors that were easy to open.
She said while staff had been innovative to ensure students’ needs were met, some had reached into their own pockets for resources.
Thompson said the school had been starved of property funding since 2005 and had to find money to maintain and repair the aged buildings from its limited operational budget, which was throwing ‘‘good money after bad’’.
The school was now creating a document describing its needs for the new design for the school, on a reduced footprint, and expected construction to go out to tender next year, and start in 2021.
Thompson said it was exciting that part of the 10-hectare site would be freed up for other educational purposes, proposing that it could become a centre for excellence for learning support.
Armstrong hoped the development would make it easier for families struggling to leave their daughters at the school.
‘‘If I did not know there were such dedicated, passionate staff across both campuses [school and residential], it would have been very hard to leave my daughter there.
‘‘Tired old buildings with ... big corridors where you can’t see who is coming, with fire-proof doors that the kids can’t open because they are not strong enough, is kind of a bad idea.’’
Being together day and night helped the girls form a bond, and Molly had made her first real friend there, which reduced her anxiety and brought calmness, Armstrong said. ‘‘If Molly has been able to benefit from that, how many other girls out there could benefit from that , and what difference is that going to make to them now, and their families now and the future for those girls.’’
The school is one of three residential special schools in New Zealand for students with highly complex behaviour and/or learning needs, and the only one which is exclusively for girls.
Thompson said Halswell in Christchurch, rebuilt after the earthquake, was a good example of how Salisbury could be designed to enable it to be easily extended.