Facing life together
A small South Canterbury education centre bore a great deal of loss in 2021, and found its own way through. Aoraki Alternative Education manager Rob Emerson spoke to senior reporter Keiller MacDuff about what it took to get the young people in his charge through several tragedies, and why it was important to follow the students’ lead.
Two of the five teenage boys who died in last year’s horrific crash at Washdyke, near Timaru, were current or recent students of Emerson’s – and there were several links between the centre and the other boys – through brothers, sisters, cousins and friends. Alternative Education student Javarney Drummond, 15, and Niko Hill, 15, who had left the centre the term before, along with friends Andrew Goodger, 15, Jack Wallace, 16, and
Joseff McCarthy, 16, were killed when the car they were passengers in crashed into a power pole on August 7, 2021. In June, the driver and sole survivor, 19-year-old Tyreese Fleming, was sentenced to 21⁄2 years in prison in June.
Just days after the crash, the centre – which provides education for young people who have been taken out of mainstream schooling – was hit with the death of another student.
‘‘I’ve never had a moment in my life like it, it’s not like I’m the in-house expert in it.
I’ve had times, but nothing, nothing of this magnitude.’’
Emerson said the enormity of what happened forced him and his team to improvise, step back and step up simultaneously.
‘‘We didn’t overthink it, we didn’t over-qualify it. We decided from the outset, who knows grief – none of us really do? So let’s do what we can do – let’s just adapt, remain flexible – that’s really all we could do.
‘‘Our kids were pretty bloody good I thought, and the
adults – it was a time we just came together, and we got closer because of it.’’
Emerson said the staff kept talking about the situation as they processed the enormity of it, working through it in their own way, and not allowing anyone to tell them how they should grieve.
‘‘I think that’s what was special about this place,’’ he said.
In the immediate aftermath of the crash, he and his team dropped everything, shutting down day-today lessons, but not the centre itself.
‘‘We had probably half the kids turn up . . . They would remember their friends, regale us with stories about the different kids, particularly Javarney and Niko. We found photos and video clips of a recent trip we’d had to Takapō .’’
He said they didn’t have access to funding to give koha to the five families, but there was something they could do together – and that was to ‘‘cook up a storm’’ in the centre’s kitchen.
‘‘I can’t tell you how many trays of lasagne and macaroni cheese we made. The team would go around to the houses delivering the food, sometimes just leaving it on the doorstep, sometimes face to face, just saying, ‘we’re here’.’’
Emerson said in some ways it was a continuation of the centre’s general approach to meeting young people where they are.
‘‘It was quite fluid. It wasn’t labelled, it wasn’t directed, it morphed and was quite natural. And they [the students] could see it was part of living and, as horrific as it was, there was no talk about blame.
‘‘I guess, in many ways, we normalised it. We didn’t make it taboo, and as a result, the kids felt a lot of freedom to talk to the staff and do certain things, for example, they produced a beautiful piece of art that reflected their journey.’’
Emerson points proudly to one of the many artworks around the centre, a series of plaster casts of the faces of students and tutors, placed, in the form of a cross, on a painted background of a heart.
‘‘About a week before the event, we did face casting with plaster of paris. It comes out slightly abstract – you can see the person’s face, sort of like a bust.
‘‘We realised a few weeks after [the crash] that we had Javarney’s face cast. It was a little bit eerie at first. But we ended up creating more moulds, and we made up two shadow boxes and gave them to Javarney’s family as his last piece of artwork from the centre.’’
Then the students created the work which now adorns the wall.
‘‘It’s titled Facing Life Together, and has all his mates and staff surrounding him,’’ Emerson said.
The death of promising rugby player Rangiora Reweti just 10 days after the crash was another direct hit for the centre.
‘‘Rangiora was a part of alt ed, and her sisters had been with us, and her cousins were currently with us.
‘‘One of her cousins bought her ashes to the centre to say goodbye, and went for a walk with her. It was just beautiful, it was so natural.
‘‘For some people that would have been weird, bringing in a box of ashes. But for our kids it was just so normal. They took her to her classroom, while they had a lesson – it was really, really special and the kids talked about it a lot.
‘‘They were so happy we allowed it, but I thought, what do you mean allow it? How dare I? How dare we? I mean, we don’t have the answers or the rights to grief.’’
‘‘Of course, our greatest desire was to do whatever it took to make sure that it didn’t have a roll-on effect.’’
Emerson said losing any other students was one of their ‘‘biggest fears’’ at that time.
He said staff and students were well-supported in their grief.
‘‘There was no lack of support. The Ministry [of Education] were very good. They responded immediately with a trauma team, we were able to meet the next day. It was very informative and really helped us to go through the steps.
‘‘We had letters from around the country. I had other schools sending us gift cards to take the kids out for morning tea, we had flowers from random people.
‘‘A lot of people really related and felt pain for our kids.’’
He is painfully aware of the reach of the tragedies which impacted the centre, the families left bereft, and the deaths of three young sisters, allegedly killed by their mother which followed shortly after, describing the period as ‘‘a dark time in Timaru’’.
‘‘The whole of South Canterbury was affected, nobody escaped. It pushed a lot of people to the wall.
‘‘One of the biggest things our kids struggle with is resilience, being able to be knocked down and stand back up again. They’ve been knocked down heaps of times.
‘‘But here they are, we’re asking them to stand up again, in spite of not wanting to . . . they’re trying to find the reset . . . ‘Those people aren’t in my life any more, what does that look like?’ Anyone who’s had grief will understand that.’’
He said he had a call recently from the (former) South Canterbury District Health Board, concerned about the rise of posttraumatic stress in the region’s teens and asking if he was seeing that at the centre.
‘‘And honestly, I could say that we hadn’t. They wanted to know what it was we were doing, and I was able to tell them there weren’t rules, there weren’t ways, it was just an open book, and if this is what worked for you, then grieve away.
‘‘I think as far as our teens are concerned, they’ve been able to process the trauma, the healing part of it in very different ways, they’ve all found ways to work through the grief.
‘‘And they’ve done it as a collective, found ways through by producing art, supplying food to the whā nau when it happened, and just openly talking about it. We’re not dictating to them how any of them should grieve.’’
Emerson said the relationships and trust he and his staff already had with their students was crucial in the days after the crash.
‘‘We always talk about the right person, right time. I’m a firm believer in timing being critical.
‘‘In those early weeks, the most important people to someone who’s dealing with that level of grief are people you already know, people that get you, they’re not prying into your life because they know.’’
He said it was about just being there – with an open heart, an open mind and, at times, a closed mouth.
‘‘Three or four weeks on, we believe that’s when intervention can start happening through counsellors, people who don’t know you now can maybe talk more – you’ve had a month to start dealing with everything, processing, unlocking.’’
Emerson said the centre had no specific plans for the anniversary, but he plans to continue as they have been, letting the young people lead, and leaving space to them to talk about their loss.
‘‘One of the young people actually talked to me about it in the van yesterday. All of a sudden I realised that was the anniversary, it had been a year. We talked a little bit about it and acknowledged the time that gone. But there wasn’t any animosity. There was no hardness. There was no bitterness.
‘‘It was just, ‘it happened, and it’s horrible, but we’re alive, we’re here. Let’s keep moving and see what we can do about maximising the best of our life because we can’t guarantee we’re going get what the world determines as a full life.’ ’’
Emerson, who has 20 years’ experience in the armed forces, has first-hand knowledge of the challenges faced by some of his students. He grew up in an abusive household and left school at 15 with a ‘‘huge chip on my shoulder’’.
He credits an uncle who treated him well and guided him into the army, the structure and discipline he found there, finding his Christian faith and meeting his wife with getting his life on track.
He’s now a qualified primary school teacher with a masters in education. He has worked in youth justice, with incarcerated teens, as unit leader for the Government’s scheme that assists parents of children with mental health and behavioural issues, and headed up Auckland’s ATC Military Prep school.
The AAE staff are tutors rather than qualified teachers, but Emerson says teaching qualifications would not have made a difference to the way his team approached getting the kids through what they experienced last year.
‘‘You don’t need to be a teacher, you just need to be human. You need to have a caring heart and once you’ve got that, then you’ve got the ingredients to make it work. There were a lot of things we had to do that we just had to work through together. I’ve got age, sure, but that’s not an automatic right to knowledge. Having lived a bit more, you feel you can offer some more, but sometimes it’s the younger ones that come up with stuff, and you think, that’s great, I wish I’d come up with that.’’