PUPILS’ TRANSFER POSTPONED

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25537, 3 July 1948, Page 2

PUPILS’ TRANSFER POSTPONED

PARENTS SEEK MORE TIME BOARD’S DIFFICULTIES AT FENDALTON Because parents wish to give the matter further consideration, the Canterbury Education Board has agreed to hold over for one week its request that 38 boys from the Fendalton School should be transferred to the new Heaton Street School, in the old Rhodes homestead. The transfer was to take place next Monday; but after hearing a deputation from the Fendalton School Committee and parents yesterdav afternoon, a committee of the board agreed to the postponement. The Education Board issued yesterday a statement explaining its accommodation difficulties in the north-west part of Christchurch. It said a comprehensive building programme had been approved and was being pushed ahead in order of urgency. School building was given a higher priority than formerly. “To cope with developments in the area, first in order will be schools for Primers to Form II at Wairarapa road and Ham road and, as concurrently as practicable, the new Elmwood Intermediate Normal School on the centrally-situated site in Heaton street, formerly the property of Sir Heaton Rhodes,” it was stated.

Remodelling of the two-storeyed Elmwood homestead had been done to provide overflow accommodation for Standard 4 to Form 2 boys of the Elmwood, Waimairi, St. Albans, and Fendalton Schools. Parents, committees, and teachers of the first three had, co-operated readily to meet the emergency with two results: there was a healthy loosening up in accommodation at the contributing schools and a zest for their new environment among transferred pupils, which had reacted beneficially on their school work. “Although two new permanent rooms, already begun, will afford substantial relief at Fendalton, this extra accommodation, if completed next term, will only partly solve present and pending accommodation problems there. Fendalton, already grown in numbers to more than 820 pupils for whom there are even now only 17 rooms for the scheduled 20 class teachers provided, has, in all, only 12.6 square feet of floor space including use of an art room recently improvised from a store shed. There are, however, only 16 regular classrooms, giving only 12.1 square feet of floor space a pupil,” the board said. "Ev reason of its present swollen roll this unweildy school, already much too large for modern educational purposes, is now due for its twenty-first teacher, making four more teachers than rooms and by the time even one of the new rooms is available the influx of new pupils will, it is conservatively estimated, require both another classroom and another teacher. “In these abnormal circumstances the board, while fully conscious that the school year is well under way, finds it necessary to relieve present and clearly anticipated future difficulties in accommodation at Fendalton by requiring this school now to make its contribution to the general relief by sending to Heaton street Standard 4 and Form I pupils whose homes are situated, in the eastern portion of the district. Thus will congestion, particularly in the infant department, be given considerable relief, and these older scholars contribute to the. common interest. Every care will be taken to avoid and minimise interruption to the work of the pupils so transferred. Their removal will materially assist in making possible the enrolment at Fendalton of. new entrants during the coming months.”