PRINCIPAL RETIRING

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30602, 19 November 1964, Page 2

PRINCIPAL RETIRING

39 Years In Teaching

After 39 years in the teaching profession—all spent in Christchurch schools—Miss E. M. Trounce, who has been principal of Te Wai Pounamu College for the last three years, will retire at the end of this school year. “I have greatly enjoyed my association with the Maori people through Te Wai Pounamu,” Miss Trounce said yesterday. Like many of the new pupils at the college, she had had little first-hand experience of the Maori language and culture until she went there. Her three years there had been interesting and rewarding ones, Miss Trounce said. She had been learning while encouraging the girls to learn and cherish their traditional art and culture. Wide Area

Te Wai Pounamu’s pupils came from the widest area of perhaps any school in New Zealand, including from Auckland, the East Coast, Bluff and the Chatham Islands, Miss Trounce said. In the past the majority had been from the North Island, but lately more had been coming from the South Island.

To get to know the parents of her widely scattered pupils, Miss Trounce once did a 3000-mile tour of the North Island in three weeks—and visited every North Island pupil’s home. One of her aims has been to foster the interests of parents in the school, distant though they may be. Some of the present pupils had had mothers, and even grand-mothers at the college, “It has a very fine tradition,” Miss Trounce said.

Two years before going to Te Wai Pounamu, Miss Trounce retired from teaching at Shirley Intermediate School, where she had taught home science for 25 years. During the last year she was the secretary of the Christchurch Principals’ Association, and for the last three years she has been the secretary of the Canterbury branch of the New Zealand Federation of University Women.