Avonside Girls’ High is 50

Press, 4 March 1978, Page 10

Avonside Girls’ High is 50

By

TUI THOMAS

Avonside Girls’ High School, which will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary later this month, actually began life in a bungalow in River Road (now Avonside Drive) in 1919. Its purpose was to relieve the pressures on Christchurch Girls’ High School by housing supplementary classes. Forty-one pupils worked in four adapted classrooms with Miss Kathleen Gresosn, first assistant at Christchurch Girls’ High school, in charge. And like the mother school in Cranmer Square, Avonside kept on growing.

Eventually the Government approved a vote of $16,000 for building six classrooms on the site and the block was opened in February, 1928. The school then became a separate, independent establishment with 204 pupils and Miss Gresson as principal. Today Avonside Girls’ High School is the largest girls’ school in the South Island with a roll of 1063 pupils and a vast complex of buildings spread so far over the original grounds that early pupils who attend the anniversary celebrations will find it

hard to recognise their “alma mater” if they have not been back since their school days. The first nursery school

of its kind in New Zealand was started at Avonside in 1943 to enable pupils taking child development to study groups of children at play ,said Mrs Shirley Shea, the first old girl to be elected chairman of the school board of governors. It is still part of the

teaching pattern of the school.

Avonside, adds Mrs Shea, was one of the first two schools in New Zealand to have a guidance counsellor appointed as

part of a pilot scheme initiated by the Education Department. In 1965 an interest in Maori culture and language at Avonside Girls’ High . School prompted the Education Department to arrange partial integration of Maori girls from Te Since then the Maori girls have lived at the college

in Ferry Road and attended daily classes at Avonside. Many old girls who have achieved distinction in community service, the arts and sciences, in education and other fields, will be among nearly 1300 participants expected to attend the jubilee celebrations from March 17 to 19. The programme will open in the afternoon of Friday, March 17, with an “at home” to give those associated with the school at any time an opportunity to see pupils at work and to inspect the grounds and buildings. In the evening a buffet dinner will be

held at the school for past and present staff members and old girls who were at Avonside from 1919 to 1927.

In the evening pupils will entertain guests with a concert in the assembly hall and admission charges will go to school funds. The official opening of the celebrations will be held the next afternoon and will be followed in the evening by a jubilee dinner. A thanksgiving service in the school grounds or assembly hall will be held on the Sum day morning.