Raffles 'needed to equip schools’

Press, 20 April 1982, Page 6

Raffles 'needed to equip schools’

Schools. now had to run raffles to buy equipment needed to give pupils the sort of education they deserved, according to the principal of Aranui High School, Mr Norman Sinclair. “The cold hard fact Is that in today’s circumstances schools simply cannot provide the equipment needed without fund-raising of this sort,” he said. Mr Sinclair was defending the selling of raffle tickets by Aranui High School pupils during school time last Thursday. Pupils from Papanui High School also sold tickets. Profits from ticket sales were to be divided between the schools and the “Spirit of Adventure” scheme, which gives young people sailing

experience. The raffle was the subject of a complaint to the Education Department. The department’s regional superintendent, Mr B. K. Gainsford, said that he sympathised, with the

complainant’s view that selling raffle tickets had little educational value. Both the principal and the chairman of the board of governors of Papanui High School disagreed with Mr Gainsford. They said that selling raffle tickets was educational. Mr Sinclair agreed. Pupils at his school had shown the “beneficial effect” of selling the tickets, he said. Their experiences “undoubtedly stimulated the kind of educational response that teachers would like to achieve more often.” Children of parents who objected to the raffle had been offered another programme. on the day tickets were sold.

Mr Sinclair said critics of such practices should write to their member of Parliament saying that they would be happy as taxpayers to pay the full cost of education “without recourse to raffles.”