Bell tolls for Wainui School

Press, 9 December 1983, Page 4

Bell tolls for Wainui School

Wainui’s 110-year-old school will close next week. The school’s roll has dwindled to five girls, two of whom will go to Christchurch intermediate shcools next year. Mrs Joyce Evans, nee Hooker, is a former pupil of the school who remembers it as a busy place at the centre of a thriving Banks Peninsula community. A drifting population and smaller families nowdays have taken their toll. Between 1926 and 1931

Mrs Evans was one of about 35 to 40 pupils at Wainui. Sometimes the school had a second teacher to cope with numbers. Uniforms were never worn but sports teams played in the school colours of green, with white tops and gold sashes.

In recent years pupils have had to travel to Akaroa or Duvauchelle for sports. Since the school opened in 1873 there have been few years when a descendant of

James Wright has not attended. He was a whaler and early settler in the area, and great-grandfather of Mrs Evans.

Four generations of Mrs Evans’s family have been to Wainui. However, . her grandmother did not attend as she was privately tutored on a whaling station. Mrs Evans’s granddaughter is one of the pupils who wil end their time at Wainui on December 14.

“I am very, very sad that

the school is closing and will miss hearing the school bell in the valley,” Mrs Evans said.

The Canterbury Education Board has given the school an option to reopen if numbers pick up in the next three years but Mrs Evans said she thought the possibility unlikely.

For the last term the Wainui school has had a relieving teacher, Mrs Philippa Foley, of Robinsons Bay.