SCHOOL BUILDINGS

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 71, 17 December 1937, Page 10

SCHOOL BUILDINGS

Replacement An Urgent

Problem

“ENORMOUS PROGRAMME”

"The need of buildings is one of our most urgent problems,” said the Minister of Education, Hon. I’. Fraser, speaking yesterday at an afternoon tea given by the Wellington branch ot the New Zealand Educational Institute. On a tour of inspection some time ago he had found that there was hardly a habitable police station or policeman’s residence in the Dominion, and the position in the schools was worse. Teachers’ houses throughout the Dominion were in very many cases really not fit to be lived in at all. In Canterbury, for example, said Mr. Eraser, where winter nights were frosty, there were cases where teachers had to cross the yard in order to obtain a bath. That sort of'thing was reminiscent of the conditions of 50 years ago. The truth was that the schools had followed the settlers, in days when people had to be content with four walls and a roof until things got better. In time the farmers had prospered, and had improved their own’ homes, and in some cases the school buildings, but the teachers’ residences had been just left as they were. In many cases these old buildings were of sound kauri timber, well constructed, to last 100 years; and it was bard sometimes to persuade people that if the wood was good there was anything bad about the building itself. As an example of the unsuitable types of buildings erected in the past, the Minister quoted an example of a school most substantially constructed in stone, with Gothic arched doorways and windows in keeping with the Gothic architecture of other public buildings in the locality, and with the Gothic ideas of the early settlers—splendidly designed to resist any invasion of sunshine or fresh air. Yet it would be a colossal undertaking to pull it down and replace it. “We’ve got an enormous programme, extending over a long period of years, but I sincerely hope that programme will be successfully carried out,” said Mr. Fraser.