Moerewa students just keep coming

Some Northland schools struggle to entice their students into showing up, but that's not a problem at Moerewa, despite the government-appointed commissioner ordering 17 senior students to go elsewhere.

Moerewa School was ordered to close its Year 11-13 unit in October, last year, and six months later Education Minister Hekia Parata sacked the board of trustees after the students were welcomed back for the second term.

Commissioner Mike Eru is now in charge, but parents have continued to send their children to the school every day. Mr Eru responded by ordering the students off the school grounds as of Friday last week. More than a dozen of the 17 students were at Moerewa on Friday.

Education Ministry group manager Jeremy Wood said parents had been given until Friday to move their children to other schools. They had been offered financial assistance for uniforms and stationery, as well as extra teaching resources to help the students catch up.

The ministry, which declined to say last week whether parents who failed to comply might be prosecuted, and Mr Eru had discussed the options with senior students' whanau, but so far only a few parents had made arrangements to enrol their children at other schools.

Their local options were Bay of Islands College in Kawakawa or Te Kura Kaupapa Maori o Taumarere in Moerewa, both of which had achievement rates for Maori students above the national average, Mr Wood said.

All children aged under 16 had to be enrolled at a school "lawfully mandated" to teach their year level.

Some parents are believed to want to enrol their children in Correspondence School and base them in a vacant classroom at Moerewa, but while the ministry can't stop students over 16 taking correspondence classes, younger children are unlikely to get approval.

Mr Wood said students under 16 would be accepted only if they had no local options, which was not the case in Moerewa, or had psychological issues which made regular schooling impossible. The ministry preferred students to be engaged in face-to-face learning with a range of social interactions and a breadth of curriculum choice.

Moerewa School launched its senior unit three years ago after some parents refused to send their children to Bay of Islands College. Although taught at Moerewa, the Year 11-13 students had been enrolled at Auckland's Kia Aroha College.

The ministry, however, deemed the arrangement illegal, while an audit had uncovered irregularities with NCEA course work and grades.

Principal Keri Milne-Ihimaera has apparently been barred from talking to the media, and Mr Eru did not return calls last week.

This is not the first time Northland parents have defied Ministry of Education orders. In 2004 the then Labour government closed and merged many rural Northland schools, but parents at Orauta, west of Moerewa, refused to send their children elsewhere. After a year of legal wrangling, which included prosecuting parents for sending their children to an unregistered school, students and teachers were evicted and the school boarded up and placed under guard.

After the Northland experience the government abandoned its plans to extend its school closure programme to the rest of New Zealand.