Missing lunches and missing buses – is New Zealand failing its schoolchildren? – Editorial

Chamon Brown, 15, and Laa Brown, 16, hitchhiking to Tamatea High School from SH2 after their school bus route was terminated at the end of 2024. Photo / Mike Brown

Editorial

School lunches have been the topic of many news articles lately, ever since the coalition Government made changes to the meals it provides for children in schools across New Zealand.

The overall feedback on the lunches being served to schoolkids under the new programme is ... not great. And that’s when the lunches do show up, as they often have not or have shown up hours later, with principals reporting buying food from supermarkets to feed hungry students in their schools.

This week, Hawke’s Bay Today told the story of a dad who is helping his son and daughter learn to hitchhike to school after their rural school bus route was terminated by the Ministry of Education.

Mike Brown lives on a family farm near the Aropaoanui River, about 45km north of Napier.

Until the end of last year, both his children would catch their school bus to and from Tamatea High School.

Brown wants his children to continue to travel to Tamatea High School’s te reo Māori immersion programme, but the ministry has told him multiple times it can no longer provide a bus, or a travel allowance, because it is not the closest state or state-integrated school to his home.

We can disagree on a lot of things but you’d be hard pressed to find someone who thinks hitchhiking is the best way for a child to be travelling to and from school on a regular basis.

While this story may seem unrelated to school lunches, it is all compounded in an overall feeling that we could – and should – be doing more to give our tamariki (children) the tools they need to be successful in their education.

Chamon Teria Brown, 15 (left), and sister Laa Jordan Brown, 16, hitchhiking to Tamatea High School from SH2 after their school bus route was terminated at the end of 2024. Photo / Mike Brown

In email correspondence between Brown and the Ministry of Education, seen by Hawke’s Bay Today, Brown has been repeatedly told by separate people at the ministry that his children are “ineligible for school transport assistance as they are not attending the closest state or state-integrated school they can enrol at”.

Despite that, group manager of school transport at the Ministry of Education, James Meffan, told Hawke’s Bay Today on Monday afternoon that there was a potential solution to Brown’s transport woes. If his children were enrolled in the Level 1 or 2 te reo Māori immersion unit at Tamatea, they would be eligible to apply for a conveyance allowance, he said.

Mike Brown’s children are not the only ones having to find less than ideal forms of transport in order to get to school every day.

Labour education spokeswoman MP Jan Tinetti says there are cases on the West Coast as well as in Northland of students having to make dangerous trips to access education.

Tinetti called it a “nationwide failure” and says the Government “has shown no urgency in fixing the mess they’ve created”.

Education Minister Erica Stanford said “the rules have not changed for many, many, many decades” and that if parents want their children to attend a school that it is not their local school, the obligation to get the children to school is on them.

The school year has barely started off properly and there have already been several reports of issues. With the current cost of living, working families with school-aged children are facing added pressure at this time of the year. The least the Government can do is ensure their kids have the access and the resources they need, and deserve, to proper education.

Missing lunches and missing bus routes are not the way to give our children a fair go.