Local Focus: Tūranga Tangata Rite new school building to become school syllabus.
Plans have been drawn, the pou are being carved, and come January 1, Te Kura o Tūranga Tangata Rite in Tūranganui-a-Kiwa will take ownership of the site where their new school will stand.
The site is on the grounds of Tūranga Ararau, with some of the existing buildings being demolished to make way for the new state-of-the-art facility.
Joelene Takai, a teacher at the kura, has been a part of the planning process for the past 15 years.
The idea for the kura started when Takai was working for Tūranga Ararau as a youth tutor.
Some of the parents and whānau of students were enquiring about their younger children joining - however, the minimum age to enrol was 15.
“In our minds, we saw there was a gap for our younger rangatahi that were disengaged from education,” Takai said.
“We had a clear vision for our rangatahi. It was a ‘for iwi, by iwi’ kura; that everything we do was about our local history, our local pūrākau, and developing a localised curriculum from that.”
The state-integrated co-ed school is an iwi initiative for Year 9 - 11 students who are at risk of dropping out of mainstream school.
Te Rūnanga o Tūranganui-ā-Kiwa is the proprietor of the school.
Teresa Scott is the tumuaki of the kura and became a part of the school in 2019, with the first students starting in 2020.
“That real aspiration and that real dream is that our rangatahi walk away feeling empowered, being proud to be Māori, and see that potential and that dream that we see in them,” Scott said.
The school design includes carvings of ancestors of the three local iwi: Ngāi Tāmanuhiri, Rongowhakaata, and Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki.
“We wanted to make sure that the kura became its own pūrākau, so that when anybody walked into the kura they would see exactly who the people of this area were.
“We have four pou that will stand on the four corners of the kura, to represent the three iwi and mana whenua as well,” Takai said.
The pou are being carved by local artist Tiopira Rauna and his students at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa’s Gisborne campus.
“It’s going to be used as a school syllabus for the tamariki. In days of old, we didn’t have pukapuka, so our school curriculum used to be all our whakairo that we used to have within our paatu,” Rauna said.
The building project will take around 18 months to complete.
