By STACEY BODGER education reporter
Education Minister Trevor Mallard wants to cut funds to troubled St Stephen's School because of fears over the health and safety of its students.
Mr Mallard announced yesterday that he was seeking a meeting with the St Stephen's and Queen Victoria Schools Trust Board to try to cancel the integration agreement covering the school.
The land and buildings at the Bombay school are owned by the trust board. But, under the agreement, the Government provides all operational funding.
This year, two incidents of bullying at the school were reported to police. In February, more than 20 senior students were suspended for three days after junior boys were hit with a stick and kicked around the head.
Mr Mallard said he had no option but to try to pull the school's funding in the interests of pupils' health, safety and education.
Neither principal Ngareta Timutimu nor the trust board's chairperson would comment on the decision. But board member Canon Hone Kaa said the move would not affect its earlier decision to close the school.
He said Mr Mallard was "not in accordance" with the board's plans for a co-educational school to replace St Stephen's.
"We have moved on - it does not matter about the rest of it now."
The Anglican trust, which administers St Stephen's and its sister girls' school Queen Victoria School in Parnell, announced in June it would close both schools at the end of next year.
The two sites, worth about $33 million, will be sold and a co-educational school will be opened on another Auckland site in 2002.
The trust has the right to keep running St Stephen's as a private school.
But Canon Kaa said it was concentrating on plans for the co-educational school.
Mr Mallard yesterday released an Education Review Office report conducted in June on St Stephen's after the bullying incidents.
It said the school's "culture of violence" had not changed over the past decade, teaching standards were poor and arrangements for protecting boarders were extremely unsatisfactory.
It also found a climate of negativity where the use of praise was almost completely lacking.
Mallard targets St Stephen's cash
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