KEY POINTS:
The signs were there years ago - the North Shore's population was booming and amid the influx were hundreds of children needing a place in a school.
The solution should have been simple for the Ministry of Education. After all Albany, one of the fastest growing areas in the country, was a greenfields area with plenty of open space.
The ministry even owned a chunk of land on the Albany Highway, big enough - at a push - to build Albany Senior High, the country's first public senior high and a showcase for the future of education.
It didn't turn out to be simple.
And come 2009, when 300 students are due to stream through the school's front door to complete their first year of NCEA, the chances are there won't be any doors.
Or any classrooms. No 21st century learning spaces, furnished with the latest computers and ergonomic chairs.
Despite the apparently straightforward conditions for the development, the opening of the senior high is set to be delayed by a year.
Instead there's talk of converting a commercial warehouse amid the businesses in William Pickering Drive into a makeshift school for a year or putting students into North Harbour Stadium. The option parents favour is to extend Albany Junior High, designed to take pupils from Year 7 to 10, so its most senior students can stay on for an extra year.
It is an embarrassment for the Government, which championed the new middle school/senior school model.
And the Ministry of Education has gone into hiding this week, refusing to speak to the Weekend Herald about the issue after pulling out of a parents' forum meeting.
Many have been left scratching their heads at how the bright, shiny plan for the future tarnished so badly.
"Once we get a solution we are going to be asking questions about how they got it so wrong," says new North Shore mayor Andrew Williams. "How did they leave these students in this situation?"
Mike Jackson, principal of the feeder school Albany Junior High, says the ministry has a systemic problem with opening schools late in the area.
In 2004, Oteha Valley School opened in the spacious President's Lounge of North Harbour Stadium.
The junior high's construction was also not without delays. On day one in 2005, only one of the three first-stage whanau blocks was complete and it was used to run the whole school: lessons, administration, staffroom included.
"It did add to the stress," says the father-of-two and former naval officer. "But you have to expect a few things to go wrong on a big project."
The problems at the senior school took "things going wrong" to a whole new level, he says.
Jackson and establishment board chairman John Parlane wrote to the ministry asking them to hurry up on the senior high before the junior school was even open.
They had anticipated problems, so the ministry's latest excuse that the consent application for the new site attracted more opposition than expected didn't wash.
"You can't open a dairy on the North Shore without someone objecting, to say that they're surprised ... ," says Jackson.
While ministry representatives didn't turn up to the parents' forum meeting on Monday, National Party leader John Key did.
The MP for Helensville's address drew hoots and cheers the crowd as he laid down the senior high issue as the latest in a series of failings by the ministry.
"In my electorate, the ministry has failed the whole way through," said Key.
"It's not just Albany Senior High. Some of you may know they've been proposing to build [a school in] Hobsonville - that was meant to start in 2002 and finish in 2005 - and it's gone on and on and on."
Key said he had regular meetings every six months or so over the past five years with ministry officials on the Albany experiment.
"This isn't something that no one was aware of. The ministry, the whole way through, have been aware of the issue," he said. "The assurances to us - and effectively to you - have been the school will be delivered. But it won't."
The ministry hasn't had much practice building secondary schools in the last 20 years.
In 2004, Botany Downs Secondary College and Alfriston College opened as the first state secondary schools to be built in Auckland since 1980.
While the ministry's northern regional manager Bruce Adin wouldn't talk publicly this week, he has previously said catering for growth in Auckland was a "real challenge" for any infrastructure provider and the ministry had launched an investigation to review how it was performing.
He said it had been too slow in parts of the senior high development and identified the main problem as having happened early in the project, when it apparently hinged on a verbal agreement to build the school on Massey University's Albany campus.
It is not clear why these talks halted three years ago, but it's obvious the failure of having a back-up plan is critical to the situation now.
Other sites were later pursued.
One in Rosedale Park met with fierce opposition from residents and there was an "odour buffer" issue from the nearby treatment facility.
At about 4ha the new site, the former Albany Outdoor Education Centre, had space constraints. Auckland schools on average have about 9ha of land. Added complications on the property are a historic building and a stream. Its native bush caught the attention of the Auckland Regional Council which filed an objection.
The ministry is now pushing ahead to re-designate the land. Details of the 75 opposing submissions to its application will be detailed in a four-day North Shore City Council hearing scheduled for later this month.
Mayor Williams says he is baffled at how the scenario has panned out.
He said the ministry sold a large parcel of land in Albany in the last 10 or 20 years, which was since transformed into a 200-home housing development.
"They had all this land, they had it land-banked, and they got rid of it. They also got rid of land in Oteha Valley Rd which they thought they would never need ... for them to be selling off land was really negligence."
His harsh words mirror the feeling at the parents' meeting earlier in the week.
More than 400 were lured to the school on Monday night, with many filing in hand-in-hand, two-by-two. Unrest was brewing in the clean-cut middle-class crowd.
"Have you got your angry mob face on tonight, mate?," one man half-joked to another.
At one point, the crowd voted for the school to picket the official opening of Westfield Albany and confront Prime Minister Helen Clark at a public appearance.
This plan was dropped but the anger persists.
Parent Paul Armishaw says he has lost faith in the ministry and does not believe its promise that options will be presented at another meeting next week.
"We are in a situation, where based on the ministry's track record, they've asked us to come to them on the 7th. We've still got no guarantees they're going to be able to perform. As a parent, I don't see I've got any other choice but to take my child away, which is a real shame."
The junior high had such a good reputation, it attracted hundreds of families to the area. Now, the broken promises were driving many away.
Parent Andrew Hooker: "There are better schools around here than some prefab on the back of this school."
For Sunil Kushor, the answer is not simple. A manager for Auckland Regional Public Health Service, he made a "long-term commitment" to the community when his family chose Albany after moving from Gisborne to Auckland two years ago.
The one big drawcard was the new, state-of-the-art junior high school.
"It was this whole concept of keeping our kids in one spot - in one institution for a sustained period of time," says Kushor, who, with wife Patty Govender, bought his daughters to New Zealand from South Africa. "It is an expensive place to live. It is worth it in the sense that the infrastructure is good. My prime interest is the safety and education of the kids."
Eldest daughter Sharndre, now 13, is a Year 9 and due to move on next year, and youngest Yentl, a 10-year-old at Albany Primary, was set to follow.
The family is now looking around at other schools but has not made a decision.
He is worried and believes parents, who were only told of the problem a few weeks ago, should have been told earlier.
"It's rather haphazard, when you commit to parents and the community that some things will be done, only to learn in the 11th hour that this might not be possible."
