During the summer holidays 2021/2022 the water damaged classrooms and teaching areas at Tauhara College were pulled down, following on from a catastrophic downpour in November 2020. Video / Rachel Canning
Tauhara College students are returning to radically changed school grounds when they start back at school this week.
Over the holidays a demolition crew has been hard at work pulling down the flood-ruined buildings.
Last week, the school grounds were a hive of activity as four diggers made piles of building debris that were then trucked off to various destinations.
Tauhara College principal Ben Hancock says staff are looking forward to starting the school year with enough classrooms on site for all the students.
In November 2020, much of the school was catastrophically flooded and most of the teaching spaces deemed unusable. Students started the 2021 school year with a temporary village of 18 classrooms available, this being only half the number of teaching spaces required.
The school community adjusted to off-site learning, mass teaching in the hall, and four-day weeks for senior students.
Throughout 2021, a second village of classrooms was added and new kitchen-based technology classes were built on-site in July.
One of four diggers busy at work demolishing the damaged buildings at Tauhara College, January 2022. The school hall is in the background. Photo / Rachel Canning
Demolition work began on December 13 and was completed last week.
An estimated 4000 cubic metres of demolition waste was moved off-site.
Material was salvaged where possible: the roofing iron (100 to 300 tones) and copper was recycled into scrap metal, 50 to 100 tones of concrete was recycled locally, asbestos was taken to a safe site, a lot of furniture was donated to Lake Taupō Rotary Club which is going to send it to Pacific Island nations, and builders were able to remove doors and windows for re-use in other projects.
The remaining waste was put through a shredder, further extracting any missed recoverables, and then sent to landfill.
A security firm kept watch over the damaged buildings in 2021. Other than some windows being smashed in early December, there was no other vandalism.
Ben says the buildings coming down produced a mixed reaction from the community.
"There is a sense of sadness, a lot of history and memories were made in those teaching areas. People have an attachment to the buildings, students spent five years of their lives here, and staff countless more years."
There were also a lot of positive comments.
"With the removal of the old, will come the building of the new.
"There's a sense of optimism that Tauhara College will finally get the buildings that the community and students deserve."
The next steps are bringing on technology space for hard materials classes, and buildings for student support services.
Over the summer holidays the water-damaged buildings at Tauhara College were pulled down. Principal Ben Hancock on site. Photo / Rachel Canning
The demolition site will be returned to green space while master planning is carried out.
Ben is hopeful the planning and design work will be finished by the end of the year.
He said a site plan for the community to comment on will be available after the Ministry of Education has written an education brief, prepared a business plan showing what the rebuild will cost and why it is required, and lastly, a master plan will be produced at the funding stage.
He says the pandemic is going to cause delays because of hold-ups getting materials, and budgeting difficulties because of ever-increasing costs.
"Our big advantage is we have lots of space for our new school, and with all the nearby home building going on, the college should have the capacity to deal with population growth."
