Parents vote with their dollars against St George

The demise of St George's School appears to be a sad and regrettable one, certainly. As one of the schools I went to in my early years, I have looked upon its crawl towards what has appeared to be an inevitable end with a certain degree of penitence. To see the large gates close for the last time would have invoked a feeling of nostalgic disappointment for all past students of this school.

More importantly though, for a city like Wanganui to lose a private school is a particularly lamentable circumstance. The drawcard of a private school can attract many and to see this lost, as well as seeing Wanganui Collegiate needing to turn to the Government for state integration, is disappointing.

But, as with all change, there must be a reason, be it within the school management's control or otherwise.

For me, the heart of the problem lies in the fact that Wanganui is a place with a small pool of wealthy families or, more specifically, few families with the resources to spend the $10,425 it costs to send a Year 4-6 child to St George's.

With that narrow pool to draw from, it immediately becomes necessary for the school to prove it can cater to and add value to the education of a wide cross-section of students. When you narrow your target market by having such high fees in a place like our city, you need to appeal to almost the entirety of that target market in order to remain sustainable as a private school.

The reason I left St George's School some seven years ago was because the school did not cater to me as an individual and did not add value to my education comparable to the school that I moved to. That's not to say that the school is not fantastic for other students - my older sister, for example, was far more suited to the structures in place.

Unfortunately though, appealing to a select type of student - those who more easily conform and are willing to accept the formality of the school - will never be enough when the original group you are drawing from is already so small.

Many have said that the Government should have allowed the state integration of St George's School and Collegiate as a whole. This begs a more general question: When a school is not providing a great enough level of education to warrant individuals paying the cost of it, should the Government step in to make up the shortfall?

I think not. The Government does not dream up its money from thin air. It gets its money from the very same people who are not seeing the value in this particular school: The public.

At the point at which that value is not worth the cost of sustaining the school, it should be allowed to fail, however unfortunate that is.

It's the same with every other industry: We don't expect the Government to prop up and pay a proportion of the cost of failing restaurants in Wanganui, nor would we expect them to cover the shortfall when a supermarket was failing to cover its costs.

I imagine many would respond by saying that education is different; it's not a business. I would say to those people that that's true, and private schools justify their existence in an otherwise publicly funded industry by arguing they add value to education which families are willing to pay for. At the point at which they fail to meet that commitment and fail to justify the reasons behind their existence, they must accept the sad reality of their failure.

As the gates of St George's school closed, many memories would have been locked in, and a chapter in Wanganui's history would have snapped shut. But the reasons for this period of change are legitimate, albeit unfortunate, ones. We must accept the signal that the parents choosing not to enter the school are sending, rather than attempting to place a bandage over them in the form of government funding which comes from the same people who personally chose to decline the service this school provides.

James Penn is deputy head boy at Wanganui High School and was a member of the New Zealand team that competed in the World School Debating Championships.