A rural primary school closing its doors after 136 years on Wednesday is a victim of cost of living pressures, its principal says.<\/p>\n
Papatawa School, near Woodville on the Hawke’s Bay side of the Manawat\u016b Gorge, had just two pupils when the school year began, so a decision was made to close.<\/p>\n
The pupils left early this year.<\/p>\n
Principal Wynita Katene said last year’s final term began with 16 children across two classrooms, but other pressures were growing.<\/p>\n
“All of our children drive out from Woodville and that didn’t become an option for a lot of our families, with the cost of living and stuff that’s been happening in society at the moment.<\/p>\n
“They needed to be at the school that was closer to them.”<\/p>\n
The school is only 6km from Woodville, but with its sweeping views of the Ruahine and Tararua ranges, and chorus of farm animals, feels more remote.<\/p>\n
It has a swimming pool, court and, over the road, a sports field.<\/p>\n
“It wasn’t the most popular place because stock grazed in there,” Katene said. “There was quite a bit of poop and the children weren’t keen on running through there – townies.”<\/p>\n
The school building has classrooms, an office and a library – areas now home to boxes, as items are packed for delivery to other schools or archiving.<\/p>\n
To mark the closure, on Wednesday about 120 former pupils and staff came along to reminisce.<\/p>\n
RNZ<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A rural primary school closing its doors after 136 years on Wednesday is a victim of cost of living pressures, its principal says. Papatawa School, near Woodville on the Hawke’s Bay side of the Manawat\u016b Gorge, had just two pupils when the school year began, so a decision was made to close. The pupils left […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":7543,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7542"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7544,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7542\/revisions\/7544"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}