[Manny]

Hi all,

Somewhere in a deep dark forum :eek: I have read that Te Puke schools have a bad reputation with no further explanation. Being ready to make an offer on a house we've seen in Te Puke and having school aged children, this kind of freaks me out a bit. Any comments on this?
Oh, I am familiar with ERO reports and have checked them out, but I always have the feeling that schools make themselves look really good on the day the ERO inspectors visit. I rather hear it from a parent kind of view.

Thanks folks!
Manny

[KerryS]

Unless anyone here is a parent of a child at a school in Te Puke that could be hard. Could you not visit the school you would potentially be zoned for and talk to some parents at the gate? Or visit the school itself and get a feel for it. I always think that visiting a school is the best way to gauge if it would be the right place for your child. (Says the girl with no children, but who used to work in education.)

[Manny]

Thanks KerryS,

You are right, best is to visit the school, but this is what I did previously when we moved to the Waikato. Just visiting appeared to be not working. I really chose the wrong school for my children. It was very hard because we didn't know anyone here at the time. It would be easy now, after making friends in the area, you hear all kinds of stories, including the terrible stories about the school your children are going to!

So as you say, talking to parents seems to be a good thing. It's just hard to organize, still having jobs to go to, and being 1.5 hour drive away from Te Puke. It just seems to be very hard to be there when the parents are actually standing at the school gate! :uhoh Listen to me, what a silly problem I have! I realise that I am in a luxurious position, compared to people who are still in the UK, so I'm really sorry to those who are about 2 days flying from Te Puke instead of 1.5 hour. I am now officially and completely ashamed of myself. :o

Manny

[ruthyroo]

I would imagine that its not so much that the schools in Te Puke are bad / have a bad reputation, rather that they draw their students from a very diverse socio-economic range, from wealthy pakeha kiwi fruit growers to poor maori kiwi fruit pickers (big generalisations I know - for illustrative purposes only). Te Puke and surrounds has a relatively high maori population and a lot of those families live in some poverty, and their kids can make for pretty challenging pupils. I have two friends who live in Te Puke and teach in Rotorua (primary and secondary), and they reckon that the two areas are fairly similar in terms of the social and economic problems affecting maori students.

This doesn't mean that the schools are bad, but it does mean they have extra challenges to deal with, and that kind of work can absorb a lot of the teacher's attention. Why not make an appointment to meet the kids prospective teachers / principal for a chat? Most schools are fairly open to this.

[Manny]

Thanks for that information Ruthyroo. That is very interesting. I didn't know about the Maori population being so high over there. I thought they were more living the Whakatane, Opotiki and Gisborne direction. They must be hiding somewhere between the kiwi fruit trees ;) When we visited Te Puke, I had the impression that is was more a 'white' town, hardly saw any coloured faces in the mainstreet.

Anyway, I will indeed visit the school and talk to the principal/teaching staff before we decide. And as I said before, hopefully I can talk to some parents over there. I have the feeling that I'm making it harder than it actually is. That's probably because we've had a really bad experience with one school over here in the Waikato.

Thanks for your support and great advice!
Manny

[pieeater]

I know it can be difficult to organise but we drove 2 hrs from where we were living and hung around at the prospective school at finishing time to grill a few parents,it was worth the effort.