Shadows Over Waverley
By SUTTON, Michelle
Revelations of cheating, rampant truancy and a total breakdown at Waverley High have left the town reeling and questioning what went wrong. MICHELLE SUTTON looks at the demise of another rural school on the brink of closure
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It is a telling
sign that the
school’s acting
principal, Tony
McIvor (left), has
been employed
only until the
end of this term.
——————–
`I told the ministry things are getting out of hand; we need to get someone in before it escalates.’
— Richard Gurnick
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IT is easy to overlook Waverley High School, off the town’s short main street. Down a side road, the school is hidden by rows of worn, weatherboard houses and on the verge of being lost among the vast farmland.
Nothing much happens in the village, which has a population of about 900. Not much since 1983 when local trainer Snow Lupton won the Melbourne Cup with his horse Kiwi, which came from last place to win.
Certainly nothing at the local high school stood out, with its three netball courts, lush grounds, standard green-coloured uniforms and ordinary academic results.
There were the usual sports exchanges with Patea and Wanganui schools, a kapa haka group and, although several farming families sent their children to boarding schools rather than the local high school, that had been happening for generations.
Locals considered it a small rural school, surviving as best it could, the same as any other. The first sign that anything extraordinary might have been happening at the school was on Monday evening, last December 18.
In the school library, parents were told that Waverley High was in a dire situation: Its roll was falling, it had more than halved to 50 pupils in four years, and it faced closure. As well, the school — lowly graded as decile two — was failing in every aspect – - student welfare, staff management and academic performance.
The New Zealand Qualifications Authority had no confidence that teachers could assess students’ work towards formal qualifications in the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA).
It alleged teachers gave out answers to NCEA assessments, marked work as correct when it was clearly wrong and gave credits for work they knew was plagiarised.
Parents and staff at the school left the meeting stunned. Waverley mum Jackie Nikorima remembers walking out wondering what had gone so terribly wrong at the school she and her husband had both attended. And where her daughter was enrolled in Year 11, due to sit NCEA Level 2 this year.
“It’s hard to know what to believe,” she said this week after being told her daughter would have to bus to another school this term if she wanted to sit NCEA. She struggles to believe reports that the school suffered from 50% truancy a day and that teachers and students cheated.
Most of all, though, Nikorima is angry. There had been no alarm bells that the school was in so much trouble, she said, in disbelief, unwilling to turn her back on the school until a decision on its future is made.
“If the school does close it won’t be because we left.”
Four years ago, before Waverley High made national headlines for becoming the first school in New Zealand suspended from assessing NCEA, Richard Gurnick had an inkling there were problems.
In 2003, the Waverley farmer was chairman of the board of trustees. His wife Linda was also a member. They had two daughters at the school and were elected soon after the deputy principal told them if their daughter wanted a decent education she should go to another school.
“That’s when we got on the board,” Richard Gurnick said.
He first approached the Education Ministry at the end of 2003, concerned the school was running over budget and had problems with student discipline. With help from the ministry, the school’s deficit became a surplus.
Still, Gurnick was worried about how the school was being run.
“Student behaviour was a real concern, it never really improved. And in the middle of 2004 I approached the deputy principal with concerns about the way things were running with senior management.”
He said the board was told nothing, except to mind its own business. It was a management problem, not governance, and it wasn’t their concern. The relationship with principal Joan Manson deteriorated and “things went rapidly downhill”.
By the time Manson retired at the end of 2005, and new principal Jonathon Lewis was appointed at the start of last year, Gurnick felt the situation had worsened.
When the board received 89 complaints — mainly from senior staff about Lewis — he called the ministry for help again in March 2006.
“There were three teachers in particular, I think they never gave the new principal a chance,” he said. “I told the ministry things are getting out of hand; we need to get someone in before it escalates.”
GURNICK and his wife resigned not long after Dallas Murdoch was appointed limited statutory manager (LSM) by the Education Ministry last April.
They were uncomfortable that Murdoch had applied for the principal’s job at the end of 2005, even though she pulled out after accepting an appointment elsewhere. The rest of the board resigned in June and Murdoch was made commissioner.
Despite his initial reservations about Murdoch, Gurnick is shocked at what she unearthed at the school.
“We knew nothing about NZQA. The first we found out was in the media. There’s a lot of other things that have come to light afterwards that the board knew nothing about. A lot of stuff was hidden from the board.”
Murdoch says she began “scoping” at the school and found a mixture of problems, some of which had been occurring since 2002, that had snowballed so the school could no longer deliver subjects in art, technology, physical education, health or a coherent social studies programme.
Recommendations made by the Education Review Office (ERO) in 2005 and NZQA, in 2002, 2004 and June 2006, had been ignored.
Staff absence was high. As a result, teaching was disrupted and the school was unable to account for students’ whereabouts during school hours.
In January this year she told the community and Education Minister Steve Maharey that the school could not recover. It needed to close for the sake of students’ education.
Murdoch has refused to apportion blame for the troubled school, but says there was a systematic breakdown in all areas.
Murdoch — who has been called in as a trouble-shooter for several struggling schools, including Waitara High School last year – - rubbished suggestions she has been unfair in her recommendation to close Waverley.
“I’m a very professional person. I have a lot of experience as a principal, an administrator. I worked for ERO. I have an excellent handle on education,” she said this week.
At the same time, the fight to save Waverley High School continues.
Former principal Joan Manson is spokeswoman for parents and staff in the Waverley Community Education Action Group.
The group put together a 26-page statement countering allegations and criticising Murdoch. It also alleged problems at the school began in 2006 and that an action plan to meet ERO’s recommendations was presented to the board in late 2005.
Many staff don’t agree with NZQA’s damning review but say they are unable to comment publicly while employed at the school, so Manson is speaking on their behalf.
“If I hadn’t retired, or if the new principal had been kept, I don’t think this would have happened,” she said. “Whatever Dallas says there’s always an element of truth, but there’s so much that’s just inaccurate.
“The major problems happened in 2006. She (Dallas) has some responsibility in the situation.”
Manson believes the main problem the school faces is getting children back to class, getting student numbers up.
“If we can do that and people are working together, then, of course, it’s redeemable.”
The odds on Waverley High School surviving are bleak, according to the National Party’s associate education spokesman, Allan Peachey, a former high school principal.
He is clear on what went wrong at Waverley High: “The basic reason is a real reluctance by education agencies to confront the hard issues around a school’s performance. As a parent, if you look at comments in the 2005 ERO report you could believe students were doing fine.
“Parents and students have been very, very seriously misled. And parents have got the right to expect that review offices will have the ability to see through incorrect staff reports that are being presented to them.”
After talking to sources close to the school, Peachey believes Waverley High has been run by a group of self-serving staff and, when a new principal came in and tried to bring about change, he was stonewalled.
Even worse, said Peachey, NZQA and ERO glossed over problems with education jargon in reports that parents would struggle to understand, and failed to act fast enough.
The teacher-pupil ratio at Waverley High is 1:8, which should have produced world-class student results. In reality, its roll had plummeted from 186 in 2002 to 72 last year — which should have been the first warning sign, Peachey said.
“I think there needs to be a huge cultural shift in the way we approach the responsibility of schools. There’s a mentality in teaching that says `praise us for the 5% we do well instead of critiquing us on the 95% we are doing badly’.”
Waverley High looked deserted this week. The 40-odd students wandering the corridors were lost among the empty classrooms with a combined capacity of 300.
Most of them didn’t like principal Jonathan Lewis, who officially resigned last week. He left the school in September and was unable to be contacted. He was last seen working at Woolworths in Taupo, but left that job in January.
But the students say they dislike Murdoch even more. It is fair to say they would hate anyone trying to close their school.
Maharey is expected to make a decision on the future of Waverley High next month, but perhaps it is a telling sign that the school’s acting principal, Tony McIvor, has been employed only until the end of this term. *
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Countdown to a crisis * 2002: The Education Review Office (ERO) made recommendations during a routine visit to school.
* 2002-2003: New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) visited the school to help establish first year of NCEA Level 1 and Level 2.
* May 2003: ERO returned to ensure recommendations had been followed and found significant progress had been made.
* 2004: NZQA noted that its recommendations in 2002 had not been followed.
* June 2005: ERO visited and made a positive report, but also made several recommendations about student achievement and assessment data. NZQA then visited twice to help with follow-up action.
* December 2005: Joan Manson retires as principal.
* February 2006: Jonathon Lewis starts as principal.
* April 2006: Dallas Murdoch is appointed limited statutory manager to help board with 89 complaints.
* June 2006: Murdoch is appointed Commissioner of school after board steps down. NZQA found some quality assurance processes in place. Principal’s nominee unavailable for interview, principal absent, none of the previous requirements were actioned, no documentation available.
* September 2006: Lewis leaves school but remains on pay roll until February this year.
* October 2006: NZQA found serious problems with quality assurance among teachers, senior management and with external moderation. It concluded the school was failing to provide a reliable, secure, quality environment for valid assessment.
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Class sizes at the troubled school are small after revelations of a school in crisis late last year.
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