Monday’s trash day

BY KAREN MANGNALL

Principal Jeanne McLeod is really over Monday mornings. So are her staff and the 62 young pupils at the Kura Kaupapa Maori o Manurewa.

Every Monday they arrive to find the primary school's Trounson Ave entrance littered with smashed beer bottles.

"That's happened every weekend in the nine years I've been here," Mrs McLeod says.

"It's annoying, it really is."

Along with the broken glass staff have to clean up empty beer bottles and cans, used condoms and "even used nappies".

The rubbish is a health hazard for the pupils aged five to 13, Mrs McLeod says.

"Some kids have cuts on their feet because a lot of these kids don't wear shoes."

She blames the mess on local teenagers drinking at weekends in the carpark outside the kura, next to the playground at one end of Finlayson Park.

Requests from kura staff for local youth to stop drinking there have had no effect. Nor have police patrols.

The carpark mess is just the tip of the rubbish heap at the kura end of the no-exit street, she says.

The turning area is a regular dumping place for household rubbish and stolen or clapped-out cars.

"And just before the inorganic collection, we end up with all of that as well."

Parents who deliver and collect their kids from the kura are "disgusted" by the mess.

"A lot of times they do clean-ups. But we just don't have the equipment."

Adding to the kura's frustration have been years of confusion over who is responsible for the carpark.

Mrs McLeod says they'd always believed it to be Manukau City Council land "because they were telling us what we could and couldn't do with it".

That belief was cemented 10 years ago when surveyors told the new kura it couldn't fence the carpark along with the rest of the school to prevent vandalism.

Someone - the kura thought it was the council - used to clean the carpark and surrounds but that stopped a few years back, about the time the barrier arms broke.

So the kura has spent years contacting the council's call centre with futile requests to clean the carpark and repair its gates.

"But we couldn't get the council to come because they said it's private land," Mrs McLeod says.

Only when the Manukau Courier started inquiring did the kura discover the carpark is actually Education Ministry land - and part of their school.

What's more, according to council's property database, the kura's longstanding street number is also wrong.

"We didn't know it was ministry land," Mrs McLeod says.

The kura's site plans don't show the carpark, only the school buildings and fence line.

Finding out the troublesome carpark is the kura's "puts us into a state of confusion", she says.

On the one hand it's good news because they can finally look at fencing it off.

"It will stop the bulk of the problems, the broken glass and make it user-friendly so the kids have something good to walk into on a Monday morning," Mrs McLeod says.

On the other hand a "little fence like that is not even aesthetic", she says.

"It's just like putting up jail bars."

The kura will need to put the fence in its 10-year property plan and talk to the ministry about funding.

And in the short term, its board will discuss hiring a caretaker to clean the carpark a couple of hours a week.

In the meantime Mrs McLeod has a message for the drinkers causing all the mess and heartache.

"Stop trashing our kids' place."

- © Fairfax NZ News