Plagued with health and safety issues, Sara Cohen School's dilapidated buildings should be demolished and rebuilt to meet education standards for its pupils, principal Raewyn Alexander says.
However, the Caversham, Dunedin, special education school is unable to secure funding. It caters for about 30 pupils ranging in age from 5 to 21 and is forced to operate in a way which does not meet special needs education standards.
However, Ministry of Education property group manager Paul Burke said staff would meet the board chairman and Mrs Alexander in early November to "discuss the school's request for a rebuild".
"Any decision about a rebuild will depend on projected student enrolments and on capacity in the Dunedin schooling network. In the interim, the school has funding to address health and safety concerns."
The school did not have a therapies or sensory room, both of which were required under ministry guidelines, Mrs Alexander said.
Heaters in the school were from the 1930s, there was only one bathroom with facilities for disabled pupils, and a lack of ceiling hoists meant teachers had to lift pupils, often fully grown men, on to toilets.
"It's all don't haves, not do haves."
The school did not meet the needs of its pupils and was compromised by many health and safety issues, which were outlined in an Education Review Office (ERO) report which was released last month.
Areas of non-compliance noted were. -
• Pupils in wheelchairs not able to access buildings independently.
• Inability to access equipment and resources in classrooms because of limited space for wheelchairs to move freely.
• The location and design of the paraplegic facilities meant pupils had to wait for toileting assistance.
One pupil experiencing difficulties was Karena Robinson, who had attended the school for two and a-half years. She struggled to move around the small classroom assigned to the senior school and could not access parts of the room because of her wheelchair.
"It's difficult for me because I have to ask people to move chairs and tables for me. It's quite complicated to get around."
Mrs Alexander believed a redevelopment would "have to start from scratch" and could cost about $9 million.
Two other special needs schools in New Zealand, both of which were in nowhere near as bad a shape as Sara Cohen, recently had multimillion-dollar upgrades, she said.
After failing in an attempt to gain ministerial funding for the redevelopment, the school was left "wondering what we can do".
Mr Burke said the school received $177,000 for the five-year period from 2004 to 2009 and used the funding to upgrade the administration areas of the school, refurbish the toilets and upgrade the ICT cabling.
It had $199,000 funding for the 2009-14 period, of which $93,000 had been earmarked to upgrade the administration area. He expected the remaining funds to go towards projects identified in the board's 10-year property plan, which included addressing issues raised in the ERO report.
However, Mrs Alexander said the funding was inadequate as $20,000 of it would be used to pay electricians for the creation of plans for toilet hoists and a quiet room, both of which were turned down for funding.
The school also had to retain 10% of the total funding for 2014 to comply with funding regulations, she said.
"All the patching in the world isn't going to bring us up to speed," she said.
Associate Minister of Education Heather Roy visited the school in July and said "there is no doubt that the school is very old and outdated for the students they are expected to cater for".
The school had been "negotiating for quite some time with the ministry" and funding for schools for children with special needs was available. However, property in the whole region needed to be looked at as part of a network review, and decisions made about how it should be distributed, Mrs Roy said.
She encouraged the different groups to get together, make some decisions and agree on one strategy to deal with the "completely unsatisfactory" situation at Sara Cohen.
