Walling off a third of the library, the 304-pupil primary school in Oamaru's South Hill has split its new entrants class in half and created a "cozy'' temporary classroom - Room 1a - to cope with pressures on its class sizes.
The 14 5-year-old pupils had their first day of classes in the new room yesterday.
Principal Lloyd Bokser said the new class would be capped at 14 pupils, but the remaining 10 pupils in the Room 1 classroom would be joined by 14 more children by the end of the year and with 38 new entrants at the end of the year, the school needed to have two classrooms open.
Fenwick Primary School board chairman Damien Goodsir said the school had done what it could for the time being, but he wanted the ministry to help provide a solution ``now''.
``That Room 1a is not a long-term solution, by any means,'' he said. ``We're making the the best of what we've got to work with.''
Mr Bokser said his understanding of why the ministry had baulked at the school's latest request for funding was due to the number of ``out-of-zone'' children at Fenwick Primary School. But he said the 26 out-of-zone pupils represented just 18 families and since 2014 the school had a policy that only out-of-zone children with a sibling at the school would be accepted.
Late yesterday, the ministry's acting head of the education infrastructure service, Rob Giller, provided a different figure for out-of-zone pupils. He said the school had 45 out-of-zone pupils. And if schools accepted additional pupils from outside their enrolment zone they needed ``to ensure that they had enough room for all students to continue to learn comfortably''.
Mr Bokser disagreed with the ministry's calculation of out-of-zone pupils.
