Rotorua Seventh-day Adventist School students fearful after incidents with homeless, hearing told | T-10 NEWS

A used tampon, knives, booze bottles, condoms and human faeces have all been dumped in a Christian school’s grounds by people in Rotorua emergency housing motels, school leaders say.

The Seventh-day Adventist School students and staff have been threatened and had sexually explicit verbal abuse hurled at them. Children have been called a racial slur and challenged for fights simply because their school uniform is blue.

The details were revealed at a resource consent hearing at Arawa Park Hotel yesterday where three independent commissioners have been tasked with deciding whether 13 contracted emergency housing motels can continue to house the homeless for another five years.

It was the final day of the hearing, which has spent days hearing from residents and business owners of Rotorua about the impact of using motels as emergency housing has had on them.

The practice of any motel being used for emergency housing is a breach of Rotorua’s District Plan as they are only consented to operate for short-term visitor stays.

The school, nestled in the heart of Fenton St on the corner of Tilsey St, caters for up to 45 children aged 5 to 13. Today was the first time its representatives had spoken publicly about their plight since the area became a hub for emergency housing.

The school’s property manager Roger Marshall, principal Lanea Strickland and former board chairwoman and current board member Victoria Finch listed incidents that had left the staff and students fearful and stressed.

They said fences, sheds and roofs had been damaged or broken into and thousands of dollars’ worth of security cameras had been smashed.

The school has spent $70,000 on security fencing – money it had set aside for a new adventure playground to replace one that rotted and was destroyed. Right now, the children don’t have an adventure playground, they said.

Since emergency housing proliferated, Marshall said the school had kept record of more than 60 incidents of either abuse, assault, vandalism or other crime. There were none in the previous decades.

Strickland said children had been left upset after a parent saw a man standing in front of children with his hands down his pants, and children had been challenged for fights due to their uniform colour.

Strickland said the grounds had been used as a crime corridor during a school day, with a man carrying a stolen television across the field and popping it over the fence to a motel.

Tall fences now surround the school and you can only enter using a video intercom system – something that had stopped many people from getting into the school but had not prevented the abuse and assaults.

Strickland said there had been threatening behaviour towards students, including being sworn at from motel windows.

Examples included: “Keep it down you bloody *************” and “haha, you bloody [racial slur].

“Some incidents have included knife-wielding individuals walking past threatening to attack or high under the influence of substances.”

Finch couldn’t hold back her tears on a couple of occasions while speaking to her submission explaining how she had personally followed perpetrators back to their motels.

As the board chairwoman, Finch said it had been her job to keep the staff and students safe and it should be a right for children to run and play on freshly cut school lawns.

She took the commissioners through a slideshow of some of the things that had been found, including knives.

“You do not expect to see an old mattress or someone’s undies or wine bottles … Or to stand on someone’s poos. That’s human poos.”

She said for Christian children, seeing alcohol cans and bottles strewn across their grounds was “like finding a pig in a Muslim school”.

Condoms and drug paraphernalia had also been found.

She quoted from a police report about an incident on June 2, this year where two girls threatened school students during the lunch break from a motel window.

“They threw things out of a window including a used tampon, they came out of their room and to the bus-stop-sign side with a large meat knife at least 25cm long, threatening students saying ‘I’m going to throw this at your head’, ‘I’ll going to come and punch you in the mouth’.”

She said regular meetings were held between the staff and the board to find solutions.

“We are exhausted but not as exhausted as our principal and staff who live with the stress every day.”

Commissioner Sheena Tepania asked if the Ministry of Education had helped, but Strickland said no.

Strickland said in her summary she purposely left a large photo of the children from the school on the slide show to show the three commissioners their faces as she begged them to decline the applications.

“Take care of our children, take care of what they hear, take care of what they see, take care of what they feel, for how they grow will be the shape of Aotearoa.”

Commission chairman David Hill said it would release its decision on the applications before Christmas.