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Kaipara Flats School principal Jason Irvine hit the ground running when he took up the post at the beginning of the year.
A mere eight days after he moved into his office, he faced a nightmare for any educator – or any father – the death of a child in a weekend dirt bike accident on a farm paddock.
Tāne Tangaroa Gregory was just nine.
In the close-knit community, the new head faced a huge challenge.
“It was a baptism of fire,” he says. “But I guess in a way it sped up my first goal, which was community – the whole idea of presence.”
School board presiding member Sarah Thompson, whose youngest child graduated from the school last year, speaks of Irvine’s “clear guidance and gentle hands”.
“I pop in and out and talk to the staff, and I hear nothing but praise for the new principal.”
Alyssa Gordon, a former Kaipara Flats student who has nine and six year old sons at the school, said it was a really tough time for the school community as a whole.
“I felt for him as a newcomer, who was still establishing relationships – and then suddenly he had to go into this quite supportive role,” Gordon says.
“I thought he did a really great job. He spoke well at Tāne’s funeral as well.”
The tragedy took place when the school was still reeling from the after-effects of flooding, followed by the cyclone, that severely impacted both the school and the community. Water swept through the lower paddocks, destroyed the playground and left several dozen 30 metre-high poplar trees so sodden that subsequent high winds brought them down.
“The kids used to play at the bottom of those trees because we stopped them climbing them,”
Thompson says, “But, you know, sticks are currency, acorns are currency. It was a really fantastic imaginative play space for them.”
She says that the flood damage was quite traumatic.
“There was angst about the devastation to the school and how that was impacting our school community, bringing a lot of stress.
“And then we moved towards mitigation and trying to turn these horrible negatives into positives. When we took out the playground, we actually created a beautiful space, a gathering space,” she says.
“So at our annual show day last year, although we had lost our playground, we realised what a wonderful sort of almost amphitheatre-like space it would become.”
She says since new principal Irvine came on board, he has brought the community together.
“We’ve had a lot of conversations about managing the trauma of losing our Tāne. Everything has been well organised, well managed, done with incredible care. Since the beginning of the year, I’ve felt the school has settled.”
Meanwhile, the focus is on planning and fundraising for an upgrade to the school’s worse-for-wear swimming pool. The project would include making the pool larger, as well as resurfacing, re-tiling and re-coating it.
“What’s really awesome about Kaipara Flats is that there is a really strong sense of community, and it’s based on whakapapa,” Irvine says. “It’s based on the school having a heart and soul, and the desire of the community to retain that, even in a world that’s rapidly changing.”
Jason Irvine
Jason grew up in Invercargill and left, aged 17, to join the Navy. Five years in uniform saw deployments to Devonport-based frigates. Pitcairn Island was probably his “most exotic” destination, but he also visited Liverpool to participate in the 50th anniversary of the Battle of the Atlantic, transiting the Panama and Suez canals.
He trained at the Auckland College of Education in Epsom, graduating in 1999. His first teaching job was at Red Beach School, before moving to the then-brand new Oteha Valley School. Two years on, he landed at Wainui School where he spent the next 18 years, rising to deputy principal.
His first principal’s post is at a school with a roll of 112 students, five teachers, one administrative staffer, a teacher aide and a caretaker.
He is married to Rachel and lives on the Hibiscus Coast. They have two daughters, Taylor and Reilly, both university students at AUT.
