Road moves from school
While fewer than 30 children are attending Palmerston North’s Whakarongo School, work creating a safer pick-up and drop-off area at the school gate is proceeding at pace.
Contractors have been able to resume work on the $1.3 million project since the country moved to the Covid-19 alert level 3.
The task involves moving the intersection of Stoney Creek Rd and State Highway 3/Napier Rd away from the school gate, and creating a new stretch of the busy road.
In turn, the school will have a safe culde-sac area for pick-ups and drop offs for children not using the off-road cycle and pedestrian pathway to James Line as their route to school.
City council chief infrastructure officer Tom Williams said the work, shut down during the level 4 lockdown, was able to restart this week.
‘‘We’re working with our contractors to construct the access point to the school while there are fewer students there.’’
He expected the project to be finished by the end of next month, but it could be sooner if the number of pupils attending school remained low.
School principal Jaco Broodryk said at level 3, there were only about 26 of the school’s 500-plus students in the classrooms.
A roster system ensured there were always teachers, teacher aides and a member of the senior management team on site for those children who could not stay at home.
‘‘With these low numbers things are running very smoothly,’’ Broodryk said.
‘‘Older students spend most of their time using the online learning programme, while the young students have a more tailored programme as they need more teacher input.’’
Broodryk said it was a good opportunity for the contractors to concentrate on the works closest to the school gate first.
He said progress had been slow for the first couple of days back on site, but was picking up.
‘‘I hope that they will speed up and use the next week to get as much of the disruptive work done as possible while we have very little traffic in that area.’’
The country school’s rapid growth over several years and the numbers of parents driving to and from the school had created increasing congestion and dangers outside the school.
That had been eased by the 2016 opening of the pathway parallel to the railway, which had encouraged more than half of the students to travel on foot or on bikes or scooters. But Broodryk said there was still significant demand for car parking at the gate.