Wainuiomata High School

Story

Wainuiomata High School is a state co-educational secondary school situated in Wainuiomata, a suburb of Lower Hutt, New Zealand. The school was founded in January 2002 from the merger of Wainuiomata College and Parkway College. A total of students from Years 9 to 13 (ages 12 to 18) attend the school as of.HistoryIn the early 2000s, the government reviewed the entire state school network in Wainuiomata under the direction of Minister of Education Trevor Mallard. At the time, the suburb of 16,000 people had two secondary schools, Wainuiomata College and Parkway College . Both schools had declining roll numbers and their facilities were underutilised; in the 2001 school year, Wainuiomata College had 450 students and Parkway College had 350 students. It was decided to rationalise the two secondary schools by merging them to form a new single secondary school, Wainuiomata High School on the Parkway site. The merger took effect in January 2002, ready for the 2002 school year.Parkway College, like most New Zealand state secondary schools built in the 1970s, was of the S68 common design plan. The S68 is characterised by single-story classroom blocks of concrete block construction, with low pitched roofs, internal open courtyards, and protruding south-facing clerestory windows When the two schools merged on the one site, the combined 800 students exceeded the capacity of the school's three S68 blocks, requiring relocatable classrooms to be moved on site to deal with the extra students. Government funding saw a new five-classroom "social sciences" block open in early 2004 as a permanent solution. However, the school's roll soon increased to 940 students, requiring the relocatable classrooms to remain.