Wellington Girls' College families demand answers over shutdown at heated hui

Shocked and perplexed families have told Ministry of Education officials to apologise, and not to downplay the risks to their daughters, at a meeting over the shutting down of Wellington Girls' College.

"These are our girls - please look after us," one man told half a dozen ministry managers and its chief engineer, at a highly charged meeting in the staffroom that ran for 90 minutes on Tuesday afternoon.

"You are putting the safety of our children at risk ... it would be really, really nice to hear you say you are sorry," another attendee said.

"Can we get an apology, please?" asked a senior student, noting she was back learning from home "in my last year at school".

This did win an apology for the poor communication from a Ministry of Education manager.

That speaker was among 1300 students being kept home for at least two days after whānau learned late on Monday the school's biggest teaching building, Brook Block, was structurally weak on top and lacked earthquake resilience.

The school said it only found out about the very low quake rating - 15 percent New Building Standard (NBS) - by accident, after seeing a ministry report in April.

The school board shut the block.

Students now faced a month of working from home perhaps one day a week, or crammed into every other space at the central city school. The full details of how the school would cope were expected to be released about lunchtime on Wednesday.

Ministry of Education chief engineer Dave Brunsdon's graph-heavy presentation stressed the risks to life were low: Even in a moderate or "significant" quake, they believed the building would be fine, and Brook Block could be kept open.

However, he also remarked on the degree of uncertainty, around both assessments, and whether to stay or go.

"There's not enough steel in there compared to how we would design it today," Brunsdon told the hui.

The school said 15 teachers had refused to work in the block.

One parent told the meeting: "You know, suggesting our students stay in that building with that risk, even though the graph points a different direction, I'm not happy with that.

"So I think sometimes we need to move away from graphs and numbers, and think of human life."

Principal Julia Davidson said it was not on to find out years after the school's Tower Block was rated quake-prone - it recently was pulled down - that the ministry had serious doubts about Brook Block, too.

"We would have been terrified" at the 15 percent rating had they known earlier, she said.

The rating was only confirmed last term in a detailed seismic assessment ordered by the school's board. The ministry had offered to fund only a smaller targeted assessment.

Brook's two top floors - which were added in 1994 on top of a lower robust concrete layer - are much lighter and lack flexibility in a quake.

"We've known for a term and we've worked our butts off ... We've had two days since we found out the board's decision" to shut the block, Davidson said.

Families peppered the officials with questions and challenges.

The meeting had echoes of 2021, when parents at Hutt Valley High took on MOE officials in their school hall over toxic black mould in classrooms. The ministry conceded then its approach had been poor, and promised parents it would "learn as much as possible from this".

"There is not considered to be any immediacy of risk," read a slide from the Ministry of Education presentation. "We always err on the side of caution."

Risk was "still very low" and vacating the building "should be a last resort", it said.

Yet one man said if the ministry was right about this, then as parents who wanted their children to be in school, "we have to ask did the board make the right decision?"

"I think they probably did," he said.

Another said: "What I don't like is dismissing that a thousand-year earthquake ... won't happen.

"We very much feel students shouldn't just feel safe here, they should be safe."

Having asked if the top floors of Brook collapsed, whether students on floors below would be hurt, the online and in-person questioners were not convinced at the engineer's answer that the lower floors were strong enough.

Some people asked why the ministry vacated its own headquarters office block in Wellington in 2022, when it got an NBS rating of 25 percent, compared to telling the school it should keep using a block rated at 15 percent.

"I would like to see why our children's lives are essentially worth less than your own," one woman said.

Ministry of Education general manager of capital works Darron Monaghan said this was largely because it was just after Covid-19, so the ministry was confident staff could work from home, with little impact.

"It wasn't a relative weighting of lives, I can assure you," Monaghan said.

Wellington Girls' has had a tough five years. It had a massive shortfall of teaching spaces, even before it learned the bad news about Brook.

The senior student spoke of taking 10 minutes to get to a bathroom, the school being so crowded and disjointed, and of disorientating construction noise.

"That's a hard life," she said.

Why had it taken years to pull down the Tower Block? she asked.

A ministry manager said this was because they had to grind glue with asbestos in it off all the vinyl floors before demolition, and this was so noisy they could not do it during term-time; the delays added nearly $400,000 to the job, he said.

Whānau asked if senior students faced with the disruption could get credits like were available during Covid.

The officials said they were working with NZQA on that.

Scepticism was evident at their promise that Brook Block - strengthened in the short term to 35 percent of NBS (34 percent is the quake-prone threshold) - would be ready by term one 2025; some demanded contingency measures for any delay.

"We are dealing with the risk issues now," officials said.

Steel was on order, and consents were being sorted with the city council. Two contractors had been lined up to begin work on the bracing from 4 November.

However, Davidson expressed doubt about throwing taxpayer money into short-term strengthening, and on the ministry's track record of delivering on time.

Her executive team had debated using split days for juniors and seniors, a split campus if they could find teaching space elsewhere, among other options. She assured families they would cope.

Earlier, Minister of Education Erica Stanford told RNZ she was confident the ministry has been dealing with schools in a transparent and open manner since she assumed the role late last year.

However, Monaghan apologised to the meeting for the lack of clear communication.

The ministry refused to release the seismic assessment immediately, or a summary of its advice over risk, forcing RNZ to use the OIA, which takes at least five weeks.

At one point, the meeting applauded the school's staff and leaders.

The ministry did not get a clap.