A family member of the student found the 23cm dagger down the back of the couch and the boy explained he had crafted it at school while classmates worked on cup-holders.
"My first question was ‘did your teacher know?’ and he said ‘yeah, she wrapped it up for me’," the mother told the Otago Daily Times.
"I was shocked. I would class that as a lethal weapon."
She said her son was a "sweet, gentle" boy but she had no doubt the knife could have done serious harm if it had fallen into the wrong hands.
"It was solid steel, it was heavy and sharp. I was gobsmacked," the woman said.
"No-one in their right mind would let anyone make that."
She was particularly concerned given it came at the end of last term, just weeks after the fatal stabbing of 16-year-old Trinity Catholic College student Enere McLaren-Taana at Dunedin’s bus hub.
He stressed it was not a planned project.
"There’s never been an intention in any of our workshop programmes to make this sort of stuff," Mr Hunter said.
"What we have done in response is changed our procedures around relief processes in workshop as an assurance something like this won’t happen again."
The teenager’s mother said she was stumped as to how to dispose of the jagged weapon and so ultimately handed it into police.
Her son’s neurodiversity might have been the reason he was given different work than the rest of the class, but it made his possession of the implement doubly worrying, she said.
"They gave it to a child that should not be left responsible for a lethal weapon. It could’ve ended really badly," the woman said.
"He’s the sort of kid who would pull it out of his bag and play with it at the park."
She hoped the incident would shine a light on the safety of her son and wider student welfare at the school.
