Tahakopa, northwest of Papatowai in the Catlins, held a village hall reunion on Saturday to mark the official closure of their historic school at the end of term on April 11, after 128 years.
Opened in 1876, Tahakopa peaked with a roll of more than 100 children in the heyday of small farms and sawmilling and was once replaced after burning down.
"We used to take turns to collect the billy of milk from the letterbox and bring it inside to put on the potbelly stove," Pearl Stenhouse, a Tahakopa pupil in the 1950s remembered.
"It was raw milk from Galbreath’s up the road, which the government must have paid for."
The school has hosted just a handful of children in recent years and has been empty this term as its final three staff have worked to store records and artefacts in preparation for the mothballing of the building.
"My first day teaching was a beautiful clear morning. I’ll never forget walking up through all the cherry blossom and seeing the little chimney chuffing away," principal’s release of 11 years Liz Gray said.
"I thought I was going to get fired because I swore in front of the principal when I saw the kids playing with pet rats," assistant teacher and administrator Marion Harper said of her first day on the job seven years ago.
"The school held the community together," principal of the past four years Cherie Zoutenbier-Bisset said.
"It is a Ministry [of Education] directed closure, not a voluntary closure ... But you can’t run a school with no kids. There are things you can do to collect pupils from outside your catchment area but understanding the bigger picture for the district, we chose not to do that."
About 130 people from teenagers to alumni in their 90s attended the lavish, bittersweet event.
