128 | Papamoa College: Stead Construction T T Virginia Wright Growing roll prompts building project New facilities at Papamoa College are coming on stream. COMMUNITY For the last 10 years at least, Papamoa in the Bay of Plenty has been one of the fastest- growing areas in the country, with its population now reaching 35,000. The influx of families has led to a corresponding influx of students in zone for Papamoa College, which opened in 2011 as a co-ed school for Years 7 to 13 and rapidly outgrew its premises. The school’s director of property and development, Nathan Rillstone, started in 2018 and is part of the senior leadership team involved with the extensive work designed to accommodate the still expanding role. As he explains: “The Ministry of Education have invested in $70 million of capital works to build us more permanent buildings to cope with our growth. The original college was built for a role of 1100 students max, and the building now taking place will mean we can take 2000 students on the campus. Our current role at the college here and now is just over 1800 students.” To meet the school’s rapid growth, the ministry trucked in a total of 12 Offsite Manufactured Buildings (OMBs) as a standard short-term solution. Four, new two-storey buildings and extensive renovations on older buildings have been happening behind those interim classrooms, with the last building on target for completion in March 2025, doubling the size of the 2011 campus from 7500sqm to 15000sqm. “Effectively, we’ve been running a school and building one next to it at the same time, so our students and our staff have been operating within a building site,” says Nathan. “Looking back it’s been relatively straightforward, which I put down to Stead Construction and all the local subcontractors and suppliers being well-versed in the compromises involved in building while a school’s still working, which means it isn’t a normal building site. They can’t have jackhammers going all day, and there’s an extra level of health and safety around site access and delivering materials, which means they have to manipulate their critical path and production schedule to work around that.” Every available space in the school had been pressed into service as classrooms, including the staffroom and school library. Nathan is excited that the wait for the carefully designed new facilities to open is nearly over. “We had to forego a lot of traditional areas a school would have just to give students a place to learn. Our college hasn’t had a dedicated library for 10 years, because we had to put our books into a little prefab lined with shelves for the books, but too small to sit in to read, so I’m excited for the staff, students and community as a whole to get back to being a proper school. “We’ve now got a new, modern library space back, and recently opened a 1500sqm standalone technology hub, which can resource courses in anything from food technology to digital learning,” says Nathan. YOUR FIX IS OUR FIX AQUAH LICS “We pride ourselves on excellent customer service and thorough knowledge of all aspects of the trade” Aquaholics are proudly supporting Papamoa College aquaholics.co.nz | 0800 AQUA 007 Branches in the Bay of Plenty and Waikato Proudly Supporting Papamoa College
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDc2Mzg=