Secondary schooling began in little Tauranga in 1907. Increasing numbers of children on the roll of the local school of that day dictated that its status should be raised to that of Tauranga District High School. This essentially meant that the infant and primary departments had a secondary department added, and senior pupils no longer had to attend private classes or boarding schools.
At the present site of Tauranga Primary School, it was a large, high-gabled building which, curiously, had wandered about in a bitter struggle between the Auckland Education Board and both northern and southern parts of a town which extended little further than Eleventh Avenue.
An early Church Missionary Society school lost its pupils as a result of the Land Wars. After brief use as a hospital for soldiers wounded at the Battle of Gate Pā it became a government-funded school for the settlement. Despite protests it was later moved off the Mission land to “The Quarter Acres” area where it was on a site bounded by Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, St John Street and Edgecumbe Road. Probably demolished! The school opened while it was still standing (1874).
Most people lived at the northern end of town over a mile away, so to satisfy the insistent demands of parents, a new school was built on the part of the original site which is now occupied by the Tauranga District Court.
So, there were two schools with one headmaster, but the old building began to deteriorate. After several years of heated debate, the Auckland Education Board moved the new school building to replace the old one at the Quarter Acres site. Conveyed on a huge wooden dray with wooden wheels and axles, it was slowly drawn via Cameron Road by a team of oxen, to start the new school year in 1898, before the older building there was demolished.
For the locals this was not the end of the matter and eventually the building was moved again, to the Fifth Avenue – Cameron Road site, there to have another wing added.
As a secondary school it did quite literally serve the whole district. Most children walked to school but some came from Welcome Bay, Ōhauiti and Ōmokoroa on horseback. Their horses were tethered to rails spanning the front of the pupils’ shelter shed until a horse paddock was used at Sixth Avenue beside the Waikareao Estuary. Pupils from Ōtūmoetai rode across the ford in the estuary.
In the 1920s the ferry to Mount Maunganui operated on Monday, Tuesday and Friday, so the Lysaght youngsters came from the Mount on the other days in their own boat, weather permitting. The first section of railway was laid south-eastward from Mount Maunganui to Taneatua, so pupils from Te Puke boarded in Tauranga during the week but at weekends travelled to and from home by ferry boat and train.
As time passed further additions were made to the old school structure and more buildings sprang up on the site until the situation became desperate; but by the end of World War II Tauranga College had been opened for boys and girls, on the old Hillsdene Estate bounded by Cameron and Devonport Roads when Thirteenth and Fourteenth Avenues were known as Morris Street and Roberts Street.
At Tauranga Primary School, the big old wooden building – expensive to maintain – was demolished in 1978, despite vigorous protests. The timber and joinery were donated to the Tauranga District Museum in Fifteenth Avenue. Materials were used in various projects but the central wing of the old school is preserved there as Tauranga Primary School.
Tauranga District High School – scholastically and in sport – had a good name. Many former pupils distinguished themselves in their trades, in commerce, the professions, agriculture and the arts.
