School Culture
Mangere Central is 158 years old. The first school was founded in 1859 when Mangere was a small farming community. It was one of the first schools in the community and served as one of the first schools in Mangere. The school as had a major part in the community since then and has connections with the local iwi. Fast forward to 2017 and much has changed from the one room school to a school that is vibrant and colourful. The school is very proud of its history within the community and we always look to ways of being a part of it.
Step 1: Identify the socioeconomic status of the community, organisational culture and professional environments.
Mangere Central School consists mainly of students who come from maori or Pacific background. The social economical status of our community is working class to families living in poverty. This is shown through many areas of our school where we struggle to get students to come to school with the basic needs. We receive Kids Can, fruit in schools and Eat My Lunch for our students daily. Money is a huge factor for our community with those who have it have the bear minimum and those that don't sometimes have to make the decision on weather they can afford to drive their children to school or to drive to work. The school hugely subsidises many of our school costs, like stationary, camp and any trips.
There is another side to poverty that as a school we are always giving towards our families and with that we feel that at times they always expect that the school will cover for them. An example of this is school camp we recently went on. The cost of the camp was $245 per student but because we knew this would be way to much for our families to pay we took it down to $60 per student and $80 for siblings. Families were told the year before they could start paying this off but a week out from camp and we had $5000 owing from the students. This meant that teachers needed to call and follow up with parents and make sure they paid. After camp we still have $400 owning because parents chose not to pay, but we still took their child to camp. We still give the children stationary and make sure that they have what they need at school. But we feel the families know we will do this so they don't put in the effort to try or help out in any way.
Below are statistics of Mangere-Otahuhu Local Board Area and Mangere-Otahuhu Local Board Area of Maori.
Total personal income for people aged 15 years and over
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Mangere-Otahuhu Local Board Area and New Zealand
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2013 Census
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Although our school has a low socioeconomic status the culture is heavily influenced by the community and their backgrounds. The background maori and Pacific background is highly influenced on whanau being the most important thing. Stoll (1998), talks about how a school culture is influenced by the students and their social class background. We have created our school programme around the needs of our community and seek feedback and support from them. As a school we are always looking for ways to help our students and community. This links with Stoll (1998), Panel 2 of improving schools.
Professional Environment
I think for our school our biggest downfall would be our professional environment in a range of ways. We have teachers who find it hard to fit into our school culture because they either do not understand where their students are coming from (culturally) and come to our school with assumptions already built about these students. We also have a 'sink or swim' kind of mentality at our school where, if you are not coping or not keeping up that's your fault and you need to find a way to sort that out. This comes from the top management and since our recent change we have had some improvements around this, where teachers feel they are overworked and not valued. Clearly within our role of a teacher in a low socioeconomic community we become more then just teachers, we are mum and dad, social worker, doctor, chef and miracle maker. Being a low socioeconomic brings with it so many challenges for us as teachers and we need the support from our colleges to support our students.
References
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