Dear Editor, I would have thought that it is simple common sense that we have only one government owned secondary school on Rarotonga.

We are a small island with a tiny population and by having two secondary schools you are doubling the costs and very little benefit.

Obviously Tereora is the main secondary school and would have the better resources and better teachers so any parent who are alert will ensure that their children enrol at Tereora. Titikaveka School simply doubles up the problem.  Good teachers are hard to get and any teacher wanting to progress will not want to teach at Titikaveka – it is not an anti Titikaveka thing but common sense. Turning Titikaveka into a trade training centre not only makes sense but very necessary as trade training enables our young people to acquire useful technical qualifications – carpentry, mechanical, cooking, etc., and equally it fills a vacuum in our small multi-faceted economy. 

Nursing and teacher training have been a mainstay in the Cook Islands for many years and there is a need to give sufficient support and backing for these highly needed skills in Titikaveka and which we cannot afford to import from New Zealand.

The area of technical and trade training cannot be ignored and underfunded and can be better supported from the savings of not having a second secondary school on tiny Rarotonga.  Tereora is not even a middle size school if compared to New Zealand schools so it has capacity to absorb all of the students from Titikaveka and the enormous saving of not having two secondary schools can be put to better use in upgrading Tereora to become the flagship and match some of the smaller secondary schools in New Zealand.

Many of us parents are alarmed at the falling standards at Tereora so if we focus on lifting up the standard of Tereora then there is no need for many families sending their children to New Zealand for secondary schooling. Many of the families who can afford it have already enrolled their children to some New Zealand school and that is a clear sign that they have already decided that their children will not progress enough if they stay in Rarotonga.  

Cicero

(Name and address supplied)