The gentle pastel and glowing wooden walls of the Steiner Kindergarten’s Wallace St campus were farewelled in a poignant ceremony late last month.
About 100 former and current students, teachers and administrators gathered at the campus in late December, to share memories made at the site.
As of 2024, the kindergarten will be located at the Robinson Rd site, alongside its primary school, which shifted from High St in 2021.
One of the founding members of the Rudolf Steiner education movement in Motueka, Anne Swann, says although it was sad to farewell the old site, she has a “really deep feeling of gratitude” that Steiner education had taken off in Motueka, so that it is “there for everyone who needs it”.
“It’s just so lovely to see how it’s grown from the very first beginnings on my lounge floor in 1982, to have the full school. It’s wonderful,” she says.
Yvonne Vincent, the kindergarten’s founding teacher, first held sessions in her house in 1984, before Riwaka’s Pioneer Hall was sourced and renovated as an appropriate site the following year.
“I think it was probably a focal point in our lives for quite a number of years,” she says.
Although Steiner kindergartens and playgroups were attempted in other areas around the region, they never took off.
“This is its home,” Yvonne says. “The nest for Rudolf Steiner education in this district has always been Motueka.”
The Wallace St building, which the kindergarten trust bought and moved to in 1991, has been “loved to bits”, Yvonne says.
It is now for sale, and this will in turn pay for the new kindergarten buildings at the Robinson Rd site.
Yvonne says that this achievement – their own school campus on their own land – is the pinnacle of a dream that began in the 1980s.
“Our dream is really realised now.”
