Profile: Susan Baragwanath ’94, New Zealand
May 2006
“I found that if you encourage a child who has been put down all her life, she can blossom and achieve amazing things,” says Susan Cave Baragwanath, recounting her experience as founder and teacher-in-charge of New Zealand’s first school for teenage parents and their children.
In 1994, when Baragwanath set off for her Eisenhower Fellowship, there were no programs in her country designed for the special needs of teenage mothers and fathers although, among industrialized nations, New Zealand ranked second after the United States in the number of teen parents. Moreover, while studies showed that one in five New Zealand adolescents were for a variety of reasons deemed at-risk of academic failure or economic disadvantage, the country’s educational system offered no coordinated approaches or strategies to deal with their problems.
Baragwanath, after twenty years’ experience as a teacher and administrator in New Zealand, Switzerland, France, and England, was then deputy principal at Porirua College near Wellington, the largest Polynesian secondary school in the world. She had become increasingly concerned about the dismal prospects facing many of her students from the school’s low-income area. When a search for guidance failed to yield any advisors or expertise on the subject, in 1993 she called a conference of secondary school teachers. Within a week it was oversubscribed; the minister of Social Welfare offered $10,000 to fund the meeting and requested a report. This enthusiastic response proved what Baragwanath had suspected: a policy vacuum at the governmental level was leaving the front-line workers in the schools without the tools or support to address what they saw as serious problems. Invitations to speak and write began to arrive, and more than one in three secondary schools expressed interest in the network Baragwanath began to assemble. “In this area,” she said, “I feel I can make a difference and that by slipping on a stone I started an avalanche.”
She found some guidance on her Eisenhower Fellowship, for there were significant parallels between her country and the United States. Not only did the two nations lead the developed world in teenage pregnancy rates, but also both were multi-racial, multi-cultural societies and both suffered from the same one-in-five ratio of at-risk adolescents. However, Americans discussed these problems more openly than did New Zealanders and had developed approaches to help this population. On her Fellowship Baragwanath investigated the more successful programs, consulting with academic experts and visiting high schools in both rural and urban environments in both middle and lower income areas. She gathered a collection of techniques and information as well as the insight that the critical component of the most thriving projects was leadership.
Back in New Zealand, Baragwanath decided to focus on one pressing problem: when parenthood prevents teenagers from completing their formal education, they do not acquire the skills to get decent jobs, thus disadvantaging themselves and their children as well. Her answer was to found He Huarahi Tamariki (HHT), a school for teenage parents. The school, whose Maori name means A Chance for Children, opened in 1995 near Wellington, not far from Porirua College, where Baragwanath at first maintained her post as deputy principal while serving also as teacher-in-charge of the new school.
The school offered the normal high school curriculum along with a work experience program in cooperation with community organizations and businesses. Volunteers supplemented a paid professional staff. Inspired by the American school lunch program she had observed on her Fellowship, Baragwanath established a meals program to combat the dietary-related diseases common among disadvantaged New Zealand teenagers. With 50 or more students at reading levels ranging from ages 6 to 16, it was not always possible to form classes of reasonable size. Correspondence courses solved this problem. Later, the students requested, and got, an attached pre-school program for their children. A mutual, interest-free loan fund was established to help students whose financial difficulties might otherwise have forced them to discontinue their education.
In the following years, supported by vigorous fundraising, the school prospered and attracted national attention. In 1999 the prime minister visited, accompanied by the minister of social services and a small TV crew. Baragwanath advised, published articles, and ran a second national conference. Another fellowship sent her to the U.S. and Europe to observe early childhood educational programs. A few other teen parent schools were opened on the HHT pattern, but their funding was inconsistent and precarious. The deplored “policy vacuum” persisted. Frustrated in her efforts to lobby legislators and prod a reluctant bureaucracy, Baragwanath turned to the media, especially at election time. “Each time one of my students did something good,” she explained, “I would tell the world about it. As a result they were media darlings, would do sound bites here and there and were featured in several documentaries, including one on the BBC with an audience of 600 million.”
What politician could continue to oppose a program so popular with the public? At last, in 2003, the New Zealand government accepted the premise that teenage parents should be educated and earmarked $50 million to build 50 schools on the He Huarahi Tamariki model, with the all-important attached programs for the students’ young children. As of today 32 of these centers have been built and are flourishing. The battle for teen parents’ education had finally been won.
At the end of 2004, after 37 years of teaching, Baragwanath retired from He Huarahi Tamariki. Having built a new school complex in 2003, she left an institution with abundant assets, no debt, $50,000 in a scholarship fund, and $100,000 in the bank. And she can say, “My former students, who had been consigned to the rubbish heap, are now in the New Zealand police, social workers, teachers, nurses, electricians, car mechanics, university students, or working in jobs with prospects. They have full lives and contribute to society.”
Massey University recognized Baragwanath’s contributions by awarding her an honorary doctorate in 2005. The New Zealand First political party, after several unsuccessful attempts, finally prevailed upon her to stand for parliament, ultimately an unsuccessful venture the she does not care to repeat. Now she commutes between homes in Auckland and Switzerland and enjoys having more time with her husband David, a judge in the NZ High Court, and visiting her two sons in Sydney and Geneva. She volunteers for causes that interest her and in March traveled to Laos to advise Unicef on establishing schools there. While relishing her current freedom, she remains keenly interested in promoting the education of women and girls and looks forward to whatever new projects may appear on her horizon.